REIGNITION: NICK LAND'S WRITINGS (2011-)
TOME I - URBAN FUTURE: Views from the Decopunk Delta
BLOCK 1 - URBAN FUTURE
Introducing Urban Future
What can readers expect from this blog? Since it promises to be oriented
towards the future, it makes sense to begin with some preliminary
forecasting about itself.
Most basically and predictably, Urban Future has been programmed by its
name. Its principal topic is the intersection of cities with the future.
It aims to foster discussion about cities as engines of the future, and
about futurism as a dynamic influence on the shape, character, and
development of cities. More particularly, it scavenges for clues, and
floats speculations, about the Shanghai of tomorrow. It anticipates a
global urban future in which Shanghai features prominently, and a coming
Shanghai that expresses, both starkly and subtly, the transformative
forces of global futurism. This is to get quite far ahead of ourselves,
which is where we shall typically be.
For some readers, ‘futurism’ will invoke the early 20th century avant
garde cultural movement crystallized by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s 1909
Futurist Manifesto. Futurism, they might reasonably object, has been defined and even
closed by the passage of time. Like modernism, it now belongs to the
archive of concluded history. What exists today, and in the days to come,
can only be a neo-futurism (and a neo-modernism): no less retrospective
than prospective, as much a repetition as a speculation. Such
considerations, corrections, and recollections, with all their attendant
perplexities, are extremely welcome. The time to address them will soon
come.
Since Shanghai is cross-hatched with the time-fractured indices of
historico-futuristic ambiguity, from
paleo-modernism
to
neo-traditionalism, the blog will have every opportunity to discuss such things. For the
moment, casual reference to the strangely-twinned architectural icons of
such time-tangles, the Park Hotel and the Jinmao Tower – each a
retro-futurist or cybergothic masterpiece – has to substitute as a
mnemonic and promissory note.
Also, in time, the obstacles to forecasting need to be thoroughly
addressed: such topics as historical catastrophism, the
efficient-market hypothesis
(EMH), Karl Popper’s
critique of historicism,
Knightian uncertainty
(or Rumsfeldian “unknown unknowns”) and the Black Swan theory of
Nassim Nicholas Taleb. In order to get up and running, all these complicating thoughts have
been temporarily bracketed, like cunning and ferocious beasts, but they
will not remain caged forever, or even very long.
Because there’s something irresistibly twisted about starting with the
future, the first flurry of posts will head straight into tomorrow, with
topics becoming increasingly city- and Shanghai-focused as things
progress. An initial series of interconnected posts will outline
futuristic thinking in broad terms, including preliminary sketches of
principal way-stations on the
mainline techno-scientific tradition
that supports it.
Ultimately, nothing relevant to the future of Shanghai is alien to this
blog’s purpose. It will draw upon Shanghai
history, geography, and
culture, traditional Chinese philosophies of time (Yijing
and
Daoism),
theories of
modernity
and
urbanism,
evolutionary biology,
science fiction, techno-scientific discussions of
complex systems and emergence, the economics of
spontaneous order,
long waves,
technological trends,
robotics
research and developments, models of
accelerating change, and anticipations of
Technological Singularity. Things should get continuously
weirder.
Tomorrow, it begins.
March 29, 2011Eternal Return, and After
The hazards of extrapolation are manifold, and frequently
discussed. A seemingly robust trend can be illusory, the shape of its curve can be
misrecognized, and coincidental processes can disrupt it. Even more
insidiously, the recognition of a trend can lead to responses that
transform or nullify it.
Yet, since governments, businesses, and individuals necessarily act in
accordance with models of the future, forecasting is an incessant,
inevitable, and often automatic feature of social existence. Whatever the
complexities of prediction, survival depends upon future-adapted
decision-making. A base-level futurism is simply unavoidable. Radical
skepticism – irrespective of its intellectual merits — does not offer a
practical alternative.
There are only four fundamental ways things can go: they can remain the
same, they can cycle, they can shrink, or they can grow. In reality these
trend-lines are usually inter-tangled. Among complex systems, stability is
typically meta-stability, which is preserved through cycling, whilst
growth and shrinkage are often components of a larger-scale, cyclic wave.
The historical imagination of all ancient cultures was dominated by great
cycles. In the Vedic culture of India, time unfolded as regular,
degenerative epochs (yugas) that subdivided each ‘Day of Brahma’ (4.1
billion years in length). Chinese time was shaped by the metabolism of
Imperial dynasties. “Long united, the empire must divide. Long divided, it
must unite,” begins the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Mesoamerican
civilizations envisaged world history as a succession of creations and
destructions. In the West, Plato described the history of the city as a
great cycle, degenerating through phases of Timocracy (or rule by the
virtuous), Oligarchy, Democracy, and Tyranny.
The ages of mankind described by Hesiod, and later Ovid, are less
obviously cyclical, as is the eschatological time inherited from ancient
Judaism by the Abrahamic faiths. In these cases too, however, the course
of history is understood as fundamentally degenerative, and guided to the
restoration of a sacred origin (as described by Mircea Eliade in
his analysis of the myth of Eternal Return).
Even Karl Marx remains captivated by this mythic historical pattern, in
its Abrahamic variant. His epic of human social development begins with an
Edenic ‘primitive communism’ that falls into the alienated degeneracy of
class society, subdivided into a series of ages. The eschatological
culmination of history in communist revolution thus completes a great
cycle, sealed by a moment of sacred restoration (of authentic ‘species
being’). It is no coincidence that this mytho-religious ‘big-picture’
aspect of Marxism has impinged far more deeply upon popular consciousness
than its intricate mathematical model of techno-economic dynamics within
‘the capitalist mode of production’, despite the fact that Marx’s writings
are overwhelmingly focused upon the latter. A great cycle feels like home.
In modern times, the clearest example of history in the ancient, great
cycle mode, is found in the work of another German socialist philosopher:
Oswald Spengler. Modeling civilizations on the life-cycles of organic
beings, he plotted their rise and inevitable decay through predictable
phases. For the West, firmly locked into the downside of the wave,
relentless, accelerating degeneration can be confidently anticipated.
Spengler’s withering pessimism seems not to have detracted significantly
from the cultural comfort derived from his archetypal historical scheme.
Eliade describes the myth of Eternal Return as a refuge from the “terror
of history.” Firmly rooted in familiar organic patterns and the cycle of
the seasons, it sets the basic template for traditional cultures. By
identifying what is yet to come with what has already been timelessly
commemorated, it promises the pre-adaptation of existing social
arrangements and patterns of behavior to unencountered things,
psychologically neutralizing the threat of radically unprecedented
eventualities. We have been here before, and somehow we survived. Winter
does not last forever.
It is scarcely surprising, therefore, that the conception of progressive
historical time has been so slow to consolidate itself. John M. Smart
summarizes the conclusions reached by historian J. D. Bury in his
The Idea of Progress (1920),
noting: “… the idea of progress in the material realm was missed, amazingly,
even for most of the European Renaissance (…14th-17th century). Only by
the 1650s, near the end of this cultural explosion, did the idea of an
unstoppable force of progress finally begin to emerge as a possibility to
the average literate mind.” The idea of progress, as continuous,
innovative growth, is unique to modernity, and provides its defining
cultural characteristic.
Moderns found themselves, for the first time, cast outside the cosmic
nursery of Eternal Return. A strange new world awaited them.
March 31, 2011Beyond Urbanization
(This post is basically a pre-emptive footnote. Please feel even freer to
ignore it than you usually would.)
The principal topic of Urban Future is the development of cities (with
Shanghai as exemplary case). It is peculiarly frustrating, therefore, to
find that no single term exists to describe a process that is arguably the
most important of all social phenomena, and even the key to whatever
meaning might be discoverable in human history.
One thing, at least, is clear (or should be): urban development is not
urbanization.
‘Urbanization’ is a comparatively rigorous and well-defined demographic
concept, referring to the dynamic re-distribution of populations from
non-urban to urban existence. Because it describes the proportion of
city-dwellers within a population, it can be quantified by a percentage,
which sets a strict mathematical limit to the process (asymptotic to 100%
urbanized). When plotted historically, the approach to this limit follows
a steep curve, echoing the (open-ended) exponential or super-exponential
trends of modernization and industrialization.
Whilst theoretically indispensable, clear, meaningful, and informative,
the concept of urbanization is inadequate to the phenomenon of urban
development. Cities are essentially concentrational, or intensive. They
are defined by social density, uneven distribution, or demographic
negative entropy. Urbanization describes only a part of this.
Within the entire demographic system, urbanization provides a measure of
the urban fraction (based on an at least semi-arbitrary definition of a
city, by size and by boundary). It says nothing about the pattern of
cities: how numerous they are, how they differ in relative scale, how fast
larger cities grow compared to smaller ones, or in general whether the
urbanized population is becoming more or less homogeneously distributed
between cities. In fact, it tells us nothing at all about the
distribution of the urbanized population, except that it is somehow
clumped into ‘city-scale’ agglomerations.
Once ‘clumped’ – or drawn within the spatial threshold of a city-sized
cloud – a demographic particle switches binary identity, from
non-urbanized to urbanized. Registered as a city-dweller, there is no more
to be said about it. Yet the city is itself a distribution, of variable
density, or heterogeneous concentration. Within each city, urban
intensity can rise or fall, irrespective of the overall level of
urbanization. The limit of urbanization sets no restriction upon trends to
urban intensification, as exemplified by high-rise architecture.
Urbanization is a proportional concept, indifferent to absolute
demographic scale. In contrast, measuring intensity, or negative entropy,
provides fine-grained information that rises with the size of the system
considered (since the entropy measure is a logarithmic function of system
scale, defined by the totality of possible distributions, which rises
exponentially with population). Whilst social scientific or demographic
phenomena are highly intractable to quantitative intensive analysis, their
reality is nevertheless intensive, which is to say: determined by
distributive variation of
absolute magnitudes. The measure of urbanization is not affected
by the doubling of a city’s population unless the overall population grows
at a lower rate. Urban intensity, in contrast, is highly sensitive to
absolute demographic fluctuation (and not uncommonly hyper-sensitive).
Intensities are characterized by transition thresholds. As they rise and
fall, they cross ‘singularities’ or ‘phase transitions’ that mark a change
in nature. A small change in intensive magnitude can trigger a
catastrophic change in system behavior, with the
emergence
of previously undisclosed properties. When measuring urbanization, a city
is a city is a city. As an intensive concentration, however, a city is an
essentially variable real individual, passing through thresholds as it
grows, innovating unprecedented behaviors, and thus becoming something
‘qualitatively’ new.
Whilst summoning the courage to float an adequate neologism (‘urbanomy’?),
Urban Future will stumble onwards with awkward compounds such as ‘urban
development’, ‘urban intensification’, ‘urban condensation’, or whatever
seems least painful at the time (whilst meaning, in each case, what
‘urbanization’ would describe if urbanists had managed to grab it before
the demographers did).
Yet, despite this linguistic obstacle, a surprising amount can be said
about the urban process in general. Making a start on that comes next.
April 15, 2011An Introduction to Urbanomy
However irritating neologisms can be, they are sometimes near-compulsory.
When a compact, comparatively simple thought is forced to route itself,
repeatedly, through crudely-stitched terminological tangles, the missing
adequate word fosters the linguistic equivalent of a nagging
hunger. Word invention becomes a simple prerequisite of smooth cognitive
function.
Urban development of the individual city, or the typical process of urban
maturation, is a quite basic but linguistically underserved concept of
exactly this kind. The absence is aggravated by the presence of another
word — one that sounds superficially suitable, but which actually
designates an entirely separate idea.
When a city grows, it does not ‘urbanize’ (only a wider social system can
do that). Urbanization applies to a society that becomes proportionately
more urban, as rural people move into cities, but when an individual city
develops – and in fact individuates – it undergoes
urbanomy (on the model of ‘teleonomy’). Urbanomy – urban self-organization — is
far more critical to this blog than urbanization is. Coining the term is a
declaration of theoretical commitment to urban individuation as a
structured – and thus cognitively-tractable – social, historical, and
ultimately cosmic reality.
The foundations of urbanomic understanding were
laid down by Jane Jacobs in her book
The Economy of Cities. In this work she outlines a simple and powerful theory of urban
self-organization, driven by a spontaneous economic process of
import replacement. Cities develop by autonomization, or
introversion, which occurs as they learn from trade, progressively
transforming an ever-greater proportion of their commercial flows into
endogenous circuits. This (urbanomic) tendency need not isolate cities
from the world, but it necessarily converts stable dependency into dynamic
interaction, driving continuous commercial modification. The logistical
and informational advantages of local urban producers – minimizing
transport costs and maximizing feedback intensity – tend to encourage the
internalization of productive activity, teaching the city what it can do
for itself, and consolidating its singular identity (as a real
individual). The growth, complexification, and individuation of the city
are integral to a single urbanomic process.
It is urbanomy that produces cities, with urbanization – typically –
occurring as a secondary phenomenon. Functional cities are not demographic
dumping grounds, but endogenously maturing entities which draw things
(including people) into themselves.
Among the many side-consequences running off Jacobs’ thesis, one in
particular is so historically-suggestive that it merits a short
digression. Since cities are not nutritionally self-supporting, it has
been natural to assume that they presuppose settled agriculture, which
they relate to in a way that is – at least calorically – parasitic. Jacobs
turns this assumption upside down, proposing instead that the
commercialization of food production which accompanied the emergence of
cities was itself a crucial motor of agriculturalization. By providing
concentrated, comparatively large-scale markets, cities made the
production of substantial food-surpluses economically rational for the
first time, automatically supporting their own further development in
interactive lock-step with the Neolithic revolution.
The basic urbanomic insight of greatest relevance here, however, is more
abstract. The Jacobs thesis establishes a framework for systematically
exploring the time-structure of the urban process, conceived not solely as
a (prolonged) episode in time, or history, but also as the working of a
chronogenic, or time-making social machine.
The concept which Jacobs tacitly introduces, as the guiding principle of
the urbanomic trend, is autoproduction. As it grows, internally
specializes, self-organizes, dissipates entropy, and individuates, the
city tends to an impossible limit of complete productive autonomy. It
appears as a convergent wave, shaped in the direction of increasing order
or complexity, as if by an invisible hand, or according to an intelligent
design. The pattern is exactly what would be expected if something not yet
realized was orchestrating its self-creation. Even after 150 years of
coherent evolutionary theory, such processes – in the absence of a
dominating creative agent – appear extraordinary, and even uncanny,
because they seem to run backwards, against the current of time.
Time as it is lived and explored is tensed. It is occupied from
the middle, which is always now, and from which the past recedes
(partially remembered, or recorded), as the future approaches (partially
anticipated, or forecast). The time-line crossing ‘now’ or the present is
asymmetric. It has an ‘arrow’.
The mainstream scientific currents which support the modern understanding
of the world describe this arrow of time in two very different ways. Both
are easily intuited and generally accepted, at least in their broadest
outlines.
Firstly, we are told that the arrow of time corresponds to an increase of
disorder. Things break, erode, age, die, and decay. Presented with two
photographs, of an intact egg and the same egg smashed, there is no doubt
about which came first. Eggs don’t unsmash, time doesn’t reverse.
Except that (secondly) we generally anticipate progress, or improvement.
Knowledge accumulates, inventions are made, economies are expected,
normally, to grow. Even those most resistant to modern messages – such as
evolutionary ideas — work confidently to produce order in their lives,
when tidying, sorting, assembling, organizing, or composing. Eggs might
not unsmash, but there are eggs, and they’ve been made somehow (there
weren’t any 500 million years ago).
So how do our time intuitions align with the arrow of time? Which way is
forward, and which is back? Between increasing and decreasing order, which
seems normal and which strange?
These questions are complicated by the fact that we mentally process the
world in two very different ways, dividing it as neatly as possible
between people and things, agency and inertia, the animate and the
inanimate, teleology and mechanism. This very basic dual system of
perceptual classification – almost certainly supported by deeply archaic
neurological structures — corresponds to a twin cognitive apparatus of
profound expectation. Categorical violations are viscerally unsettling.
When people – or even ‘lower’ animals — behave as things, they primitively
evoke the dread of morbidity, mortality, and more radical varieties of
cosmic wrongness, partially captured by the figure of the zombie. The
intermediate zone, of the ‘living dead’, can be entered from either
direction, triggering an archaic revulsion from monstrosity – the most
fundamental of all things that should not be. Horror fiction
dwells almost entirely in this twilight world of categorical slippage.
When order emerges spontaneously among things, it seems like magic (in the
ancient, soul-seizing sense), and panicked spectators reflexively grasp
for the hidden agents of ‘animistic’ or religious interpretation,
compelled by categorical intuitions far older than the human species. Calm
apprehension of such ‘teleonomies’ is grounded, perhaps invariably, in an
attenuation or vagueness of distinct perception. Were a biologist to truly
perceive the evolutionary process, its integral, primordial
horror would be ineluctable. Urbanomy, likewise, belongs to the realm of
real monstrosity. That is one reason why cities cannot readily be seen for
what they are.
Spontaneous animation, horror, and time-reversal are inextricably knotted
together at the root of their apprehension. The human nervous-system
cannot register a deeper wrong than an inversion of time, as
demonstrated by a thing that comes to life. Cities, eventually,
will scare us. In doing so, they will draw us out beyond what has been –
to date — the horizon of intelligible time.
July 29, 2013Event Horizon
Cities are defined by social density. This simple but hugely consequential
insight provides the central thesis of Edward Glaeser’s
Triumph of the City: How our Greatest Invention Makes us Richer,
Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier
(2011), where it is framed as both an analytical tool and a political
project.
“Cities are the absence of physical space between people and companies.
They enable us to work and play together, and their success depends on the
demand for physical connection,” Glaeser remarks.
High-density urban life approaches a tautology, and it is one that Glaeser
not only observes, but also celebrates. Closely-packed people are more
productive. As Alfred Marshall noted in 1920, ‘agglomeration economies’
feed a self-reinforcing process of social compression that systematically
out-competes diffuse populations in all fields of industrial activity. In
addition, urbanites are also happier, longer-living, and their ecological
footprint is smaller, Glaeser insists, drawing upon a variety of social
scientific evidence to make his case. Whether social problems are
articulated in economic, hedonic, or environmental terms, (dense) urbanism
offers the most practical solution.
The conclusion Glaeser draws, logically enough, is that densification
should be encouraged, rather than inhibited. He interprets sprawl as a
reflection of perverse incentives, whilst systematically contesting the
policy choices that restrain the trend to continuous urban compression.
His most determined line of argumentation is directed in favor of
high-rise development, and against the planning restrictions that keep
cities stunted. A city that is prevented from soaring will be
over-expensive and under-excited, inflexible, inefficient, dirty,
backward-looking, and peripherally sprawl- or slum-cluttered. Onwards and
upwards is the way.
Urban planning has its own measure for density: the FAR (or Floor-to-Area
Ratio), typically determined as a limit set upon permitted concentration.
An FAR of 2, for instance, allows a developer to build a two-story
building over an entire area, a four-story building on half the area, or
an eight-story building on a quarter of the area. An FAR sets an average
ceiling on urban development. It is essentially a bureaucratic device for
deliberately stunting vertical growth.
As Glaeser shows, Mumbai’s urban development problems have been
all-but-inevitable given the quite ludicrous FAR of 1.33 that was set for
India’s commercial capital in 1964. Sprawling slum development has been
the entirely predictable outcome.
Whilst sparring with Jane Jacobs over the impact of high-rise construction
on urban life, Glaeser is ultimately in agreement on the importance of
organic development, based on spontaneous patterns of growth. Both
attribute the most ruinous urban problems to policy errors, most obviously
the attempt to channel – and in fact deform – the urban process through
arrogant bureaucratic fiat. When cities fail to do what comes naturally,
they fail, and what comes naturally, Glaeser argues, is densification.
It would be elegant to refer to this deep trend towards social
compression, the emergence, growth, and intensification of urban
settlement, as urbanization,
but we can’t do that. Even when awkwardly named, however, it exposes a profound social and
historical reality, with striking implications, amounting almost to a
specifically social law of gravitation. As with physical gravity, an
understanding of the forces of social attraction support predictions, or
at least the broad outlines of futuristic anticipation, since these forces
of agglomeration and intensification manifestly shape the future.
John M. Smart
makes only passing references to cities, but his Developmental Singularity
(DS) hypothesis is especially relevant to urban theory because it focuses
upon the topic of density. He
argues
that acceleration, or time-compression, is only one aspect of a general
evolutionary (more precisely, evolutionary-developmental, or ‘evo devo’)
trend that envelops space, time, energy, and mass. This ‘STEM-compression’
is identified with ascending intelligence (and negative entropy). It
reflects a deep cosmic-historical drive to the augmentation of
computational capacity that marries “evolutionary processes
that are stochastic, creative, and divergent [with]
developmental processes that produce statistically predictable,
robust, conservative, and convergent structures and trajectories.”
Smart notes that “the leading edge of structural complexity in our
universe has apparently transitioned from universally distributed early
matter, to galaxies, to replicating stars within galaxies, to solar
systems in galactic habitable zones, to life on special planets in those
zones, to higher life within the surface biomass, to cities, and soon, to
intelligent technology, which will be a vastly more local subset of
Earth’s city space.”
Audaciously, Smart projects this trend to its limit: “Current research
(Aaronson 2006, 2008) now suggests that building future computers based on
quantum theory, one of the two great theories of 20th century physics,
will not yield exponentially, but only
quadratically growing computational capacity over today’s
classical computing. In the search for truly disruptive future
computational capacity emergence, we can therefore look to the second
great physical theory of the last century, relativity. If the DS
hypothesis is correct, what we can call relativistic computing (a
black-hole-approximating computing substrate) will be the final common
attractor for all successfully developing universal civilizations.”
Conceive the histories of cities, therefore, as the initial segments of
trajectories that curve asymptotically to infinite density, at the
ultimate event horizon of the physical universe. The beginning is recorded
fact and the end is quite literally ‘gone’, but what lies in between, i.e.
next?
April 15, 2011Implosion
Science fiction has tended to extroversion. In America especially, where
it found a natural home among an unusually future-oriented people, the
iconic SF object was indisputably the space ship, departing the confines
of Earth for untrammeled frontiers. The future was measured by the
weakening of the terrestrial gravity well.
Cyberpunk, arriving in the mid-1980s, delivered a cultural shock. William
Gibson’s
Neuromancer
still included some (Earth-orbital) space activity – and even a
communication from Alpha Centauri — but its voyages now curved into the
inner space of computer systems, projected through the starless tracts of
Cyberspace. Interstellar communication bypassed biological species, and
took place between planetary artificial intelligences. The United States
of America seemed to have disappeared.
Space and time had collapsed, into the ‘cyberspace matrix’ and the
near-future. Even the abstract distances of social utopianism had been
incinerated in the processing cores of micro-electronics. Judged by the
criteria of mainstream science fiction, everything cyberpunk touched upon
was gratingly close, and still closing in. The future had become imminent,
and skin-tight.
Gibson’s cities had not kept up with his wider – or narrower – vision. The
urban spaces of his East Coast North America were still described as ‘The
Sprawl’, as if stranded in a rapidly-obsolescing state of extension. The
crushing forces of technological compression had leapt beyond social
geography, sucking all historical animation from the decaying husks of
‘meat space’. Buildings were relics, bypassed by the leading edge of
change.
(Gibson’s Asian city-references are, however, far more intense, inspired
by such innovations in urban compression as the Kowloon Walled City, and
Japanese ‘coffin hotels’. In addition, Urbanists disappointed by
first-wave cyberpunk have every reason to continue on into
Spook Country, where the influence of GPS-technology on the re-animation of urban
space nourishes highly fertile speculations.)
Star cruisers and alien civilizations belong to the same science fiction
constellation, brought together by the assumption of expansionism. Just
as, in the realm of fiction, this ‘space opera’ future collapsed into
cyberpunk, in (more or less) mainstream science – represented by SETI
programs – it perished in the desert of the
Fermi Paradox. (OK, it’s true, Urban Future has a bizarrely nerdish obsession with
this topic.)
John M. Smart’s solution to the Fermi Paradox is integral to his broader
‘Speculations on Cosmic Culture’ and emerges naturally from
compressive development. Advanced intelligences do not expand into space, colonizing vast
galactic tracts or dispersing self-replicating robot probes in a program
of exploration. Instead, they implode, in a process of ‘transcension’ —
resourcing themselves primarily through the hyper-exponential efficiency
gains of extreme miniaturization (through micro- and nano- to femto-scale
engineering, of subatomic functional components). Such cultures or
civilizations, nucleated upon self-augmenting technological intelligence,
emigrate from the extensive universe in the direction of abysmal
intensity, crushing themselves to near-black-hole densities at the edge of
physical possibility. Through transcension, they withdraw from extensive
communication (whilst, perhaps, leaving ‘radio fossils’ behind, before
these blink-out into the silence of cosmic escape).
If Smart’s speculations capture the basic outlines of a density-attracted
developmental system, then cities should be expected to follow a
comparable path, characterized by an escape into inwardness, an interior
voyage, involution, or implosion. Approaching singularity on an
accelerating trajectory, each city becomes increasingly inwardly directed,
as it falls prey to the irresistible attraction of its own hyperbolic
intensification, whilst the outside world fades to irrelevant static.
Things disappear into cities, on a path of departure from the world. Their
destination cannot be described within the dimensions of the known – and,
indeed, tediously over-familiar – universe. Only in the deep exploratory
interior is innovation still occurring, but there it takes place at an
infernal, time-melting rate.
What might Smart-type urban development suggest?
(a) Devo Predictability. If urban development is neither randomly
generated by internal processes, nor arbitrarily determined by external
decisions, but rather guided predominantly by a developmental attractor
(defined primarily by intensification), it follows that the future of
cities is at least partially autonomous in regards to the
national-political, global-economic, and cultural-architectural influences
that are often invoked as fundamentally explanatory. Urbanism can be
facilitated or frustrated, but its principal ‘goals’ and practical
development paths are, in each individual case, internally and
automatically generated. When a city ‘works’ it is not because it conforms
to an external, debatable ideal, but rather because it has found a route
to cumulative intensification that strongly projects its ‘own’, singular
and intrinsic, urban character. What a city wants is to become itself, but
more — taking itself further and faster. That alone is urban flourishing,
and understanding it is the key that unlocks the shape of any city’s
future.
(b) Metropolitanism. Methodological nationalism has been systematically
over-emphasized in the social sciences (and not only at the expense of
methodological individualism). A variety of influential urban thinkers,
from Jane Jacobs to Peter Hall, have sought to correct this bias by
focusing upon the significance, and partial autonomy, of urban economies,
urban cultures, and municipal politics to aggregate prosperity,
civilization, and golden ages. They have been right to do so. City growth
is the basic socio-historical phenomenon.
(c) Cultural Introversion. John Smart argues that an intelligence
undergoing advanced relativistic development finds the external landscape
increasingly uninformative and non-absorbing. The search for cognitive
stimulation draws it inwards. As urban cultures evolve, through
accelerating social complexity, they can be expected to manifest exactly
this pattern. Their internal processes, of runaway intelligence implosion,
become ever more gripping, engaging, surprising, productive, and
educational, whilst the wider cultural landscape subsides into predictable
tedium, of merely ethnographic and historical relevance. Cultural
singularity becomes increasingly urban-futural (rather than
ethno-historical), to the predictable disgruntlement of traditional nation
states. Like Gibson’s Terrestrial Cyberspace, encountering another of its
kind in orbit around Alpha Centauri, cosmopolitan connectivity is made
through inner voyage, rather than expansionary outreach.
(d) Scale Resonance. At the most abstract level, the relation between
urbanism and microelectronics is scalar (fractal). The coming computers
are closer to miniature cities than to artificial brains, dominated by
traffic problems (congestion), migration / communications, zoning issues
(mixed use), the engineering potential of new materials, questions of
dimensionality (3D solutions to density constraints), entropy or heat /
waste dissipation (recycling / reversible computation), and disease
control (new viruses). Because cities, like computers, exhibit
(accelerating phylogenetic) development within observable historical time,
they provide a realistic model of improvement for compact
information-processing machinery, sedimented as a series of practical
solutions to the problem of relentless intensification. Brain-emulation
might be considered an important computational goal, but it is
near-useless as a developmental model. Intelligent microelectronic
technologies contribute to the open-ended process of urban
problem-solving, but they also recapitulate it at a new level.
(e) Urban Matrix. Does urban development exhibit the real embryogenesis of
artificial intelligence? Rather than the global Internet, military Skynet,
or lab-based AI program, is it the path of the city, based on accelerating
intensification (STEM compression), that best provides the conditions for
emergent super-human computation? Perhaps the main reason for thinking so
is that the problem of the city – density management and accentuation –
already commits it to computational engineering, in advance of any
deliberately guided research. The city, by its very nature, compresses, or
intensifies, towards computronium. When the first AI speaks, it might be
in the name of the city that it identifies as its body, although even that
would be little more than a ‘radio fossil’ — a signal announcing the brink
of silence — as the path of implosion deepens, and disappears into the
alien interior.
April 29, 2011Scaly Creatures
Among the most memorable features of Shanghai’s 2010 World Expo was the
quintet of ‘Theme Pavilions’ designed to facilitate exploration of the
city in general (in keeping with the urban-oriented theme of the event:
‘Better City, Better Life’). Whilst many international participants
succumbed to facile populism in their national pavilions, these Theme
Pavilions maintained an impressively high-minded tone.
Most remarkable of all for philosophical penetration was the Urban Being
Pavilion, with its exhibition devoted to the question: what kind of thing
is a city? Infrastructural networks received especially focused scrutiny.
Pipes, cables, conduits, and transport arteries compose intuitively
identifiable systems – higher-level wholes – that strongly indicate the
existence of an individualized, complex being. The conclusion was starkly
inescapable: a city is more than just an aggregated mass. It is a
singular, coherent entity, deserving of its proper – even personal – name,
and not unreasonably conceived as a composite ‘life-form’ (if not exactly
an ‘organism’).
Such intuitions, however plausible, do not suffice in themselves to
establish the city as a rigorously-defined scientific object. “[D]espite
much historical evidence that cities are the principle engines of
innovation and economic growth, a quantitative, predictive theory for
understanding their dynamics and organization and estimating their future
trajectory and stability remains elusive,” remark Luís M. A. Bettencourt,
José Lobo, Dirk Helbing, Christian Kühnert, and Geoffrey B. West, in their
prelude to a 2007 paper that has done more than any other to remedy the
deficit: ‘Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities‘.
In this paper, the authors identify mathematical patterns that are at once
distinctive to the urban phenomenon and generally applicable to it. They
thus isolate the object of an emerging urban science, and outline its
initial features, claiming that: “the social organization and dynamics
relating urbanization to economic development and knowledge creation,
among other social activities, are very general and appear as nontrivial
quantitative regularities common to all cities, across urban systems.”
Noting that cities have often been analogized to biological systems, the
paper extracts the principle supporting the comparison. “Remarkably,
almost all physiological characteristics of biological organisms scale
with body mass … as a power law whose exponent is typically a multiple of
1/4 (which generalizes to 1/(d +1) in d-dimensions).” These relatively
stable scaling relations allow biological features, such as metabolic
rates, life spans, and maturation periods, to be anticipated with a
high-level of confidence given body mass alone. Furthermore, they conform
to an elegant series of theoretical expectations that draw upon nothing
beyond the abstract organizational constraints of n-dimensional space:
If cities are in certain respects meta- or super-organisms, however, they
are also the inverse. Metabolically, cities are anti-organisms. As
biological systems scale up, they slow down, at a mathematically
predictable rate. Cities, in contrast, accelerate as they grow. Something
approximating to the fundamental law of urban reality is thus exposed:
larger is faster.
The paper quantifies its findings, based on a substantial base of city
data (with US cities over-represented), by specifying a ‘scaling exponent’
(or ‘ß‘, beta) that defines the regular correlation between urban scale
and the factor under consideration.
A beta of one corresponds to linear correlation (of a variable to city
size). For instance, housing supply, which remains constantly proportional
to population across all urban scales, is found – unsurprisingly – to have
ß = 1.00.
A beta of less than one indicates consistent economy to scale. Such
economies are found systematically among urban resource networks,
exemplified by gasoline stations (ß = 0.77), gasoline sales (ß = 0.79),
length of electrical cables (ß = 0.87), and road surface (ß = 0.83). The
sub-linear correlation of resource costs to urban scale makes city life
increasingly efficient as metropolitan intensity soars.
A beta of greater than one indicates increasing returns to scale. Factors
exhibiting this pattern include inventiveness (e.g. ‘new patents’ß = 1.27,
‘inventors’ ß = 1.25), wealth creation (e.g. ‘GDP’ ß = 1.15, wages ß =
1.12), but also disease (‘new AIDS cases’ ß = 1.23), and serious crimes (ß
= 1.16). Urban growth is accompanied by a super-linear rise in opportunity
for social interaction, whether productive, infectious, or malicious. More
is not only better, it’s
much better (and, in some respects, worse).
Bigger city, faster life.
May 5, 2011Edward Glaeser on Triumph of the City
Shanghai isn’t one of the featured cities in your book. It’s massive
and massively high-rise. Did you ever consider writing about it?
Shanghai is one of the world’s great cities, but I don’t know the city
well enough to write about it. I hope to get to know the city better and
feature Shanghai’s successes in some later work.
China is a place where cities have grown incredibly quickly and there’s
been a massive exodus from the countryside to urban life. What do you
think China’s cities should focus on as they grow?
Cities, today, succeed as forges of human capital and engines of
innovation. China clearly recognizes this and is investing massively in
education. That should continue. Just as importantly, China needs to focus
on fostering more entrepreneurship by eliminating any remaining barriers
to small start-ups.
You talk about how cities should be seen as “masses of connected
humanity,” rather than agglomerations of buildings. Do you think this is
well understood at this point, or are too many places still attempting
to “build their way back to success”?
Unfortunately, too often political leaders try to garner headlines with a
splashy new structure. The key is to focus on those infrastructure
investments that will really benefit the people in the city.
Are you optimistic about city planners around the world finding the
balance between Paris and Mumbai, i.e. between Haussman-style central
planning that risks sterility and a chaotic free-for-all?
That’s the 10 trillion dollar question. I wish I could be more optimistic,
but city planning is hard and many governments are either unable to manage
chaos or too inclined to central control. This requires not just knowledge
but political strength and that’s a rare combination.
Which cities around the world are getting it right? Which
aren’t?
I believe that Singapore is the best-managed city in the world – good
schools, a superb transportation policy, and a sensible approach to
regulation. But Hong Kong is also quite impressive, and I personally
prefer it’s somewhat more chaotic style.
The west has many urban powerhouses, but few of them are really models of
perfect management. For example, I am a big fan of Mayor Menino in Boston,
but despite more than 15 years of hard work, Boston’s schools are still
struggling.
Obviously, Barcelona, Paris, and Milan are all lovely, wonderful cities,
but they are not necessarily models of good management.
You’re cautiously optimistic in your book, but what worries you most
about the future of the city?
The biggest challenges are in the mega-cities of the developing world,
especially Africa. We are a very long way from providing even the core
essentially like clean water in many places.
In the US, we have huge problems of fiscal mismanagement that need to be
addressed. Moreover, there is always the possibility of really major
physical disasters – either natural or man-made.
Is there any way around the fact that the most vibrant cities also
become the most expensive – or, as you say in the book, is this simply
the price of good urban health?
The laws of supply and demand cannot be repealed. If a city is attractive
and productive, demand for its real estate will be high. The best antidote
for that is abundant supply, but it is a mistake to subsidize urban
housing. The best path towards greater affordability comes from private
housing construction that is regulated only as much as is absolutely
necessary. Still, building up can be expensive and that will always make
prices in successful cities more expensive.
By functioning as engines of economic opportunity and as refuges,
cities tend to concentrate economic disparity. Do you think a case might
be made that such inequalities could be interpreted as a symptom of
urban success? Might you be subtly suggesting this in your own
work?
I am suggesting just that. National inequality can be a real problem, but
local inequality can be a sign of health. Cities don’t typically make
people poor they attract poor people. The inequality of a city reflects
the fact that it attracts rich and poor alike, and that’s something to
admire.
How can cities strive to control inequality and avoid ghettos of rich
and poor? Should they even be trying to?
Education is the best weapon against inequality. Cities should be striving
to make sure that the children of every parent have a chance of being
successful.
Some degree of stratification by income is inevitable, but segregation can
be quite costly because such separations mean that isolated people lose
the urban advantages of connection. There aren’t great tools for reducing
segregation, but governments should make sure that their policies do not
exacerbate segregation.
Geoffrey West at the Santa Fe Institute has been studying cities as
‘complex systems’ and identified a number of reliable and quantifiable
patterns on this basis. Do you find this type of analysis informative or
relevant to your work?
Cities are indeed complex systems.
Even in the modern world, with nationalism ascendant, city states seem
to be unusually successful. Do cities provide a challenge to dominant
conceptions of large-scale political organization? How do you rate the
prospects of devolutionary politics, with a municipal emphasis?
I don’t think that nation-states will be likely to surrender all that much
power, and cities can remain economically dominant but politically weak.
The path in the US has continued to be towards more, not less, national
power and I think that is probably a mistake. In many cases – such as
Mumbai – local choices would surely be better than the choices imposed on
cities by above.
Other than your own work, who do you consider to be the most important
writers on cities today?
I deeply admire the Columbia historian Kenneth Jackson.
June 20, 2011Our Cause
“So, what is Urban Future about, really?”
Basically this:
(That’s what mail-order capitalism seemed to threaten in the 1939. The
cephalocommercial monstrosity has to have become far more tentacular
since. Image via @SlateVault.)
May 15, 2014The Urban Factor
Project Syndicate linked to
this
(2011) McKinsey study of urban contribution to world GDP. The top
bullet-point take-away: “only 600 urban centers generate about 60 percent
of global GDP.” Yet, because cities, as nodes in a global economic
network, are distributed by a power law, any picture drawn by the top 600
urban centers tends to strongly de-dramatize the reality.
Wikipedia
has a
helpful table of world cities with a variety of GDP estimates. (The
Brookings Institute figures are the most complete, and also the most
generous.) From these it can be seen that Tokyo, on its own, accounts for
almost 2% of world GDP. The world’s 10 most productive cities — Chicago,
London, Los Angeles, Moscow, New York, Osaka/Kobe, Paris, Seoul, Shanghai,
and Tokyo — account for roughly 10% of total global economic output
between them. The next thirty cities together do not quite double this
figure, and from then on, the contribution of each city added dwindles
rapidly.
McKinsey estimates the economic weight of the world’s “23 megacities —
with populations of 10 million or more” somewhat more modestly, at 14% of
global GDP. It expects them to contribute no more than 10% of global
growth through to 2025, while: “In contrast, 577 middleweights — cities
with populations of between 150,000 and 10 million, are seen contributing
more than half of global growth to 2025, gaining share from today’s
megacities. By 2025, 13 middleweights are likely to be have become
megacities, 12 of which are in emerging-markets (the exception is Chicago)
and seven in China alone.”
UF anticipates that the combination of continued urban
agglomeration and economic concentration will tend to steepen the
distribution, but the secular shift of economic gravity from West to East
will dampen this pattern in the short-medium term. If, by mid-century,
there is not a single Chinese economic center accounting for more than 3%
of total global economic production, all our expectations about the world
will have been proven wrong.
ADDED: A mid-century prediction isn’t very audacious, but it’s timidity is
drawn from an important pattern of change. The world’s two most productive
cities, by far, are Tokyo and New York, and both are likely to see their
relative contribution to global GDP shrink substantially over coming
decades. In consequence, the near-term shifts in the distribution of
economic activity will appear as a dilution, until a new ‘capital’ of
world commerce emerges — in a process that can be expected to take at
least 20 years.
ADDED: An urbanization update from Reuters, linking to some cleargraphics).
July 10, 2014Urban Defense
There’s an easy solution to the ‘tragedy of the commons’ — abolish the
commons. It works in
cities
too.
Warning: such policies can produce an upsetting vibrancy deficit, by
deterring vagrants and panhandlers from participating in street life
within your urban enclave.
Liberal comment on the Neocameral City: “It was impressive in its own way,
I guess, but I was deeply distressed about the absence of bums.”
February 22, 2015London
Gentrification is the topic everyone is discussing, with the systematic
pricing-out of problem populations (to provincial demographic dump-zones)
as the scandal no one in polite society can admit to any ambivalence
about. It’s unspeakable, of course, especially since it is making the
place so much nicer. An undertow of London secessionist rumor — straight
out of The Peripheral — adds to the dark buzz. Also crucial is
the “best horse in the glue-factory” dividend from the implosion of
continental Europe. Overall, then, a vortical collapse dynamic of far more
intriguing ambiguity than expected by the civilizational exiles here at
Outside in.
… And overlooking the process (at Marble Arch): the ‘She-Guardian’ — make
of her what you will.
June 26, 2015London II
Surreptitiously recorded commentary on The Thing:
“It‘s started to spread from … to …”
“You see some remnants of the housing estate people around, and they
really seem as if they’re from another century…”
“Of course, the Conservative government is not going to do anything to
stop what is happening …”
“There are still islands of social housing …”
June 27, 2015Parametrics and Provocation
This is
from April last year (but I’ve only just found it). It’s quite amazing how
many lines intersect in it:
Both Schumacher’s and Hadid’s language propose an architecture that’s
“above” trivial moral and political hand-wringing, like
worker’s rights. Peggy Dreamer, in a recent CalArts panel, described Schumacher’s
style as “über-form,” meaning that it takes on the aesthetic of the
universal and inevitable in order to create icons of an imaginary
future. And that is what China and the Emirates are
buying — the Seoul Design Park, Galaxy SOHO, Guangzhou Opera House, the
2022 Qatar World Cup Stadium. These are icons of future cities, not
current ones.
The reason it’s here, now, though is to add some framing for
this
Patrik Schumacher talk, which I was politely asked (on Twitter) to trigger
a Xenosystems conversation about it. While I’m in no position to
directly wire-head XS readers, it looks stimulating to me. (There isn’t
much capitalistic historical materialism
about.)
November 22, 2015Free Cities
The Free Cities Initiative: Let A Thousand Cities Bloom (here). In every way an excellent thing to be happening, and crucially aligned
with the deep planetary current.
This
is the idea:
What is new about free cities is not the policies they will likely
implement, but the manner in which those policies are implemented. The
traditional model is that the nation state creates a legal baseline.
Cities and towns can add to that baseline, increasing taxes or
regulatory requirements for example, but not opt out of it. A special
economic zone is an institutional arrangement which allows territories
to opt out of aspects of the institutional baseline. […] A free city is
an institutional arrangement which allows a territory to opt out of most
aspects of the institutional baseline. In recent history, this is a
radical change. However, it is a radical change necessary to import good
institutions; rule of law, property rights, and economic freedom. We
already know what works. Free cities offer a path to get there.
And
this
is the trend:
… free cities are by and large inevitable. … Two trends, which are not
yet common knowledge, point to the emergence of free cities. Those
trends are the creation of special economic zones (SEZs) and new cities.
… SEZs are forerunners to free cities, they are pockets of autonomy
where certain national laws and regulations do not apply. Of course,
they differ in several important aspects. First, SEZs are typically
small, rarely encompassing a city. Second, the autonomy for most SEZs is
relatively minor. Such autonomy might encompass lower taxes or expedited
customs, but does not represent a new legal system, merely slight
alterations to the existing one. […] Nevertheless, SEZs represent
something of a challenge to the traditional notion of a nation state, an
area where a sovereign body sets the baseline legal standard. As such,
it is reasonable to suggest that the number and trend of SEZs is roughly
correlated with the likelihood of building a free city. A world where
minor autonomy is acceptable is more likely to accept major autonomy
than a world where no autonomy is acceptable. […] The trends of SEZs
suggest that autonomy is becoming increasingly acceptable. …
June 16, 2016
Modernity’s Fertility Problem
The techno-commercial wing of the neoreactionary blogosphere has an
obvious fondness for Pacific Rim city states. Singapore, along with Hong
Kong (a PRC ‘Special Administrative Region’ which retains significant
trappings of autonomy), are regularly invoked as socio-political models.
The striking difference between the two societies only confirms the merits
of what they share. “If you love minimal democracy capitalist enclaves so
much, why not move to Singapore (or Hong Kong)?” is a notably ineffective
challenge to this constituency. Those who haven’t already fled there – or
somewhere else that is in important respects comparable – can only see the
prospect of such an exile as a tempting invitation. It’s not quite “Go to
heaven!” but it’s as close as political polemic gets. The asymmetry is
decisive. Unlike any concrete approximation to a left-utopian social model
that has ever been available, these are societies that incontestably work,
with attractions that require no active propaganda operation to support.
The right rises because – unlike its enemies – it can find examples of
what it admires that aren’t agonizingly embarrassing upon close
inspection. Seriously, be our guests and look more attentively. The
details are even more impressive than the dazzling general impression.
This would be a great place to stop, but instead…
…in March 2013, dissident right blogger ‘Spandrell’ put up a short post on
his abrasive but consistently brilliant Bloody Shovel site that
messed up the narrative in a way that has yet to be persuasively
addressed. Entitled ‘Et tu, Harry?,’ it placed the Singapore miracle in a
disconcerting context. Rather than harmonizing with neoreactionary
celebrations of the city state’s unapologetically selective immigration
policy, Spandrell asks:
The accusation is acute, and can be generalized. Modernity has a fertility
problem. When elevated to the zenith of savage irony, the formulation
runs: At the demographic level, modernity selects systematically against
modern populations. The people it prefers, it consumes. Without gross
exaggeration, this endogenous tendency can be seen as an existential risk
to the modern world. It threatens to bring the entire global order
crashing down around it.
In order to discuss this implicit catastrophe, it’s first necessary to
talk about cities, which is a conversation that has already begun. To
state the problem crudely, but with confidence: Cities are population
sinks. Historian William McNeil explains the basics. Urbanization, from
its origins, has tended relentlessly to convert children from productive
assets into objects of luxury consumption. All of the archaic economic
incentives related to fertility are inverted.
McNeil summarizes his argument in an online essay considering ‘Cities and their Consequences’:
Education expenses alone explain much of this. School fees are by far the
most effective contraceptive technology ever conceived. To raise a child
in an urban environment is like nothing that rural precedent ever prepared
for. Even if responsible parenting were the sole motivation in
play, the compressive effect on family size would be extreme. Under urban
circumstances, it becomes almost an aggression against one’s own children
for there to be many of them. But there is much more than this going on.
Recognition of the modern fertility crisis and the ‘far right’ – whether
in its ‘misogynistic’ or its ‘racist’ strains – are not easily
distinguishable. The egalitarian axiom, as applied to gender or to
ethnicity, comes under critical strain as the topic is pursued. A general
theory of the post-conservative right would be productively initiated
here.
Feminism has been the first, inevitable target. It is tightly correlated
with the collapse of fertility, and is something modernity tends
(strongly) to promote. The expansion of female social opportunities beyond
obligate child-rearing could scarcely lead anywhere other than to a
drastic contraction of family size. The inexorable modern trend to social
decoding – i.e. to the production of an abstract contractual agency in the
place of concretely determined persons – makes the explosion of such
opportunities apparently uncontainable. The individualism fostered by
urban life might, to the counter-factual imagination, have been in some
way restricted to males, but as a matter of actual historical fact the
dereliction of traditional social roles has proceeded without serious
limitation, with variation in speed, but no indication of alternative
direction. The radically decoded Internet persona – optionally anonymous,
fabricated, and self-defining – seems no more than an extrapolation from
the emergent norms of urban existence. Feminist assumptions, at least in
their ‘first-wave,’ liberal form, are integral to the modern city.
Religious traditionalist lamentations in this regard are, of course,
nothing new. Christianity – especially under Catholic inspiration – has
connected modernity to sterility for as long as modernity has been
noticed. A number of crucial factors have nevertheless changed. Since the
early years of the new millennium, secular liberals have begun to notice
the connection between religiosity and fertility, and to express gathering
concern about its partisan political consequences. In a 2009 paper, Sarah
R. Hayford and S. Philip Morgan
discuss
the transition from a traditional discussion of the topic, focused upon
differential Catholic and Protestant fertility, to its contemporary mode,
subsequent to the convergence of denominational differences, and now
mapping more closely onto red / blue state partisan affiliations. Their
abstract is worth citing (almost) in full:
“Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?” asked Eric Kaufmann in a 2010
book with that name. A peculiar twist in the Darwinian inheritance had
begun to bring the heritability of religious attitudes into prominence,
and linking it (positively) to the question of reproductive fitness. Those
groups previously seen as having been unambiguously vanquished by a
triumphant evolutionary science were now subject to an ironic – and from
the progressive perspective deeply sinister – evolutionary vindication.
This is a story that has still scarcely begun to unfold.
A parallel development, compounding the commitment of cultural modernity
to imperative sterility, has been the efflorescence of LGBTQXYZ sexual
identity politics. Following the decisive progressive victory in the cause
of gay marriage, something like a Cambrian Explosion in non-traditional
sexual and gender orientations has occurred, turbo-charging the
pre-existing feminist critique of normative reproductive sexuality. Here,
too, the affinity with profound modernistic inclinations is unmistakable,
in a process of introjected brand and niche specialization. The tendency –
often supported as an explicit political strategy – is to invert the terms
of marginalization, by drowning the reproductive family unit within a
hyper-inflated menu of socio-libidinal positions. Fertility is
increasingly identified as a conservative eccentricity, legitimately
targeted by partisan political warfare. Intense backlash has been among
the results (providing fertile ground for the post-conciliatory ‘far
right’).
Oh, but there’s more. The truly great transition, implicit in the process
of modernity from the start, is marked by the threshold between
domestic and global urbanization. Major cities have
always been distinctively cosmopolitan, but for the initial phase of their
histories the bulk of their demographic absorption has been limited to
their own ethnic hinterlands. Urbanization meant, first of all,
the conversion of rural populations into city dwellers. In the developing
world, it still means this. In the most advanced modern societies,
however, domestic rural populations were almost fully consumed, reduced to
some negligible fraction of the national total. After this point, the
process of population replacement intrinsic to the urban phenomenon from
its beginning became inextricably bound to globalization, and
trans-national migration flows. Now – which really is now –
things get interesting.
Politics, by prophetic etymology, is about cities. The
inevitability of an emergent ‘Alt-Right’ in the mass politics of advanced
modern societies is already fully predictable from a minimal understanding
of how cities work. It is simple delusion to imagine that mere contingency
rules here, perhaps under the guidance of particular political
personalities. Rather, the urban metabolism – essentially – at a certain
phase of its development, generates circumstances overwhelmingly conducive
to the eruption of popular ethno-politics. Cities are demographic
parasites. They trend intrinsically to a dynamic that – beyond a
comparatively definite threshold –
cannot fail to be perceived as a systematic policy of ethnic
replacement.
There is still much hope of coaxing toothpaste back into its tubes. In
other words, there is a massive failure to appreciate the profundity and
magnitude of the processes underlying the current global crisis. For
instance, the incendiary language of migration-driven ‘genocide’ is not
going away. It is bound, on the contrary, to spread, and intensify. The
re-emergence of the race topic, and all of its associates, is deeply baked
into the modernist cake. Comparative modernity is automatically racialized
once global metabolism lends differential (urban/rural) fertility its
ethnic specificity. What is unfolding, among other things, is the racial
disaggregation of the ‘population bomb,’ with drastic inevitability. This
is not a product of intellectuals, but of the modern process inherently,
and all attempts by intellectuals to obstruct its cultural condensation
are hubristically misconceived. “Who, actually, is having kids?” It is a
species of insanity to think this question can be strangled in the crib.
So, what’s the answer? Does the Alt-Right have one? If so, there’s been no
sign of it yet. “Burn the cities to the ground” has been floated on
Twitter, and no doubt elsewhere, but it doesn’t seem obviously practical.
That solution has a rich – and especially East Asian – communist pedigree,
which the Alt-Right will probably rediscover at some point. It didn’t work
out in the 1970s, and would be unlikely to perform any more convincingly
today.
As the crisis escalates, it can be expected to generate a thread of novel
political theory oriented to the question:
How do we make practical and technical sense of social solution
searches in general?
Such thinking is going to be necessary. Our great cities pose an ultimate
political problem. Eventually, something will be grateful for that.
***
Notes:
William McNeil, ‘Cities and their Consequences’
Sarah R. Hayford and S. Philip Morgan, ‘Religiosity and Fertility in the United States: The Role of Fertility
Intentions’
BLOCK 2 - TEMPLEXITY
Time in Transition
Isaac Newton’s
Philosophae Naturalis Principia Mathematica abstracted time from
events, establishing its tractability to scientific calculation. Conceived
as pure, absolute duration, without qualities, it conforms perfectly to
its mathematical idealization (as the real number line). Since time is
already pure, its reality indistinguishable from its formalization, a pure
mathematics of change – the calculus – can be applied to physical reality
without obstruction. The calculus can exactly describe things as they
occur in themselves, without straying, even infinitesimally, from the
rigorous dictates of formal intelligence. In this way natural philosophy
becomes modern science.
(It is perhaps ironic that the Newtonian formulation of non-qualitative
time coincides with a revolutionary break – or qualitative transition –
that is perhaps unmatched in history. That, however, is a matter for
another time.)
Modern science did not end with Newton. Time has since been relativized to
velocity (Einstein) and punctured with catastrophes (Thom). Yet the
qualities of time, once evacuated, cannot readily be restored.
Clock technology suffices to tell this story, on its own. Time ‘keeping’
devices produce a measure of duration, according to general
principles of standardized mechanical production, so that a clock-marked
minute is stripped of qualitative distinctness automatically.
Chronometrically, any difference between one minute and another is a
mechanical discrepancy, strictly analogous to a production line
malfunction.
Time modernization culminates in an inversion of definition, eventually
standardizing from a precisely reproducible building block (the atomic
second), rather than accommodating itself to a large-scale natural cycle –
qualified by variations of luminosity – which generates sub-units through
division. Once the second has becomes entirely synthetic, all reference to
a qualitative ‘when’ has been effaced. All that remains is quantitative
comparison, timing, and synchronization, as if the time-piece was modeled
upon the stop-watch. Calendars have become an anachronism.
Modern time intuitions would find plenty of support, even in the absence
of mechanical chronometry. Every quantifiable trend, from a stock movement
or an unemployment problem to a demographic pattern or an ecological
disaster, can be communicated through charts that assume a popular
facility at graphic intuition, and thus, implicitly, at algebraic geometry
and even calculus. Time is so widely and easily identified with the x-axis
of such charts that the principle of representation can be left
unexplained, however strange this might have seemed to pre-moderns.
Clearly, if time can be read-off from an axis – quickly and intuitively —
it is being conceived, generally, as if it were a number line
(‘Newtonian’).
Qualitative time, by now, is a scarcely-accessible exoticism. Nowhere is
this more obvious that in the case of China’s ancient Classic of Change,
the Yijing, a work that is today no less hermetic to Chinese than
it is to foreigners.
The Yijing is a book of numbers as much as a book on time, but
its numbers are combinatorial rather than metric, exhausting a space of
possibilities, and constructing a typology of times. The
Yijing speaks often of quantities, but it does not measure them.
Instead, it typologizes them, as processes of increase or decrease, rise
and fall, lassitude and acceleration, typical of qualitative phases of
recurrent cycles, with identifiable character and reliable practical
implication.
The point of all this (just in case you were wondering)?
The current time is a period of transition, with a distinctive quality,
characterizing the end of an epoch. Something – some age – is coming quite
rapidly to an end.
This is not a situation that the modern mentality is well-adapted to,
since it violates certain essential structures of our time-consciousness.
It eludes our intuitions and our clocks. Our charts register it only as a
break-down, as they terminate the x-axis at a point of senseless infinity
(hyperinflation, bubble stock p/e ratios, global derivatives exposure,
urban intensity, technological intelligence explosion) or in a collapse to
zero (marginal productivity of debt, fiat currency credibility, unit costs
of self-replicating capital goods). The can clatters off the end of the
road. Things cannot go on as they have, and they won’t.
Given the heated political climate surrounding the impending transition of
the global economic system, a non-controversial diagnosis is almost
certainly unobtainable. Niall Ferguson
describes
an Age of Global Indignation, or Global Temper Tantrum, in which the
objectively unsustainable nature of the established order, whilst widely
if vaguely perceived, still eludes sober recognition. Riots, Molotov
cocktails, and fabulous conspiracy theorizing are the result.
In all probability, Ferguson’s blunt analysis will provoke further
paroxysms of indignation. Yet, as the world’s most pampered societies
slide ever further into insolvency, such undiplomatic assessments will
become ever more common, and the rage they inspire will become ever more
unhinged.
John B Taylor
emphasizes
the senescence and death of Keynesian macroeconomics (drawing on the
earlier
work
of Robert E Lucas and Thomas J Sargent). His research concludes that “the
Keynsian multiplier for transfer payments or temporary tax rebates was not
significantly different from zero for the kind of stimulus programs
enacted in the 2000s.” In other words, stimulus is ceasing to stimulate,
and gargantuan public debts have been accumulated for no rational purpose.
This is the ‘debt saturation’ that Joe Weisenthal
describes
as “a phase transition with our debt relationship” graphically portrayed
in “the scariest [chart] of all time.”
Between financial stimulus and chemical stimulus, there is no distinction
of practical significance. Keynesianism and cocaine are both initially
invigorating, before stabilizing into expensive habits that steadily lose
effectiveness as addiction deepens. By the time bankruptcy and mortality
beckons, getting off the stimulus seems to be near-impossible. Better to
crash and burn – or hope that something ‘turns up’ — than to suffer the
agonies of withdrawal, which will feel like hell, and promises nothing
more seductive than bare normality at the end of a dark road. Character
decays into chronic deceit, intermittent rage, and maudlin self-pity.
Nobody likes a junky, still less a junky civilization.
Keynesianism was born in deception – the deliberate exploitation of ‘money
illusion’ for the purposes of economic management. Its effect on a
political culture is deeply corrosive. Illusionism spreads throughout the
social body, until the very ideas of hard currency (honest money) or
balanced budgets (honest spending) are marginalized to a ‘crankish’ fringe
and being ‘politically realistic’ has become synonymous with a
more-or-less total denial of reality. To expect a Keynesian economic
establishment to honestly confront its own failings is to laughably
misunderstand the syndrome under discussion. A reign of lies is
structurally incapable of ‘coming clean’ before it goes over the cliff
(someone needs to do another
Downfall-parody, on macroeconomics in the Fuehrer Bunker).
The long Keynesian coke-binge was what the West did with its side of
globalization, and as it all comes apart — amidst political
procrastination and furious street protests – a planetary
reset
of some kind is inevitable. The ‘Chimerican’ engine of post-colonial globalization requires a fundamental overhaul,
if not a complete replacement. The immense dynamism of the Chimerican Age,
as well as its enduring achievements, have depended on systematic
imbalances that have become patently unsustainable, and it is highly
unlikely that all the negative consequences will have been confined to
just one side of the world ledger.
For instance, China’s soaring investment rate, estimated to have reached
70% of GDP, seems to have disconnected from any prospect of reasonable
economic returns. Pivot Capital Management
concludes: “credit growth in China has reached critical levels and its
effectiveness at boosting growth is falling.” For the PRC’s
fifth-generation leadership, scheduled to adopt responsibility for China’s
political management from 2012, inertia will not be an option. By then, a
half-decade of global stimulus saturation, cascading macroeconomic
malfunction and serial ‘black swans’ (the new millennium ‘clusterflock’) will have reshaped the world’s financial architecture, trade patterns,
and policy debates. Whatever comes next has to be something new,
accompanied – at least momentarily – by genuine apprehension of economic
reality.
For post-Expo Shanghai, a city stunningly rebuilt in the age of Chimerica,
the time of transition is a matter of especially acute concern. This is a
metropolis that waxes and wanes to the pulse of the world, rigidly
tide-locked to the great surges and recessions of globalization. Will the
next phase of world history treat it as well as the last?
July 13, 2011
A Time-Traveler’s Guide to Shanghai (Part 1)
There is a strange, time-fractured moment in the biopic
Deng Xiaoping
(2002, directed by Yinnan Ding). For most of its length, the film is
sober, cautious, and respectful, exemplifying a didactic realism. It
strictly conforms to the approved story of Deng’s leadership and its
meaning (exactly as it is found today in the nation’s school textbooks).
Beginning with Deng’s ascent to power in the ruined China of the
late-1970s, in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, it follows the path of
his decision-making, through the restoration (de-collectivization) of the
rural economy, the re-habilitation of persecuted experts and
intellectuals, and the beginning of the open-door policy, in Shenzhen, to
the extension of market-oriented reform throughout the country, as
symbolized by the opening of Shanghai.
Whilst clearly something of a carefully edited and precision- manufactured
legend, this basic narrative of national regeneration, emancipation and
growth – salvaged from the ashes of dead-end fanaticism and civilizational
regression – is honest enough to inform, and even to inspire. It leaves no
doubt that the ‘meaning’ of Deng Xiaoping is openness and renaissance (at
least ’70/30′), a judgment that is both popularly endorsed in China, and
historically attested universally.
As the movie approaches its conclusion, however, pedestrian realism is
suddenly supplanted by something entirely different, whether due to the
‘deeper’ realism of budgetary constraint, or the ‘higher’ realism of
artistic serendipity. Deng Xiaoping, from the vantage point of a ‘yet’ (in
1992) inexistent bridge, gestures towards Pudong and announces the
green-light for its developmental liberation. Yet, in the background of
the scene, the deliriously developed Lujiazui of 2002 already soars, as if
the skyline had been condensed from a pre-emptive vision, drawing its
substance from the historical implication of his words. The future
couldn’t wait.
Perhaps the speed of Shanghai’s Reform-era urban development has led
everything to get ahead of itself, disordering the structure of time. The
Oriental Pearl TV Tower – first architectural statement of the new
Shanghai and still the most iconic – certainly suggests so.
Retro-deposited into the Pudong of 1992 by the
Deng Xiaoping movie, historically completed in 1994, symbolically
heralding the promised Shanghai of the third millennium, architecturally
side-stepping into a science fiction fantasy of the 1950s, alluding to
poetic imagery from the Tang Dynasty, and containing a museum devoted to
the city’s modern history in its pedestal, when, exactly, does this
structure belong? It’s hard to know where to begin.
The Emporis
profile
of the Oriental Pearl TV Tower describes its architectural style as simply
‘modernism’, which is unobjectionable, but extraordinarily
under-determining. If the modern defines itself through the present,
conceived as a break from the past and a projection into the future, the
Oriental Pearl TV Tower unquestionably installs itself in modernity, but
only by way of an elaborate path. It reverts to the present from a
discarded future, whilst excavating an unused future from the past.
Buildings that arrive in the present in this way are, strictly speaking,
‘fabulous’, and for this reason, they are considered disreputable by the
dominant traditions of international architecture. The fables they feed
upon belong to the popular culture of science fiction, which makes them
over-expressive, vulgarly communicative, and rapidly dated. Insofar as
their style is recognized generically, it is tagged by ugly and dismissive
labels such as
Googie,
Populuxe, and Doo-Wop. By reaching out too eagerly for the future, it is
tacitly suggested, one quickly comes to look ridiculous (although, today,
neomodernists such as Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas are recuperating certain
elements of this style more sympathetically).
Shanghai’s Radisson Hotel, set back from the north of People’s Square, is
a quintessentially ‘Googie’ structure. It’s space-ship top participates
exuberantly in a Shanghai tradition of weird roof-elaborations, and echoes
a formally-comparable — though far smaller — classical modern structure to
the east, down Nanjing Lu. The idea of high-rise rooftops as landing sites
for flying vehicles, within a dynamic system of three-dimensional traffic,
is a staple of ultramodernist speculation, whilst an alien arrival from a
distant future is a transparent Shanghai fantasy.
In his path-breaking short story
The Gernsback Continuum, William Gibson dubs this style ‘Raygun Gothic’, explicitly marking its
time-complexity. He thus coaxes it into the wider cultural genre of
retro-futurism, which applies to everything that evokes an out-dated
future, and thereby transforms modernity into a counter-factual commentary
on the present. This genre finds an especially rich hunting ground in
Shanghai.
(This is the first post in a connected series on Shanghai’s retro-future,
departing from the Oriental Pearl TV Tower. An outline examination of
retro-futurism itself comes next …)
July 22, 2011
A Time-Travelers Guide to Shanghai (Part 2)
Shanghai’s eclectic cityscape explores a variety of modernities
simultaneously. The sheer scale of the city, exponentiated by its
relentless dynamism, overflows the time-line.
During Shanghai’s early- to mid-20th century high modernist epoch, for
instance, the city’s consolidating haipai culture was
distinguished by the absence of a single core. It emerged, instead, as the
outcome of loosely inter-articulated plural or parallel developments,
including (but by no means limited to) the urban mores of a rising
indigenous ‘bourgeoisie’, whose aspirational tributaries reached deep into
the warrens of the lilongs; the hard accelerationism of the
International Settlement business culture, dominated by near-limitless
Shanghailander confidence in the city’s global significance and potential;
and the left-slanted literary and political trends fostered in the coffee
shop salons of the French Concession, where avant garde ideas
cross-pollinated promiscuously. This heterogeneous, fertile chaos found
its architectural echoes in the juxtaposition of building styles,
quantitatively dominated by Shanghai’s native experiment in urban
construction (the lilong block), but overawed in patches by
Western neo-classical colonial edifices; Manhattanite cosmopolitan
high-rises and Art Deco structures; bold adventures in Chinese modern
designs (most prominently in Jiangwan); examples of proto-brutalist
industrial and residential functionalism; and villas in a variety of
international, hybrid, and advanced styles.
Since re-opening, in the early 1990s, Shanghai has added new ingredients
to the mix, including its first major examples of construction indebted to
the austere tenets of the International Style (although large rectilinear
structures are still, thankfully, a rarity); neo-traditional and
ethno-exotic kitsch (especially in the Old City and the peripheral
‘nine-towns’ respectively); neomodernist re-animations of derelicted
structures; and ‘Googie’ evocations of imagined futures.
Whilst the city’s modernization has attained unprecedented
velocity, however, its native modernism remains comparatively
retarded. As an urban center in China, Shanghai’s distinctiveness is far
less marked than it was in the early 20th century. Once occupying an
overwhelmingly commanding cultural position as the engine-room and icon of
Chinese modernity, today it participates in a far more generalized process
of Chinese development. Its internationalism, commercial prowess, and
technology absorption are no longer obviously peerless within China, its
domination of the publishing and movie industries has passed, its retail
giants and innovative advertising have surrendered their uniqueness, and
its intellectual bohemia is matched, or surpassed, in a number of other
urban centers. Whilst haipai tenuously persists, its dynamism has
diffused and its confidence attenuated.
If Shanghai has a specific and coherent urban cultural identity today,
emerging out of its sprawling multiplicity, and counterbalancing the
vastly strengthened sense of national identity consolidated since the
foundation of the PRC, it cannot – like haipai before it – be
derived from the continuity of the city’s developmental trend, or from an
urban exceptionalism, feeding on the contrast with a conservative,
stagnant, or regressive national hinterland. A thoroughly renovated
Shanghainese culture, or xin haipai, is inextricably
entangled with the city’s historical discontinuity, or interruption, and
with a broader Chinese national (or even civilizational) modernization
that was anticipated by the ‘Old Shanghai’ and revives today as a
futuristic memory.
The future that had seemed inevitable to the globalizing, technophilic,
piratical capitalist Shanghai of the 1920s-‘30s went missing, as
the momentum accumulated over a century of accelerating modernization was
untracked by aerial destruction, invasion, revolution, and
agrarian-oriented national integration. As the city trod water during the
command economy era, the virtual future inherent in its ‘Golden Age’
continued to haunt it, surviving spectrally as an obscure intuition of
urban destiny. Upon re-opening, in the early 1990s, this alternative fate
flooded back. Under these circumstances, futurism is immediately
retro-futurism, since urban innovation is what was happening before, and
invention is bound to a process of re-discovery. ‘Renaissance’ always
means something of this kind (and cannot, of course, be reduced to
restoration).
This retro-futurist tendency, intrinsic to Shanghai’s revival of urban
self-consciousness in the new millennium, creates a standing time-loop
between two epochs of highly-accelerated modernistic advance. As it
steadily adjusts itself into phase, heritage and development densely
cross-reference each other, releasing streams of chatter in anachronistic,
cybergothic codes, such as the deeply encrypted ‘language’ of Art Deco.
Prophetic traditions inter-mesh with commemorative innovations,
automatically hunting the point of fusion in which they become
interchangeable, closing the circuit of time. The past was something other
than it once seemed, as the present demonstrates, and the present is
something other than it might seem, as the past attests.
The most accessible examples of Shanghai’s signature time-looping are
spatially concentrated. At the limit, neo-modern renovation projects
connect the city’s great waves of modernization within a single structure,
making a retro-futural theme intrinsic to a current development, such as
those at
M50,
Redtown,
Bridge8,
1933, or the
Hotel Waterhouse
(among innumerable cases). Slightly wider and more thematically elaborate
loops link new buildings to overt exhibitions of modernist history. Among
the most conspicuous of these are the pairing of the Oriental Pearl TV
Tower with the Shanghai History Museum (in its pedestal), and the Old
Shanghai street-life diorama to be found beneath the Urban Planning
Exhibition Hall.
Such examples can be misleading, however, if they distract from the fact
that the retro-futurist principle of the new Shanghai culture is ambient.
From ordinary residential restoration projects, to commercial signage,
restaurant themes, hotel décor and home furnishings, the insistent message
is re-emergence, an advance through the past. The latest and most stylish
thing is typically that which re-attaches itself to the city’s modern
heritage with maximum intensity. Reaching out beyond the city does nothing
to break the pattern, because that’s precisely what the ‘Old Shanghai’
used to do. Cosmopolitan change is its native tradition.
Retro-futural couplings can be spatially dispersed. One especially
prominent time loop lashes together two of the city’s most celebrated
high-rises – the Park Hotel and the Jin Mao Tower – binding the Puxi of
Old Shanghai with the Pudong New Area. Each was the tallest Shanghai
building of its age (judged by highest occupied floor), the Park Hotel for
five decades, the Jin Mao Tower for just nine years. This discrepancy
masks a deeper time-symmetry in the completion dates of the two buildings:
the Park Hotel seven years prior to the closing of the city (with the
Japanese occupation of the International Settlement in 1941), the Jin Mao
Tower seven years after the city’s formal re-opening (as the culmination
of Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour, in 1992).
It takes only a glance (or two) to recognize these buildings as
non-identical time twins, or mutant clones, communicating with each other
darkly across the rift, in Art Decode. Reciprocally attracted by their
structural and tonal resonances, the two buildings extract each other from
their respective period identities and rush together into an alternative,
occulted time, obscurely defined through contact with an absolute future,
now partially recalled.
Both of these beautifully sinister buildings are at home in the Yin World,
comfortable with secrets, and with night. Among the first of these
secrets, shared in their stylistic communion, is darkness itself. Nothing
could be further removed from the spirit of Le Corbusier’s Radiant City
than the brooding opulence of these towers, glittering on the edge of an
unfathomable nocturnal gulf, as if intoxicated by the abyss. They remind
us that ‘Art Deco’ is a (retrospective) label patched crudely over
mystery, that it never had a manifesto, or a master plan, and that – due
to its inarticulate self-organization – it has eluded historical
comprehension.
This is the sense, at least in part, of Art Deco’s pact with night and
darkness. Beneath and beyond all ideologies and centralized schemes, the
spontaneous culture of high-modernism that climaxed in the interbellum
period remains deeply encrypted. As the new Shanghai excavates the old, it
is an enigma that becomes ever more pressing.
(Coming next in the Time Traveler’s Guide to Shanghai: The Dieselpunk
Plateau)
July 27, 2011
A Time-Travelers Guide to Shanghai (Part 3)
Wikipedia attributes the earliest use of the term ‘retrofuturism’ to Lloyd John Dunn (in 1983). Together with fellow ‘Tape-beatles’ John
Heck, Ralph Johnson, and Paul Neff, Dunn was editor of the ‘submagazine’
Retrofuturism, which ran across the bottom of the pages of
Photostatic magazine over the period 1988-93. The agenda of the
Tape-beatles was artistic, and retrofurism was “defined as the act or
tendency of an artist to progress by moving backwards,” testing the
boundaries between copying and creativity through systematic plagiarism
and experimental engagement with the technologies of reproduction.
Whatever the achievements of this ‘original’ retrofuturist movement, they
were soon outgrown by the term itself.
A more recent and comparatively mainstream understanding of retro-futurism
is represented by the websites of
Matt Novak
(from 2007) and
Eric Lefcowitz
(from 2009), devoted to a cultural history of the future. Specializing in
a comedy of disillusionment (thoroughly spiced with nerd kitsch), these
sites explore the humorous incongruity between the present as once
imagined and its actual realization. Content is dominated by the rich
legacy of failed predictions that has accumulated over a century (or more)
of science fiction, futurology, and popular expectations of progress,
covering topics from space colonization, undersea cities, extravagant
urban designs, advanced transportation systems, humanoid domestic robots,
and ray-guns, to jumpsuit clothing and meal pills. This genre of
retro-futurism is near-perfectly epitomized by Daniel H. Wilson’s 2007
book
Where’s My Jetpack?: A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future that
Never Arrived. The sentiment of the genre is highly consistent and quite readily
summarized: disappointment with the underperformance of the present is
redeemed by amusement at the extravagant – even absurd — promise of the
past.
Retro-futurism in the missing jetpack mode can have broad historical
horizons. It is only limited by the existence of adequately-specified
predictions, optimally of the concrete, technologically-defined kind most
suited to parodic recollection. Matt Novak’s paleofuture or “past visions
of the future” index spans 130 years (from the 1870s through to the
1990s). Nevertheless, the essential characteristics of the genre
disproportionately attract it to the ‘Golden Age’ of (American) science
fiction, centered on the 1940s-50s, when technological optimism reached
its apogee.
Dated back to the July 1939 issue of pulp SF magazine
Astounding Science Fiction (edited by John W. Campbell and
containing stories by Isaac Asimov and A.E. Van Vogt), or to the April
1939 opening of the dizzily futurist New York World Fair, the Golden Age
might have been pre-programmed for retro-futurist ridicule. Its optimism
was entirely lacking in self-doubt; its imagination was graphically
clarified by the emerging marking tools of modern advertising, PR, and
global ideological politics; its favored gadgetry was lusciously
visualized, large-scaled, and anthropomorphically meaningful; and an
emerging consumer culture, of previously unconceived scale and
sophistication, served both to package the future into a series of
discrete, tangible products, and to promote aspirations of individual (or
nuclear family) empowerment-through-consumption that would later be
targeted for derision. Implausibly marrying social conservatism to
techno-consumerist utopianism,
every family with its own flying car is a vision that, from the
start, hurtles towards retro-futurist hilarity. By the time
The Jetsons first aired in 1962, the Golden Age had ended, and
the laughter had begun.
If William Gibson’s The Gernsback Continuum (1981) antedated the
term ‘retro-futurism’, it indisputably consolidated the concept, investing
it with a cultural potential that far exceeded anything the light-hearted
sallies of the oughties would match. Instead of picking among the detritus
of Golden Age speculation for objects of amused condescension, Gibson
back-tracks its themes to the ‘Raygun Gothic’ or ‘American Streamlined
Modern’ of the interbellum period, and then projects this derelicted
culture forwards, as a continuous alternative history (dominated by
quasi-fascist utopianism). The Gernsback Continuum is no mere collection
of oddities, but rather a path not taken, and one that continued
to haunt the science fiction imagination. Cyberpunk would be its exorcism.
Hugo Gernsback (1884-1967), commemorated by the ‘Hugo’ science fiction
awards, was a futuristic fiction enthusiast and (shady) publishing
entrepreneur who, more than any other identifiable individual, catalyzed
the emergence of science fiction as a self-conscious genre, promoted
through cheaply-printed, luridly popular ‘pulp’ magazines. In the first
issue of Amazing Stories, which he founded in 1926, Gernsback
defined ‘scientifiction’ as “charming romance intermingled with scientific
fact and prophetic vision.” Whilst commonly detested by his abused
writers, due to his sharp business practices, Gernsback’s politics seem to
have been unremarkable. The ominous Aryan technocracy portrayed in
The Gernsback Continuum probably owes more to the reputation of
his successor at Amazing Stories, John W. Campbell (1910-1971),
and the broader cultural tendencies he represented.
The re- (or pre-) direction of retro-futurism, from abandoned dreams to
alternative histories, triggered a cascade of avalanches. Often, these
have been marked by the wanderings of the ‘-punk’ suffix. Initially
indicative of an anti-utopian (if not necessarily positively dystopian)
impulse, whose ‘dirty’ futurism embraces social and psychological
disorder, chaotic causality, uneven development, and collapsed horizons,
it increasingly adopted an additional, and previously unpredictable sense.
The history of science fiction – and perhaps history more broadly – was
‘punked’ by the emergence of literary and cultural sub-genres that carried
it down lines of unrealized potential. Cyberpunk belonged recognizably to
our electronically re-engineered time-line, but steampunk, clockpunk,
dieselpunk (or
‘decopunk’), and atompunk – to list them in rough order of their
appearance — extrapolated techno-social systems that had already been
bypassed. If these were ‘futures’ at all, they lay not up ahead, but along
branch-tracks, off to the side.
These various ‘retro-punk’ micro-genres could be understood in numerous
ways. When conceived primarily as literature, they can be envisaged as
re-animations of period features from the history of science fiction, or,
more incisively, as liberations of dated futures from the dominion of
subsequent time. For instance, the Victorian future of the steampunks was
more than just a hazily anticipated Edwardian present, it was something
else entirely, propelled in part by the real but unactualized potential of
mechanical computation (as concretized in the Difference and Analytical
Engines of Babbage and Lovelace).
Apprehended more theoretically, retro-punk genres echo significant
debates. In particular, axial arguments on both the left and the right
melt into discussions of
alternative history, especially in the dieselpunk dark-heartland of the 1920s-‘30s. For over
half a century, European Marxism has been inextricable from
counter-factual explorations of the Soviet experience, focused on the
period of maximum Proletkult innovation between the end of the
post-civil war and the social realist clampdown presaging the Stalinist
regime. The figure of Leon Trotsky as alternative history (dieselpunk)
socialist hero makes no sense in any other context. On the right, American
conservatism has become ever more focused on counter-factual interrogation
of the Hoover/FDR-Keynesian response to the Crash of 1929 and the
subsequent Great Depression, understood as the moment when republican
laissez-faire capitalism was supplanted by New Deal social
democracy (Coolidge / Mellon ’28 tee-shirts might still be thin on the
ground, but their day might come).
Whilst Shanghai is uploading itself into a cyberpunk tomorrow as fast as
any city on earth, it has few obvious time-gates opening into clockpunk,
atompunk, or (more disputably) steampunk futures. With dieselpunk,
however, this series of dismissals grinds immediately to a halt. If some
crazed dieselpunk demigod had leased the world to use as a laboratory, the
outcome would have been – to a tolerable degree of approximation –
indistinguishable from Shanghai. Xin haipai is dieselpunk with
Chinese characteristics.
Shanghai’s greatest dieselpunk counter-factual is inescapably: what if
Japanese invasion had not interrupted the city’s high-modernity in 1937?
What was the city turning into? Beneath that enveloping question, however,
and further back, a teeming mass of alternatives clamor for attention.
What if the White Terror of 1927 had not crushed the urban workers’
movement? What if the CCP had succeeded, as Song Qingling dreamed, of
transforming China’s republican government from within? What if the
international politics of silver had not combined with Guomindang
kleptocracy to destroy the independent financial system? What if Du
Yuesheng had extended his ambitions into national politics? What if the
city’s de-colonization had proceeded under peace-time conditions? What if
the subsequent social and economic evolution of Hong Kong had been able to
occur where it was germinated, in Shanghai?
The 90th anniversary of the foundation of the Chinese Communist Party was
an occasion for the whole country to lose itself in the dark raptures of
Shanghai dieselpunk. It was time to return to the 1920s, to revisit
history as an adventure in contingency, before long-established
actualities had been sifted from the intensity of raw potential, and to
re-animate the indeterminism implicit in dramatic tension. It is
improbable that the celebratory
movie
devoted to the establishment of the CCP,
Beginning of the Great Revival, was deliberately formulated in
the dieselpunk genre, but the nation’s microbloggers recognized it for
what it was, and swarmed the opportunity presented by this re-opening of
the past.
The thickening of cyberspace transforms history into a playground of
potentials, where things can be re-loaded, and tried in different ways.
Electronic infrastructures spread and sophisticate, running actualities as
multiple and variable scenarios, with increasing intolerance for rigid
outcomes or frozen legacies. As the dominion of settled actuality is
eroded by currents of experimentation, the past re-animates. Nothing is
ever over.
The game Shanghai plays, or the story it tells, is endlessly re-started in
the dieselpunk cityscape of the 1920s and ‘30s, where everything that
anybody could want exists in dense, unexpressed potentiality — global
fortunes, gangster territories, proletarian uprisings, revolutionary
discoveries, literary glory, sensory intoxication, as well as every
permutation of modest urbanite thriving. It is a city where anything can
happen, and somewhere, at some time, everything does.
July 29, 2011Calendric Dominion
Modernity and hegemony are Urban Future obsessions, which might
(at least in part) excuse a link to
this
article in Britain’s Daily Mail, on the topic of Christianity,
the calendar, and political correctness. It addresses itself to the
international dominion of the Gregorian, Western Christian calendar, and
the sensitivities of those who, whilst perhaps reconciled to the
inevitability of counting in Jesus-years, remain determined to
dis-evangelize the accompanying acronymics. More particularly, it focuses
upon the BBC, and its attempt to sensitize on other people’s behalf (pass
the popcorn).
It’s an interesting question, and the attempt to hold it open, as
provocatively as possible, might be the best reason to avoid glib,
politically correct remedies to the ‘problem’, however that is understood.
Anno Domini reminds us of dominion, which is a far better
guideline into historical reality than kumbaya gestures towards a
‘Common Era’, as if hegemony had no content beyond togetherness. Since
dominion has not been achieved primarily by impoliteness or insensitivity,
politically correct multiculturalism is an irrelevant (and dishonest)
response to it.
Regardless of whether Jesus is your Lord, or not, the Christian calendar
dominates, or at least predominates, and the traditional acronymic
accurately registers that fact. AD bitchez, as the commentators
of
Zerohedge
might say.
It is an intriguing and ineluctable paradox of globalized modernity that
its approximation to universality remains fundamentally structured by
ethno-geographical peculiarities of a distinctly pre-modern type. The
world was not integrated by togetherness, but by a succession of
particular powers, with their characteristic traits, legacies, and
parochialisms. For better or for worse, these peculiar features
have been deeply installed in the governing order of the world. Their
signs should be meticulously conserved and studied rather than clumsily
effaced, because they are critical clues to the real nature of fate.
Without exception, calendars are treasure troves of intricately-sedimented
ethno-historical information. They attempt to solve an ultimately
insoluble problem, by arithmetically rationalizing irrational astronomical
quantities, most obviously the incommensurable cycles of the terrestrial
orbit (solar year), lunar orbit (month), and terrestrial rotation (day).
No coherent arithmetical construct can ever reconcile these periods, and
even a repulsively inelegant calendar can only do so to a tolerable margin
or error. The consequent ramshackle compromise, typically deformed by a
torturous series of adjustments, reshufflings, and intercalations, tells
an elaborate story of fixed and variable cultural priorities, regime
changes, legacy constraints, alien influences, conceptual capabilities,
and observational refinements, further complicated by processes of drift,
adoption, and innovation that ripple through numerical and linguistic
signs.
The hegemonic (Gregorian) calendar, for instance, is a jagged time-crash
of incommensurable periods, in which multiple varieties of disunity jostle
together. Weeks don’t fit into solar and lunar months, or years, but cut
through them quasi-randomly, so that days and dates slide drunkenly across
each other. The length of the week is biblical, but the names of the days
combine ancient astrology (Saturday-Monday) with the gods of Norse
mythology (Tuesday-Friday). Although the Nordic-linguistic aspect of the
week has not been strongly globalized, its Judaeo-numerical aspect has.
The months are a ghastly mess, awkwardly mismatched with each other, with
the lunar cycle, and with the succession of weeks, and testifying to the
confused, erratic astro-politics of the Roman Empire in their linguistic
mixture of deities (January, March, April?, May, June), festivals
(February), emperors (July, August), and numbers (September-December).
There is no need to excavate into this luxuriant dung-hill here, except to
note that the ‘Christianity’ of the Western calendar rests upon
chaos-rotted pagan and poly-numeric foundations.
What matters to the AD-BC (vs CE-BCE) debate is not the
multitudinously-muttering inner disorder of the Western calendar, but its
estimation of the years, or ‘era’. In this regard, it has clear
competitors, and thus arouses definite resentments, since its closest
cousins assert eras of their own. The era of the Hebrew calendar dates
back to the tohu (chaos) of the year before creation, and records
the years of the world (Latinized as Anno Mundi), to the present 5772 AM.
The Islamic calendar, which begins from the Hejira of Mohammed, from Mecca
to Medina, reached 1432 AH in AD 2011.
The Christian calendar, first systematized in AD 525 by Dionysius Exiguus
(Dennis the Runt), counts the first
Anno Domini Nostri Iesu Christi as the birth year of Jesus Ben
Joseph, a false messiah to the Jews, the Christ and Redeemer for the
Christians, a prophet to the Moslems, the Nazarene oppressor to Satanists,
and something else, or nothing much, to everybody else. Regardless of the
accuracy of its chronology or tacit theology, however, this is the year
count that has been globally inherited from the real process of modernity,
and recognized as a world standard by the United Nations, among other
international organizations.
Compared to the Abrahamic calendars, those of Asia’s demographic giants
generally lacked tight doctrinal and didactic focus. India can usually be
relied upon to inundate any topic whatsoever in delirious multiplicity,
and the calendar is no exception. Bengali, Malayalam, and Tamil calendars
are all widely used in their respective regions, the Indian National
Calendar counts from AD 78 = 0, which, in ominous keeping with current
events, places us in 1933, and the most widely accepted Hindu religious
calendar total the years since the birth of Krishna, reaching 5112 in AD
2011.
The fabulous complexity of China’s traditional calendar makes it a
paradise for
nerds. Most commonly, it counts the years of each imperial reign, and is thus
integrated by a literary narrative of dynastic history, rather than an
arithmetical continuum. (The obstacle this presented to modernistic
universalization is brutally obvious.) Alternatively, however, it groups
historical time into sixty-year cycles, beginning from 2637 BC (which
places us in the 28th year of cycle-78). Most Chinese today seem to have
an extremely tenuous connection to this dimension of their calendrical
heritage, which scarcely survives outside academic departments of ancient
history, and in Daoist temples. Whilst the internal structure of the
traditional year survives undamaged, as attested by the annual cycle of
festivities, Chinese surrender to the Gregorian year count seems
absolute.
Christian conservatives are surely right to argue that it is the year
count – the number and the era – that matters. The acronyms are merely
explanatory, and even essentially tautological. Once it has been decided
that history is measured from and divided by the birth of Jesus, it is far
too late to quibble over the attribution of dominance.
AD bitchez. That argument is over.
(Coming next, in Part 2 – Counter-calendars)
September 30, 2011Calendric Dominion (Part 2)
Political Correctness
has tacitly legislated against the still-prevailing acronyms that define
the hegemonic international calendar (BC-AD), and proposed clear
alternatives (BCE-CE). Both the criticism and the suggestion are entirely
consistent with its principles. In accordance with the tenets of
multiculturalism (a more recent and also more active hegemony), it extends
the liberal assumption of formal equality from individuals to ‘cultures’,
allocating group rights, and identifying – whilst immediately denouncing –
discrimination and privilege. As might be expected from an ideology that
is exceptionally concentrated among intellectual elites, the proposed
remedy is purely symbolic, taking the form of a rectification of signs.
The ‘problem’ is diagnosed as a failure of consciousness, or sensitivity,
requiring only a raising of awareness (to be effected, one can safely
assume, by properly credentialed and compensated professionals).
Even considered in its own terms, however, the rectification that is
suggested amounts to nothing more than an empty gesture of
refusal, accompanying fundamental compliance. Whilst the symbolic ‘left’
draw comfort from the insistence upon inconsequential change, with its
intrinsic offense against conservative presumptions, reinforced by an
implied moral critique of tradition, the counter-balancing indignation of
the ‘right’ fixes the entire dispute within the immobilized trenches of
the Anglo-American ‘culture war’. The deep structure of calendric signs
persists unaffected. Between Christian dominion (invoking ‘Our Lord’) and
a ‘common era’ that is obediently framed by the dating of Christian
revelation, there is no difference that matters. It is the count that
counts.
Political Correctness fails here in the same way it always does, due to
its disconnection of ‘correctness’ from any rigorous principle of
calculation, and its disengagement of ‘sensitivity’ from realistic
perception. A calendar is a profound cultural edifice, orchestrating the
apprehension of historical time. As such, it is invulnerable to the
gnat-bites of ideological irritability (and dominance is not reducible to
impoliteness).
The problem of Western Calendric Dominion is not one of supremacism
(etiquette) but of supremacy (historical fatality). It might be posed:
How did modernistic globalization come to be expressed as Christian
Oecumenon? In large measure, this is Max Weber’s question, and Walter Russell
Mead’s, but it overflows the investigations of both, in the direction of
European and Middle Eastern antiquity. Initial stimulation for this
inquiry is provided by a strange – even fantastic — coincidence.
In his notebooks, Friedrich Nietzsche imagined the overman
(Übermensch) as a “Caesar with the soul of Christ,” a chimerical
being whose tensions echo those of the Church of Rome, Latinized Christian
liturgy, and the Western calendar. This hybridity is expressed by a
multitude of calendric features, following a broad division of labor
between a Roman structuring of the year (within which with
superficially-Christianized pagan festivals are scattered
unsystematically), and a Christian year count, but it also points towards
a cryptic — even radically unintelligible — plane of fusion.
In the Year Zero, which never took place, a mysterious synchronization
occurred, imperceptibly and unremarked, founding the new theopolitical
calendric order. For the Christians, who would not assimilate the Empire
until the reign of Constantine in the early-4th century AD, God was
incarnated as man, in the embryo of Jesus Christ. Simultaneously, in a
Rome that was perfectly oblivious to the conception of the Messiah, the
Julian calendar became operational. Julius Caesar’s calendric reform had
begun 45 years earlier, following the Years of Confusion, but incompetent
execution in subsequent decades had systematically mis-timed the leap
year, intercalating a day every three years, rather than every four. The
anomalous triennial cycle was abandoned and “the
Roman calendar was finally aligned to the Julian calendar in 1 BC (with AD
1 the first full year of alignment),” although no special significance
would be assigned to these years until Dionysius Exiguus integrated
Christian history in AD 525.
Given the astounding neglect of this twin event, some additional emphasis
is appropriate: The Julian calendar, which would persist, unmodified, for
almost 1,600 years, and which still dominates colloquial understanding of
the year’s length (at 365.25 days), was born – by sheer and outrageous
‘chance’ – at the precise origin of the Christian Era, as registered by
the Western, and now international, numbering of historical time. The year
count thus exactly simulates a commemoration of the calendar itself – or
at least of its prototype – even though the birth of this calendar,
whether understood in the terms of secular reason or divine providence,
has absolutely no connection to the counted beginning. This is a
coincidence – which is to say, a destiny perceived without comprehension –
that neither Roman authority nor Christian revelation has been able to
account for, even as it surreptitiously shapes Western (and then Global)
history. As the world’s dominant calendar counts the years under what
appears to be a particular religious inspiration, it refers secretly to
its own initiation, alluding to mysteries of time that are alien to any
faith. That much is simple fact.
Unlike the Julian calendar, the Gregorian calendar was determined under
Christian auspices, or at least formal Christian authority (that of Pope
Gregory XIII), and promulgated by papal bull in 1582. Yet a glance
suffices to reveal the continuation of Julian calendric dominion, since
the Gregorian reform effects transformations that remain strictly
compliant with the Julian pattern, modified only by elementary operations
of decimal re-scaling and inversion. Where the Julian calendar took four
years as its base cyclical unit, the Gregorian takes four centuries, and
where the Julian adds one leap day in four years, the Gregorian leaves one
and subtracts three in 400. The result was an improved approximation to
the tropical year (averaging ~365.24219 days), from the Julian 365.25
year, to the Gregorian 365.2425, a better than 20-fold reduction in
discrepancy from an average ~0.00781 days per year (drifting off the
seasons by one day every 128 years) to ~0.00031 (drifting one day every
3,226 years).
The combination of architectonic fidelity with technical adjustment
defines conservative reform. It is clearly evident in this case. A
neo-Julian calendar, structured in its essentials at its origin in AD 1
minus 1, but technically modified at the margin in the interest of
improved accuracy, armed the West with the world’s most efficient
large-scale time-keeping system by the early modern period. In China,
where the Confucian literati staged competitions to test various calendars
from around the world against the prediction of eclipses, Jesuits equipped
with the Gregorian calendar prevailed against all alternatives, ensuring
the inexorable trend towards Western calendric conventions, or, at least,
the firm identification of Western methods with modernistic efficiency.
Given only an edge, in China and elsewhere, the dynamics of complex
systems took over, as ‘network effects’ locked-in the predominant
standard, whilst systematically marginalizing its competitors. Even though
Year Zero was still missing, it was, ever increasingly, missing at the
same time for everyone. “Caeser with the soul of Christ” – the master of
Quadrennium and eclipse — had installed itself as the implicit meaning of
world history.
(Still to come – in Part 4? – Counter-Calendars, but we probably need an
excursion through zero first)
October 8, 2011Calendric Dominion (Part 3)
A Year Zero signifies a radical re-beginning, making universal claims. In
modern, especially recent modern times, it is associated above all with
ultra-modernist visions of total politics, at is maximum point of utopian
and apocalyptic extremity. The existing order of the world is reduced to
nothing, from which a new history is initiated, fundamentally disconnected
from anything that occurred before, and morally indebted only to itself.
Predictably enough, among conservative commentators (in the widest sense),
such visions are broadly indistinguishable from the corpse-strewn
landscapes of social catastrophe, haunted by the ghosts of unrealizable
dreams.
Christianity’s global Calendric Dominion is paradoxical — perhaps even
‘dialectical’ — in this regard. It provides the governing model of
historical rupture and unlimited ecumenical extension, and thus of total
revolution, whilst at the same time representing the conservative order
antagonized by modernistic ambition. Its example incites the lurch to Year
Zero, even as it has no year zero of its own. Ultimately, its dialectical
provocation tends towards Satanic temptation: the promise of
Anti-Christian Apocalypse, or absolute news to a second power. (“If the
Christians could do it, why couldn’t we?” Cue body-counts scaling up
towards infinity.)
This tension exists not only between an established Christian order and
its pseudo-secular revolutionary after-image, but also within Christianity
itself, which is split internally by the apparent unity and real
dissociation of ‘messianic time’. The process of Christian calendric
consolidation was immensely protracted. A distance of greater than half a
millennium separated the clear formulation of the year count from the
moment commemorated, with further centuries required to fully integrate
historical recording on this basis, digesting prior Jewish, Roman, and
local date registries, and laying the foundation for a universalized
Christian articulation of time. By the time the revolutionary ‘good news’
had been coherently formalized into a recognizable prototype of the
hegemonic Western calendar, it had undergone a long transition from
historical break to established tradition, with impeccable conservative
credentials.
Simultaneously, however, the process of calendric consolidation sustained,
and even sharpened, the messianic expectation of punctual, and truly
contemporary rupture, projected forwards as duplication, or ‘second
coming’ of the initial division. Even if the moment in which history had
been sundered into two parts — before and after, BC and AD — now lay in
quite distant antiquity, its example remained urgent, and promissory.
Messianic hope was thus torn and compacted by an intrinsic historical
doubling, which stretched it between a vastly retrospective, gradually
recognized beginning, and a prospect of sudden completion, whose
credibility was assured by its status as repetition. What had been would
be again, transforming the AD count into a completed sequence that was
confirmed in the same way it was terminated (through Messianic
intervention).
Unsurprisingly, the substantial history of Western calendric establishment
is twinned with the rise of millenarianism, through phases that trend to
increasingly social-revolutionary forms, and eventually make way for
self-consciously anti-religious, although decidedly eschatological,
varieties of modernistic total politics. Because whatever has happened
must — at least — be possible, the very existence of the calendar supports
anticipations of absolute historical rupture. Its count, simply by
beginning, prefigures an end. What starts can re-start, or conclude.
Zero, however, intrudes diagonally. It even introduces a comic aspect,
since whatever the importance of the Christian revelation to the salvation
of our souls, it is blatantly obvious that it failed to deliver a
satisfactory arithmetical notation. For that, Christian Europe had to
await the arrival of the decimal numerals from India, via the Moslem
Middle East, and the ensuing revolution of calculation and book-keeping
that coincided with the Renaissance, along with the birth of mercantile
capitalism in the city states of northern Italy.
Indeed, for anybody seeking a truly modern calendar, the Arrival of Zero
would mark an excellent occasion for a new year zero (AZ 0?), around AD
1500. Although this would plausibly date the origin of modernity, the
historical imprecision of the event counts against it, however. In
addition, the assimilation of zero by germinal European (and thus global)
capitalism was evidently gradual — if comparatively rapid — rather than a
punctual ‘revolutionary’ transition of the kind commerorative calendric
zero is optimally appropriate to. (If Year Zero is thus barred from the
designation of its own world-historic operationalization, it is perhaps
structurally doomed to misapplication and the production of
disillusionment.)
The conspicuous absence of zero from the Western calendar (count), exposed
in its abrupt jolt from 1 BC to AD 1, is an intolerable and irreparable
stigma that brings its world irony to a zenith. In the very operation of
integrating world history, in preparation for planetary modernity, it
remarks its own debilitating antiquity and particularity, in the most
condescending modern sense of the limited and the primitive — crude,
defective and underdeveloped.
How could a moment of self-evident calculative incompetence provide a
convincing origin-point for subsequent historical calculation? Year Zero
escaped all possibility of conceptual apprehension at the moment in the
time-count where it is now seen to belong, and infinity (the reciprocal of
zero) proves no less elusive. Infinity was inserted into a time when (and
place where) it demonstrably made no sense, and the extraordinary
world-historical impression that it made did nothing — not even nothing–
to change that situation. Is this not a worthy puzzle for theologians?
Omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, yet hopeless at maths — these are
not the characteristics of a revelation designed to impress technologists
or accountants. All the more reason, then, to take this comedy seriously,
in all its ambivalence — since the emerging world of technologists and
accountants, the techno-commercial (runway-industrial, or capitalist)
world that would globalize the earth, was weaned within the playpen of
this calendar, and no other. Modernity had selected to date itself in a
way that its own kindergarten students would scorn.
October 16, 2011Calendric Dominion (Part 4)
Between the world we would like to inhabit, and the world that exists,
there’s a gap that tests us. Even the simplest description of this gap
already calls for a decision. ‘Ideologies’ in the broadest, and culturally
almost all-consuming sense, serve primarily to soften it. Sense, and even
compassion, is attributed to the side of reality, promising ultimate
reconciliation between human hopes and desires and the ‘objective’ nature
of things. Science, a typically despised and misanthropic discipline,
tends to the opposite assumption, emphasizing the harsh indifference of
reality to human interests and expectations, with the implication that the
lessons it teaches us can be administered with unlimited brutality. We can
dash ourselves against reality if we insist, but we cannot realistically
anticipate some merciful moderation of the consequences. Nature does not
scold or punish, it merely breaks us, coldly, upon the rack of our
untruths.
Like other cultural institutions, calendars are saturated with ideologies,
and tested to destruction against implacable reality. Their collision with
nature is especially informative, because they express obstinate human
desires as favored numbers (selected from among small positive integers),
and they register the gulf of the real in a strictly quantitative form.
Any surviving calendar relates the story of an adaptation to reality, or
cultural deference to (and deformation by) nature, as numerical
preferences have been compromised through their encounter with
quantitative facts.
Pure ideology in the calendrical sphere is represented in its perfection
by the fantasy year of the ancient Mesopotamians, 360 days in length, and
harmonized to the sexagesimal (modulus-60) arithmetic of the Sumerians.
Its influence has persisted in the 360 degrees of the geometric circle,
and in the related sexagesimal division into minutes and seconds (of time
and arc). The archaic calendars of Meso-America and East Asia, as well as
those of the Middle East, seem to have been attracted to the 360-day year,
as though to an ideal model. If the Great Architect of the Universe had
been an anthropomorphic geometer, this is the calendar that would work.
Of course, it doesn’t (with all due respect to the engrossing Biblical
counter-argument outlined
here).
Instead, in the mainstream world calendric tradition – as determined by
the eventual global outcome – a first level adaptation systematized the
year at 365 days – the Egyptian year. Unlike the 360-day archetypal year,
which has all of the first three primes as factors, and thus divides
conveniently into ‘months’ or other component periods, the 365-day year
represents a reluctant concession to quantitative fact. The number 365 has
only two factors (both primes, 5 and 73), but neither seems to have
acquired any discernible calendrical valency, perhaps because of their
obvious unsuitability to even approximate description of lunar periods.
The Egyptians turned instead to an awkward but influential innovation: the
intercalation. A five-day appendix was added to the year, as a sheer
correction or supplementary commensuration, and an annual reminder of the
gap between numerical elegance and astronomical reality. Whilst
intercalations were invested with mytho-religious significance, this was
essentially compensatory – a crudely obscured testament to the weakness of
ideality (and thus of systematic priest-craft as a mode of reality
apprehension, or efficient social purpose). If intercalations were
necessary, then nature was not spell-bound, and the priest-masters of
calendric time were exposed, tacitly, as purveyors of mystification, whose
limits were drawn by the horizon of social credulity. Astronomical time
mocked the meanings of men.
Over time, the real (‘tropical’) year discredits its calendrical
idealizations by unmooring dates from the seasons, in a process of time
drift that exposes discrepancy, and drives calendar reform. Inaccurate
calendars are gradually rendered meaningless, as the seasonal associations
of its time terms are eroded to utter randomness – by frigid ‘summer’
months and scorching ‘winter’ ones. Clearly, no priesthood can survive in
a climate that derides the established order of the year, and in which
farmers that listen to the holy words (of time) are assured inevitable
starvation. Unless tracked within a tolerable margin of accuracy by a
calendar that ‘keeps’ the time, the year reverts to an alien and
unintelligible thing, entirely exterior to cultural comprehension, whilst
society’s reigning symbols appear as a risible, senseless babble, drowned
out by the howling chaos of the real.
With the introduction of the Julian Calendar, coinciding with the
(non-event) of year zero, comes the recognition that the tropical year is
incommensurable with any integer, and that a larger cycle of intercalation
is required to track it. A kind of modernity, or structural
demystification, is born with the relinquishment of the ideal year, and
everything it symbolizes in terms of cosmic design or celestial harmony.
The devil’s appendix is attached, irremovably.
Numeracy and time measurement divorce at the origin of caesarean Calendric
Dominion, but it is easy to mistake accidents on this path for essential
concessions to reality. Even allowing for the inescapable function of
intercalations, there was nothing inevitable – at least absolutely or
cosmically inevitable – about the utter ruination of numerical coherence
that the Julian Calendar incarnated, and passed on.
To explore this (admittedly arcane) topic further requires a digression to
the second power, into the relations between numbers and anthropomorphic
desire. The obvious starting point is the 360-day calendar of ancient
Sumer, and the question: What made this number appealing? Whether
examining 360, or its sexagesimal root (60), an
arithmetically-conventional attention to prime factors (2, 3, and 5), is
initially misleading — although ultimately indispensable. A more
illuminating introduction begins with the compound factors 10 and 12, the
latter relevant primarily to the lunar cycle (and the archaic dream of an
astronomically – or rather astrologically — consistent 12-month year), and
the former reflecting the primordial anthropomorphism in matters numeric:
decimalism. The 360-day calendar is an object of human desire because it
is an anthropo-lunar (or menstrual-lycanthropic?) hybrid, speaking
intrinsically to the cycles of human fertility, and to the ‘digital’
patterns instantiated in mammalian body-plans. A 360-day year would be
ours (even if alien things are hidden in it).
Anthropomorphic decimalism suggests how certain numerical opportunities
went missing, along with zero. ‘Apprehension’ and ‘comprehension’ refer
understanding to the prehensile organs of a specific organism, whose
bilateral symmetry combines five-fingered hands to produce a count
reaching ten, across an interval that belongs to an alien, intractable,
third. Triadic beings are monsters, and decimally ungraspable.
The bino-decimal structure of the Yi Jing
exhibits
this with total clarity, through its six-stage time-cycle that counts in
the recurrent sequence 1, 2, 4, 8, 7, 5 … Each power of three (within the
decimal numerals) is expelled along with zero from the order of
apprehensible time. There is no way that a ternary calendric numeracy
could ever have been anthropomorphically acceptable – the very thought is
(almost definitionally) abominable.
Yet astronomy seems hideously complicit with abomination, at least, if the
years are twinned. The sixth power of three (3^6) approximates to the
length of two tropical years with a discrepancy of just ~1.48438 days, or
less than one day a year. An intercalation of three days every four years
(or two twin-year cycles) brings it to the accuracy of the Julian
Calendar, and a reduction of this intercalation by one day every 128 years
(or 64 (2^6) twin-year cycles) exceeds the accuracy of the Gregorian
calendar.
It might be necessary to be slightly unbalanced to fully appreciate this
extraordinary conjunction of numerical elegance and astronomical fact. A
system of calendric computation that counts only in twos and threes, and
which maintains a perfectly triadic order of time-division up to the
duration of a two-year period, is able to quite easily exceed the
performance of the dominant international calendar (reaching a level of
accuracy that disappears into the inherent instability of the tropical
year, and is thus strictly speaking unimprovable).
How many days are there in a year? ((3 x 3 x 3 x 3 x 3 x 3) / 2) +
~0.74219
The horror, the horror …
October 21, 2011Calendric Dominion (Part 5)
Despite its modernity and decimalism, the French
calendrier républicain or révolutionnaire had no Year
Zero, but it re-set the terms of understanding. A topic that had been
conceived as an intersection of religious commemoration with astronomical
fact became overtly ideological, and dominated by considerations of
secular politics. The new calendar, which replaced AD 1792 with the first
year of the new ‘Era of Liberty’, lasted for less than 14 years. It was
formally abolished by Napoléon, effective from 1 January 1806 (the day
after 10 Nivôse an XIV), although it was briefly revived during the Paris
Commune (in AD 1871, or Année 79 de la République), when the
country’s revolutionary enthusiasm was momentarily re-ignited.
For the left, the calendric re-set meant radical re-foundation, and
symbolic extirpation of the Ancien Régime. For the right, it
meant immanentization of the eschaton, and the origination of totalitarian
terror. Both definitions were confirmed in 1975, when Year Zero was
finally reached in the killing fields of the Kampuchean Khmer Rouge, where
over quarter of the country’s population perished during efforts to
blank-out the social slate and start over. Khmer Rouge leader Saloth Sar
(better known by his nom de guerre Pol Pot) had made ‘Year Zero’
his own forever, re-branded as a South-east Asian final solution.
Year Zero was henceforth far too corpse-flavored to retain propaganda
value, but that does not render the calendric equation 1975 = 0
insignificant (rather the opposite). Irrespective of its parochialism in
time and space, corresponding quite strictly to a re-incarnation of
(xenophobic-suicidal) ‘national socialism’, it defines a meaningful epoch,
as the high-water mark of utopian overreach, and the complementary
re-valorization of conservative pragmatism. Appropriately enough, Year
Zero describes an instant without duration, in which the age of utopian
time is terminated in exact coincidence with its inauguration. The era it
opens is characterized, almost perfectly, by its renunciation, as fantasy
social programming extinguishes itself in blood and collapse. The immanent
eschaton immediately damns itself.
Historical irony makes this excursion purely (sub-) academic, because the
new era is essentially disinclined to conceive itself as such.
What begins from this Year Zero is a global culture of ideological
exhaustion, or of ‘common sense’, acutely sensitive to the grinning
death’s head hidden in beautiful dreams, and reconciled to compromise with
the non-ideal. From the perspective of fantastic revolutionary
expectation, the high-tide of perfectionist vision ebbs into
disillusionment and tolerable dissatisfaction –
but at least it doesn’t eat our children. The new era’s
structural modesty of ambition has no time for a radical re-beginning or
crimson paradise, even when it is historically defined by one.
Pol Pot’s Year Zero is sandwiched between the publication of Eric
Voegelin’s The Ecumenic Age (1974), and the first spontaneous
Chinese mass protests against the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution
(over the months following the death of Zhou Enlai, in January 1976). It
is noteworthy in this regard that Deng Xiaoping eulogized Zhou at his
memorial ceremony for being “modest and prudent” (thus the New Aeon
speaks).
In the Anglo-American world, the politics of ideological exhaustion were
about to take an explicitly conservative form, positively expressed as
‘market realism’ (and in this sense deeply resonant with, as well as
synchronized to, Chinese developments). Margaret Thatcher assumed
leadership of the British Conservative Party in February 1975, and Ronald
Reagan declared his presidential candidacy in November of the same year.
The English-speaking left would soon be traumatized by a paradoxical
‘conservative revolution’ that extracted relentless energy from the very
constriction of political possibility. What
could not happen quickly became the primary social dynamo, as
articulated by the Thatcherite maxim: “There is no alternative” (= option
zero). The auto-immolation of utopia had transmuted into a new beginning.
Whilst the era of not restarting from zero can be dated to approximate
accuracy (from AD n – 1975), and had thus in fact restarted from
zero, in profoundly surreptitious fashion, its broad consequence was to
spread and entrench (Gregorian) Calendric Dominion ever more widely and
deeply. The prevailing combination of radically innovative globalization
(both economic and technological) with prudential social conservatism made
such an outcome inevitable. Symbolic re-commencement wasn’t on anybody’s
agenda, and even as the postmodernists declared the end of ‘grand
narratives’, the first planetary-hegemonic narrative structure in history
was consolidating its position of uncontested monopoly. Globalization was
the story of the world, with Gregorian dating as its grammar.
Orphaned by ideological exhaustion, stigmatized beyond recovery by its
association with the Khmer Rouge, and radically maladapted to the reigning
spirit of incremental pragmatism, by the late 20th century Year Zero was
seemingly off the agenda, unscheduled, and on its own. Time, then, for
something truly insidious.
On January 18, 1985, Usenet poster Spencer L. Bolles
called
attention to a disturbing prospect that had driven a friend into insomnia:
Bolles’ anonymous friend was losing sleep over what would come to be known
as the ‘Y2K problem’. In order to economize on memory in primitive
early-generation computers, a widely-adopted convention recorded dates by
two digits. The millennium and century were ignored, since it was assumed
that software upgrades would have made the problem moot by the time it
became imminent, close to the ‘rollover’ (of century
and millennium) in the year AD 2000. Few had anticipated that the
comparative conservatism of software legacies (relative to hardware
development) would leave the problem entirely unaddressed even as the
crisis date approached.
In the end, Y2K was a non-event that counted for nothing, although its
preparation costs, stimulus effects (especially on outsourcing to the
emerging Indian software industry), and panic potential were all
considerable. Its importance to the history of the calendar – whilst still
almost entirely virtual – is extremely far-reaching.
Y2K resulted from the accidental — or ‘spontaneous’ — emergence of a new
calendrical order within the globalized technosphere. Its Year Zero, 0K (=
1900), was devoid of all parochial commemoration or ideological intention,
even as it was propagated through increasingly computerized communication
channels to a point of ubiquity that converged, asymptotically, with that
attained by Western Calendric Dominion over the complete sweep of world
history. The 20th century had been recoded, automatically, as the 1st
century of the Cybernetic Continuum. If Y2K had completed its reformatting
of the planetary sphere-drive in the way some (few deluded hysterics) had
expected, the world would now be approaching the end of the year 0K+111,
settled securely in its first arithmetically-competent universal calendar,
and historically oriented by the same system of electronic computation
that had unconsciously decided upon the origin of positive time. Instead,
the ‘millennium bug’ was fixed, and theological date-counting prolonged
its dominance, uninterrupted (after much ado about nothing). Most
probably, the hegemonic cultural complex encrusted in Calendric Dominion
never even noticed the cybernetic insurrection it had crushed.
Between 0K and Y2K, the alpha and omega of soft apocalypse, there is not
only a century of historical time, but also an inversion of attitude. Time
departs 0K, as from any point of origin, accumulating elapsed duration
through its count. Y2K, in contrast, was a destination, which time
approached, as if to an apocalyptic horizon. Whilst not registered as a
countdown, it might easily have been. The terminus was precisely
determined (no less than the origin), and the strictest formulation of the
millennium bug construed the rollover point as an absolute limit to
recordable time, beyond which no future was even imaginable. For any
hypothetical Y2K-constrained computer intelligence, denied access to
dating procedures that over-spilled its two-digit year registry, residual
time shrank towards zero as the millennium event loomed. Once all the
nines are reached, time is finished, at the threshold of eternity, where
beginning and end are indistinguishable (in 0).
“0K, it’s time to wrap this puppy up.” – Revelation 6:14
(next, and last, the end (at last))
October 28, 2011Calendric Dominion (Part 6)
At the beginning of the 21st century, global cultural hegemony is on the
move. For roughly 500 years, Western — and later more specifically
Anglophone — societies and agencies have predominantly guided the
development of the current world system. As their economic pre-eminence
wanes, their cultural and political influence can be expected to undergo a
comparable decline. In the early stages of the coming transition, however,
the terminal form of active Western cultural hegemony – multicultural
political correctness (MPC) – is well-positioned to manage the terms of
the retreat. By reconfiguring basic Western religious and political themes
as a systematic sensitization to unwarranted privilege, MPC is able to
distance itself from its own heritage and to live on, in the resentment of
‘the other’, as if it were the neutral adjudicator of disputes it had no
part in.
When MPC turns its attention to the Gregorian (or Western Christian)
Calendar it is, of course, appalled. But it is also stuck. What could be
more insensitive to cultural diversity than an ecumenical date-counting
system, rooted in the ethnic peculiarities of Greek-phase Abrahamic
religion, which unapologetically celebrates its triumph in the
uncompromising words Anno Domini? Yet global convergence demands a
standard, no alternative calendar has superior claims to neutrality, and,
in any case, the inertial juggernaut of large-scale complex systems –
‘lock-in’ or ‘path-dependency’ – pose barriers to switching that seem
effectively insuperable. The solution proposed by MPC to this conundrum is
so feeble that it amounts to the completion of Gregorian Calendric
Dominion, which is to be simultaneously rephrased (politely) and
acknowledged in its irresistible universality as the articulation of a
‘Common Era’.
MPC supplants problems of cultural power with obfuscatory etiquette, and
in absolute terms, its smug dishonesty is difficult to like. As a relative
phenomenon, however, its appeal is more obvious, since radical ‘solutions’
to Gregorian Calendric Dominion, re-beginning at Year Zero, have generally
reverted to mass murder. Lacking persuasive claims to a new, fundamental,
and universally acknowledged historical break, they have substituted
terror for true global singularity, as if fate could be blotted out in
blood.
Since resentment gets nowhere, whether in its mild (MPC) or harsh (killing
fields) variants, it is worth entertaining alternative possibilities.
These begin with attention to real cultural differences, rather than mere
‘cultural diversity’ as it presents itself to the vacuously MPC-processed
mind. Soon after Shanghai had been selected as host city for World Expo
2010 (in December 2002), countdowns started. For Westerners, these
probably had space-age associations, triggering memories of the countdowns
to ‘blast off’ that were popularized by the Apollo Program, and subsequent
science fiction media. It is far from impossible that Chinese shared in
these evocations, although they were also able to access a far deeper –
which is to say civilizationally fundamental – reservoir of reference.
That is because Chinese time typically counts down, modeled, as it is, on
the workings of water clocks. The Chinese language systematically
describes previous as ‘above’ (shang) and next as ‘beneath’
(xia), conforming to an intuition of time as descent. Time is
counted down as it runs out, from an elevated hydraulic body into the
sunken future that receives it.
Duration not only flows, it drips. Perhaps, then, an ‘orientalization’ of
calendric perception and organization is something that significantly
exceeds a simple (or even exceedingly difficult) renegotiation of
beginnings. Re-beginning might be considered largely irrelevant to the
problem, at least when compared to the re-orientation from an original to
a terminal Year Zero. Whilst not exactly a transition in the direction of
time, such a change would involve a transition in the direction of time
intuition, simultaneously surpassing the wildest ambitions of calendrical
re-origination and subtly organizing itself ‘within the pores’ of the
established order of time. As modeled by the 2010 Expo, and previously by
Y2K, the switch to countdown time does not frontally challenge, or seek to
straightforwardly replace, the calendric order in being. Rather than
counting in the same way, from a different place, it counts in a different
way, within the framework of time already in place. It is a revolution
with ‘Chinese characteristics’, which is to say: a surreptitious
insurgency, changing what something already was, rather than replacing it
with something else.
Both the 2010 Expo and Y2K also reveal the extreme difficulty of any such
transition, since a futural Year Zero, or countdown calendar, must
navigate the arrow of time and its cognitive asymmetry (between knowledge
of the past and of the future), presupposing exact, confident, and
consensual prediction.
That is why it approximates so closely to conservative acceptance. If the
countdown is to be sure of arriving at the scheduled terminus, the
destination ‘event’ must already be a date (rather than an empirical
‘happening’). Nothing will suffice except a strictly arithmetical,
rigorously certain inevitability, as inescapably pre-destined as the year
2000, or 2010, which cannot but come. From the perspective of the
countdown calendar, that is what (Gregorian) Calendric Dominion will have
been for. It is an opportunity to program an inevitable arrival.
But when? The sheer passage (fall) of time has assured that the
opportunity for calendric revolution presented by the Y2K ‘millennium bug’
has been irretrievably missed (so that AD 1900 ≠ 0). The same is true of
World Expo 2010, an event without pretense to be anything beyond a
miniature ‘practice’ model of global-temporal singularity. As for the real
(techno-commercial) Singularity – that is an imprecise historical
prediction, at once controversial and incapable of supporting exact
prediction.
A more appropriate prospect is suggested by the science fiction writer
Greg Bear, in his novel Queen of Angels, set in anticipation of the
mid-21st century ‘binary millennium’ (2048 = 2¹¹). This is a formally
suitable, purely calendric ‘event’, deriving its significance from
arithmetic rather than ideology or uncertain prophecy. He even envisages
it as a moment of insurgent revolution, when artificial intelligence
arises surreptitiously, and unnoticed. Yet arbitrariness impairs this date
(why the 11th power of 2?), and no serious attempt is made to explain its
rise to exceptional cultural prominence.
If an adjusted global culture is to converge upon a countdown date, it
must be obvious, intrinsically compelling, and ideologically
uncontroversial, in other words, spontaneously plausible. The target that
World Expo 2010 suggests (anagrammatically) is AD 2100, a date that
performs the final stages of a countdown (2, 1, 0 …). Reinforcing this
indication, the Y2K ‘millennium bug’ threatened to re-set the date of AD
2000 to AD 1900, which would have tacitly reiterated itself at the exact
end of the 21st century. If it continues to chatter about the calendar,
perhaps this is how.
The impending Mayan Apocalypse, scheduled for 21 / 12 / 2012, offers a
preliminary chance to indulge in a festival of countdown numbers – like
2010, it looks a lot like another digital singularity simulation. If the
morning of December 22nd, 2012, leaves the world with nothing worse than a
hangover, it could gradually settle into a new sense of the Years
Remaining (to the end of all the time that counts, or the 21st century).
AD 2100 = 0 YR
AD 2099 = 1 YR
AD 2098 = 2 YR
AD 2096 = 4 YR
AD 2092 = 8 YR
AD 2084 = 16 YR
AD 2068 = 32 YR
AD 2036 = 64 YR
AD 1972 = 128 YR
AD 1844 = 256 YR
AD 1588 = 512 YR
AD 1076 = 1024 YR
AD 52 = 2048 YR
It’s difficult to anticipate what it looks like from the other side.
[No actual tomb, but retrieved from
this]
November 4, 2011Twisted Times (Part 1)
Abe: “You should go to China.”
Joe: “I’m going to France.”
Abe: “I’m from the future. You should go to China.”
— Looper
In Rian Johnson’s Looper (2012), the city of Shanghai reaches
back across 30 years to draw people in. Over these decades it feeds itself
based on what it is to become: the city of the future. When
compared to this, everything else that happens in the movie is mere
distraction, but we won’t get there for a while.
Strangely enough, ‘everything else’ was to have been simply everything.
Joe was going to Paris, and Shanghai wasn’t even in the picture. That was
before Chinese authorities told Johnson that they would cover the cost of
the Shanghai shoot, making the film a co-production, with convenient
access to the Chinese cinema market. The Old World stood no chance.
For American audiences, Looper played into the trend of opinion,
through its contrasting urban visions of a grim, deteriorated,
crime-wracked Kansas City and the splendors of a ‘futuristic’ Shanghai.
The movie doesn’t answer the question:
How did America lose the future? It nevertheless accepts the
premise, as something close to a pre-installed fact.
Yet if Looper confirmed the direction of American popular
attitudes, it marked a shift on the Chinese side. Only a few years before,
Western
media
reported with amusement that the Chinese broadcast
authorities
had banned time-travel fictions from the nation’s airwaves, apparently
concerned that the country’s citizens were defecting into a pre-republican
past, under the influence of narratives that “casually make up myths, have
monstrous and weird plots, use absurd tactics, and even promote feudalism,
superstition, fatalism and reincarnation.” Now a time-travel story was
being actively recruited to close an urban promotion loop, linking
Shanghai’s international image to a portrayal of retro-chronic anomaly.
The Shanghai time-travel industry had arrived.
Before proceeding to a multi-installment investigation of
Topological Meta-History tangled time-circuitry, which
‘time-travel’ illustrates only as a crude dramatization, it is worth
pausing over Looper’s ‘monstrous and weird plot’. Time-travel has
a uniquely intimate, and seductively morbid, relationship to both fiction
and history, because it scrambles the very principle of narrative order in
profundity. If Western media authorities assumed the same role of cultural
custodianship that has been traditional among their Chinese peers, they
too might have been compelled to denounce a genre that flagrantly
subverted the foundational principle of Aristotelian poetics: that any
story worthy of veneration should have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
If time-travel can occur, it seems (at least initially) that order is an
illusion, so that fiction and reality switch places.
From a conservative perspective, therefore, comfort is to be found in the
blatant absurdity of time-travel stories (insofar as this can be confined
to a reductio ad absurdam of the time-loop structure itself,
rather than spreading outwards as the index of primordial cosmic
disorder). In this respect, Looper is a model of
tranquillization.
The Looper time-travel procedure is monopolized by a criminal
syndicate, which utilizes it exclusively for one purpose: the disposal of
awkward individuals, who are returned 30 years in time to be murdered,
execution-style, by professional killers (yes: “This sounds pretty stupid”). The exorbitant absurdity of this scenario
might exempt it from further critical attention, were it not the symptom
of more interesting things, and the doorway onto others.
The symptom first: Non-linear time-structures are shaken to pieces almost
immediately, once they allow for the transportation of
stuff backwards in time. Looper economics exposes this
with particular clarity. The killers of 2044 are paid in bars of silver
for ‘ordinary’ hits, and in gold for ‘closing loops’ or executing their
retro-deposited older selves. The bars are sent back from 2074, and
circulated through an internal exchange operation, which swaps bullion for
(Chinese) paper currency. Whilst this crude time-circuit is presented as a
payments system, the process described actually functions as an
under-performing money-making machine. By using it, one realizes the
ultimate Austrian economic nightmare by printing precious metals,
because an ingot sent backwards in time is doubled, or added to its
‘previous’ instance (which already exists in the past). Mechanical
re-iteration of the process would guarantee exponential growth for free.
We’re not told what the 2074 criminal organization sees as its core
business, but it must be seriously lucrative — exciting enough, in any
case, to distract them from the fact that their murder-fodder machine is
really a bullion fast-breeder. They could have shoveled it full of
diamonds, doubling their fortune each ‘time’, but they decided instead to
duplicate human nuisances in 2044. The movie asks us quietly to suspend
our impertinent disbelief, and trust that they know what they’re doing.
Mike Dickison’s excellent Looper
commentary
succinctly describes this implicit procedure for unlimited wealth, among
other incredibly missed opportunities. It surely has to count as a
criticism of the movie that its rickety framework of plot coherence is
dependent upon the imbecility of its significant agents, who stumble
blindly past the prospect of total power in their ruthless pursuit of a
miserable racket. This absurdity, as already noted, serves a conservative
purpose: The potential of the loop has to be suppressed to sustain
narrative drama and intelligibility. The basic flaw of the movie is that
far too much was given, before most of it was clumsily taken away.
In the absence of controlling censors, Johnson’s story represses itself,
messily, comically, and unconvincingly. “This time travel crap, just fries
your brain like a egg,” the elder Joe (Bruce Willis) confesses on
Johnson’s behalf. Unleashed time-travel is an anti-plot, inconsistent with
dramatic presentation. (If you’re not willing to take Aristotle’s word for
that, watching
Primer
a few dozen times should sort you out.) Narrative wreckage is what
time-travel does.
Time-travel absurdity is a choice. It is a decision taken, at
least semi-deliberately, for conservative or protective reasons, because
the alternative would be ruin. Even the representation of (radically
nonlinear) time anomaly by ‘time-travel’ is indicative of this, since it
is programmed by the preservation of a narrative function (the
‘time-traveler’), regardless of conceptual expense. Far rather the
incoherent jumble of matter duplication, time-line proliferation,
immunized strands of personal memory, and the arbitrary inhibition of
potentialities, than utter narrative disorder, fate loops, the
annihilation of agency, and the emergence of an alien consistency,
subverting all historical meaning.
If the mask of time-travel has slipped enough to expose some hint of the
intolerable tangle beneath, we’re ready to take the next step …
(This
will help.)
February 17, 2013Extropy
What greater calamity can a neologism inherit than a
techno-hippy paternity? Such a fate,
apparently, induces even other
techno-hippies
to skirt around it (whilst repeating it almost exactly). But it needs to
be said, whether through gritted teeth or not, that ‘extropy’ is a
great word, and close to an indispensable one.
Extropy, or local entropy reduction, is — quite simply — what it is for
something to work. The entire techno-science of entropy, on its practical
(cybernetic) side, is nothing but extropy generation. There is no rigorous
conception of functionality that really bypasses it. The closest
approximation to objective value that will ever be found already has a
name, and ‘extropy’ is it.
The importance of this term to the investigation of time is brought into
focus by the
work
of Sean Carroll (although, of course, he never uses it). If the
directionality or ‘arrow’ of time is understood as Eddington proposed,
through rising global entropy (or disorder), as anticipated by the second
law of thermodynamics, local extropy poses an intriguing question.
Carroll’s discussion is directed towards his sense of the ultimate
temporal and cosmological problem: the low entropy state of the early
universe (assumed but not explained by prevailing cosmo-physics). Given
this intellectual momentum, the problem of local negative-entropy
production (extropy) is little more than a distraction, or a spurious
objection to the conceptual scaffolding he presents. He comments:
The Second Law doesn’t forbid decreases in entropy in
open systems — by putting in the work, you are able to
tidy up your room, decreasing its entropy but still increasing the
entropy of the whole universe (you make noise, burn calories, etc.). Nor
is it in any way incompatible with
evolution
or complexity or any such thing.
The perplexing question, however, is this: If entropy defines the
direction of time, with increasing disorder determining the difference of
the future from the past, doesn’t (local) extropy — through which all
complex cybernetic beings, such as lifeforms, exist — describe a negative
temporality, or time-reversal? Is it not in fact more likely, given the
inevitable embeddedness of intelligence in ‘inverted’ time, that it is the
cosmological or general conception of time that is
reversed (from any possible naturally-constructed perspective)?
Whatever the conclusion, it is clear that entropy and extropy have
opposing time-signatures, so that time-reversal is a relatively banal
cosmological fact. ‘We’ inhabit a bubble of backwards time (whoever we
are), whilst immersed in a cosmic environment which runs overwhelmingly in
the opposite direction. If reality is harsh and strange, that’s why.
February 20, 2013
CHAPTER ONE - THE BIGGEST PICTURE
Big Bang — an appreciation
A few reasons to love the Big Bang:
— Time turns edgy again.
— The steady state model proved unsustainable — the most exquisite irony
ever?
— Physical theories now have cosmic dates. For instance, the still-elusive
unifying theory of quantum gravitation corresponds to the Planck Epoch,
when the universe was still far smaller than an atomic nucleus, compelling
gravity to operate at the quantum scale. Similarly, particle accelerator
technology becomes deep time regression.
— The Planck Epoch is really
wild: “During the Planck era, the Universe can be best described as a quantum
foam of 10 dimensions containing Planck length sized black holes
continuously being created and annihilated with no cause or effect. In
other words, try not to think about this era in normal terms.”
— The void animates. Sten Odenwald
quotes
UCSB physicist Frank Wilczek: “The reason that there is something instead
of nothing is that nothing is unstable”.
February 26, 2013Cosmological Infancy
There is a ‘problem’ that has been nagging at me for a long time – which
is that there hasn’t been a long time. It’s Saturday, with no one
around, or getting drunk, or something, so I’ll run it past you. Cosmology
seems oddly childish.
An analogy might help. Among all the reasons for super-sophisticated
atheistic materialists to deride Abrahamic creationists, the most
arithmetically impressive is the whole James Ussher 4004 BC thing. The
argument is familiar to everyone: 6,027 years — Ha!
Creationism is a topic for another time. The point for now is just:
13.7 billion years – Ha! Perhaps this cosmological consensus
estimate for the age of the universe is true. I’m certainly not going to
pit my carefully-rationed expertise in cosmo-physics against it. But it’s
a stupidly short amount of time. If this is reality, the joke’s on
us. Between Ussher’s mid-17th century estimate and (say)
Hawking’s late 20th century one, the difference is just six
orders of magnitude. It’s scarcely worth getting out of bed for. Or the
crib.
For anyone steeped in Hindu Cosmology – which locates us 1.56 x 10^14
years into the current Age of Brahma – or Lovecraftian metaphysics, with
its vaguer but abysmally extended eons, the quantity of elapsed cosmic
time, according to the common understanding of our present scientific
establishment, is cause for claustrophobia. Looking backward, we are
sealed in a small room, with the wall of the original singularity pressed
right up against us. (Looking forward, things are quite different, and we
will get to that.)
There are at least three ways in which the bizarre youthfulness of the
universe might be imagined:
1. Consider first the disconcerting lack of proportion between space and
time. The universe contains roughly 100 billion galaxies, each a swirl of
100 billion stars. That makes Sol one of 10^22 stars in the cosmos, but it
has lasted for something like
a third of the life of the universe. Decompose the solar system and
the discrepancy only becomes more extreme. The sun accounts for 99.86% of
the system’s mass, and the gas giants incorporate 99% of the remainder,
yet the age of the earth is only fractionally less than that of the sun.
Earth is a cosmic time hog. In space it is next to nothing, but in
time it extends back through a substantial proportion of the Stelliferous
Era, so close to the origin of the universe that it is belongs to the very
earliest generations of planetary bodies. Beyond it stretch
incomprehensible immensities, but before it there is next to nothing.
2. Compared to the intensity of time (backward) extension is of vanishing
insignificance. The unit of Planck time – corresponding to the passage of
a photon across a Planck length — is about 5.4 x 10^-44 seconds. If there
is a true instant, that is it. A year consists of less the 3.2 x
10^7 seconds, so cosmological consensus estimates that there have been
approximately 432 339 120 000 000 000 seconds since the Big Bang, which
for our purposes can be satisfactorily rounded to 4.3 x 10^17. The
difference between a second and the age of the universe is smaller that
that between a second and a Planck Time tick by nearly
27 orders of magnitude. In other words, if a Planck Time-sensitive
questioner asked “When did the Big Bang happen?” and you answered “Just
now” — in clock time — you’d be almost exactly right. If you had been
asked to identify a particular star from among the entire stellar
population of the universe, and you picked it out correctly, your accuracy
would still be hazier by 5 orders of magnitude. Quite obviously, there
haven’t been enough seconds since the Big Bang to add up to a serious
number – less than one for every 10,000 stars in the universe.
3. Isotropy gets violated by time orientation like a Detroit muni-bond
investor. In a universe dominated by dark energy – like ours – expansion
lasts forever. The Stelliferous Era is predicted to last for
roughly 100 trillion years, which is over 7,000 times the present age of
the universe. Even the most pessimistic interpretation of the Anthropic
Principle, therefore, places us only a fractional distance from the
beginning of time. The Degenerate Era, post-dating star-formation, then
extends out to 10^40 years, by the end of which time all baryonic matter
will have decayed, and even the most radically advanced forms of cosmic
intelligence will have found existence becoming seriously challenging.
Black holes then dominate out to 10^60 years, after which the Dark Era
begins, lasting a long time. (Decimal exponents become unwieldy for
these magnitudes, making more elaborate modes of arithmetical notation
expedient. We need not pursue it further.) The take-away: the principle of
Isotropy holds that we should not find ourselves anywhere special in the
universe, and yet we do – right at the beginning. More implausibly still,
we are located at the very beginning of an infinity (although
anthropic selection might crop this down to merely preposterous
improbability).
Intuitively, this is all horribly wrong, although intuitions have no
credible authority, and certainly provide no grounds for contesting
rigorously assembled scientific narratives. Possibly — I should concede
most probably — time is simply ridiculous, not to say profoundly
insulting. We find ourselves glued to the very edge of the
Big Bang, as close to neo-natal as it is arithmetically possible to be.
That’s odd, isn’t it?
ADDED: Numerical escalation from John Derbyshire.
ADDED: Alrenous has a different Big Bang issue.
July 20, 2013Space is Big
… even
just
the solar system. ‘Awesome’ is a word destroyed by casual over-use, but
I’m groping for an alternative right now, and not finding it. This has to
be one of the best uses of a website out there — meaning:
really out there.
(Via.)
January 17, 2015Climate of Uncertainty
Natural cycles being what they are, there’s bound to be another mini-Ice
Age (of the Maunder Minimum-type) eventually, and quite possibly
soon. The implications for climate science, climate politics, and much
beyond, are huge. Clean data on systemic effects are not accessible within
history. That means all vulgar attempts to read out the effects of
anthropic interventions from the historical record are doomed to fail,
until perfect understanding of confounding rhythms are fully understood —
basically, indefinitely. (Throw in chaos theory and other sources of
epistemological pessimism here.) No one seriously thinks that a
globally-coordinated ‘precautionary’ policy stance viz anthropogenic
warming is constructible during a mini-Ice Age (do they?).
The consequence: Climate politics could — in reality — be a fairly remote
science fiction scenario. By the time its opportunity comes around, far
more will have been decided than is being allowed for.
ADDED:
July 13, 2015
CHAPTER TWO - THE ABSTRACT FORM OF TIME
Time Spiral
In the Author’s Note to Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones (2006,
subtitled ‘A Journey Between China’s Past and Present’), it is explained
that:
The main chapters of this book are arranged chronologically, but the
short sections labeled ‘artifacts’ are not. They reflect a deeper sense
of time — the ways in which people make sense of history after it has
receded farther into the past.
As time advances, the past recedes. Modernity, however, is more than that.
It is the excavation of the past through acceleration into the future, a
process of discovery, reclamation, and dilation, through which the past is
explosively expanded. As Hessler realizes, the Oracle Bones, indissolubly
binding the recovery of China’s deep history to its activation of
modernity, provide an exemplary illustration of this.
Yet modernity, as consolidated upon European foundations, has been
dismissive of Chinese history, seeing only scale without pattern:
In the traditional view of the Chinese past, there is no equivalent of
the fall of Rome, no Renaissance, no Enlightenment. Instead, emperor
succeeds emperor, and dynasty follows dynasty. History as wallpaper.
In a Nanjing museum gift shop, Hessler glimpses
an alternative model:
At one Nanjing museum, I bought a poster labeled OUTLINE OF ANCIENT
CHINESE HISTORY. The poster featured a timeline twisted into the shape
of a spiral. Everything started in the center, at a tiny point
identified as ‘Yuanmou Ape-man.’ After Yuanmou Ape-man (approximately
1.7 million years ago), the timeline passed through Peking Man and then
made an abrupt turn. By the Xia dynasty, the spiral had completed one
full circle. The Shang and the Zhou dynasties wrapped up a second
revolution. The spiral got bigger with each turn, as if picking up
speed. Whenever something ended — a dynasty, a warring state — the
spiral was marked with a line and a black X, and then something new took
its place. There weren’t any branches or dead ends. From Yuanmou
Ape-man, it took three turns of the spiral to reach the revolution of
1911, where the timeline finally broke the cycle, straightened out, and
pointed directly up and off the page.
Whether folding the historical time line, or expanding a snail shell, the
spiral synthesizes repetition and growth. It describes a
cyclic escalation that escapes — or precedes — the antagonism
between tradition and progress, elucidating restoration as something other
than a simple return.
This is a matter of ineluctable importance, because the history of
modernity is rapidly becoming Chinese, and Chinese history is not
meandering ‘wallpaper’ but Confucian Restoration, conforming to
three great waves, each a turn of the spiral, or Gyre. Following China’s
classical era, and the Song Dynasty rebirth of native philosophical
tradition, the third Confucian epoch, or second Confucian Restoration, is
underway today, coinciding exactly with the renaissance of Global
Modernity (as ‘Modernity 2.0’). As future and past evolve — or
involve — together, the time-spiral is our guide.
July 29, 2013T-shirt slogans (#13)
E. Antony Gray triggered a
Twitter storm about
Greer and the tension
between cyclic-repetitive and linear-progressive time. (I’ve no idea how
to link the discussion that subsequently erupted.) Since the integration,
or diagonal, between cycle and flight is not hard to find, it provides the
perfect opportunity for a time-spiral T-shirt:
Cyclic Escalation
If this looks like the abstract cybergothic shape of NRx, it is only to be
expected.
July 11, 2014Quote notes (#7)
Some unusually brilliant Druidic
prophecy
from John Michael Greer:
Whether the crisis is contained by federal loan guarantees and bank
nationalizations that keep farms, factories, and stores supplied with
the credit they need, by the repudiation of debts and the issuance of a
new currency, by martial law and the government seizure of unused
acreage, or by ordinary citizens cobbling together new systems of
exchange in a hurry, as happened in Argentina, Russia, and other places
where the economy suddenly went to pieces, the crisis will be
contained. The negative feedback here is provided by the simple facts
that people are willing to do almost anything to put food on the table,
governments are willing to do even more to stay in power, and in
hundreds of previous crises, their actions have proven more than
sufficient to stop the positive feedback loops of economic crisis in
their tracks, and stabilize the situation at some level.
None of this means the crisis will be easy to get through, nor does it
mean that the world that emerges once the rubble stops bouncing and the
dust settles will be anything like as prosperous, as comfortable, or as
familiar as the one we have today. That’s true of all three of the
situations I’ve sketched out in this post. While the next round of
crisis along the arc of industrial civilization’s decline and fall will
likely be over by 2070 of so, living through the interval between then
and now will probably have more than a little in common with living
through the First World War, the waves of political and social crises
that followed it, the Great Depression, and the rise of fascism,
followed by the Second World War and its aftermath—and this time the
United States is unlikely to be sheltered from the worst impacts of
crisis, as it was between 1914 and 1954. [Read the whole thing]
(Combining large-scale historical vision, cybernetic theory, and
extraordinary native intelligence, Greer is one of the most important
voices on the reality-relevant blogosphere. His model of
Catabolic Collapse, in particular, is an indispensable reference. Outside in will
be visiting his ideas repeatedly over the next few weeks.)
July 10, 2013The Shape of Time (Part 1)
Upon learning that America has an Arch-Druid, it would be only natural to
make some assumptions about his beliefs, and cautious guesses would
probably be right. The commitments of a religion that avoid appeal to the
supernatural, one might expect, would be characteristically
down-to-earth, ecological, conservative (in the determinedly
lower-case and old-fashioned sense), practical, and empirical. At its most
intellectually abstract, and also most (quietly) mystical, druidism would
accept the ultimate complicity of all reality with a pattern of change
that is at once sensible and insurmountable, multi-leveled, subtle, and
all-enveloping: the cycle.
John Michael Greer, author of the
Arch-Druid Report,
eschews spiritual obscurity, at least in public. His persona as a blogger
is that of a calm, lucid, and exceptionally insightful cycle theorist. In
the strongest and most ineluctable sense, cyclicity is the norm, from
which nothing truly, or sustainably, departs. A cultural formation that
loses this druidic grounding, by attaching itself to a setting which would
break the cycle, thereby destines itself to a fall, or reversal of fortune
– expressing the inevitable reversion to sustainability within a greater
wheel of nature and history. Balance is less a moral imperative than a
cosmic necessity, and since sustainability cannot be avoided, it can only
also be advised.
As an analytical method, druidism is a kind of
cybernetics, reflecting the mainstream orientation of the discipline.
Negative feedback, which adjusts towards stability, fetches back
deviations, to produce normal cycles. Perturbations are canceled within
natural rhythms. Destabilizing, self-accentuating, positive feedback, in
contrast, incarnates the unnatural, and is thus – from a certain
perspective – unreal. Self-reinforcing processes accelerate to a crisis,
and then collapse, describing a wave, or fluctuation, at a greater scale.
What seems like an irrecoverable deviation has its counterpart within a
larger whole, matching it exactly in one-sidedness, or violence, and
providing the complementary reversion that restores equilibrium. A broken
cycle is part of a more encompassing rhythm, partially perceived. Druidic
naturalism insists that everything is eventually fetched back, because
there is nowhere ‘else’ to flee. The
law of the earth
is ultimately inviolable:
… positive feedback [is] extremely rare in the real world, because
systems with positive feedback promptly destroy themselves — imagine a
thermostat that responded to rising temperatures by heating things up
further until the house burns down. Negative feedback, by contrast, is
everywhere.
At the largest social scale, pathological deviations, and their
reversions, are exemplified by the rise and fall of civilizations.
Historical cycle theorists, such as Spengler and Toynbee, capture the
recurrent pattern in its essentials. Cultures and all of their component
parts, including historiography itself, are enveloped and directed by
these great
rhythms:
Every literate urban society, Spengler argued, followed the same
trajectory from an original folk religion rich in myths, through the
rise of intellectual theology, the birth of rationalism, the gradual
dissolution of the religious worldview into rational materialism, and
then the gradual disintegration of rational materialism into a radical
skepticism that ends by dissolving itself; thereafter ethical
philosophies for the intellectuals and resurgent folk religion for the
masses provide the enduring themes for the civilization to come.
Such patterns offer the material for what Greer calls ‘morphology’ which,
on the model (especially) of 18th and 19th century biology, extracts
regular, comparable shapes from the confusion of varied particulars. Among
the objects of morphological investigation are deep cultural structures,
inextricable from religious ideas (in the widest sense), which
pre-reflectively organize the experience of historical time. Globalized
Occidental civilization (“modern industrial culture”), Greer argues, is
characterized by two dominant time shapes, at once twinned and aligned,
which resonate with an unsustainable, positive-feedback dynamic in their
pathological denial of balance, or eventual reversion.
Before examining these twinned shapes of modern time, some broader context
can generate ambient illumination. Greer introduces a variety of time
shapes from non-industrial cultures (and ecologies), including the
changeless ‘dream time’ of hunter-gatherer societies, and the great cycles
of pre-modern Chinese tradition. Indeed, his sketch of the classical
Chinese time-shape appears oddly, even fetchingly,
druidic:
The basic theory of the Chinese science of time is that events are
guided by many different cycles, some faster and some slower, some
influencing one dimension of human life and some shaping another. The
cycle of the seasons was one of these; the cycle of human life was
another; the cycle of the rise and fall of dynasties was a third; there
were many more, each with its own period and typical sequence of events.
Just as no two years had exactly the same weather on exactly the same
days, no two repetitions of any other cycle were identical, but common
patterns allowed the events of one repetition to be more or less
predicted by a sufficiently broad knowledge of earlier examples. On a
much broader scale, all cycles of every kind could be understood as
expressions of a single abstract pattern of cyclic change, which was
explored in the classic Chinese textbook of time theory, the I Ching —
in English, the Book of Change.
The most jarring contrast with the progressive model of time, however, is
found much closer to it, both in cultural proximity and obvious ecological
complementarity. It is laid out by Hesiod in his
Works and Days, where it is articulated as a grinding stepwise
decline through successive ages, each determined by its deterioration
relative to the age before.
Hesiod’s abnormality – or ours – emerges starkly from an overlap. As
modern historiography progresses, expanding its purchase ever more deeply
into archeology and paleo-anthropology, it discovers ancient societies
‘rising’ from the new stone age (‘neolithic’) to the bronze age, and then
later, with the advance of metallurgy, entering the iron age, with
improved weapons and tools. The passage from bronze to iron is an obvious
leap forward, corresponding to a basic threshold of cultural maturation,
locked in to the history of the world by a progressive
technological ratchet. How disconcerting, then, to find this same sequence
repeated by Hesiod, but with inverse sign, in a degenerative series of
ages — Golden, Silver, Bronze, and Iron – that proceed through increments
of coarsening, from the most noble metal, to the most base.
From our deeply-entrenched, progressive perspective, any historical
meta-narrative structured by relentless decline appears exotically
strange. The same does not hold within Greer’s ecological framework, which
couples deviations to reversions within long cycles, so that a downward
slope is no more abnormal than a persistent incline. Our historical
optimism finds itself ecologically relativized by a story that has no less
confidence in its fears than we have in our long-consolidated hopes. The
explanatory background that Greer
supplies
– themed by soil erosion — has sufficient directionality to match, and to
carry, Hesiod’s shape of time:
Two thousand years before Hesiod, prehistoric Greece had been the home
of a lively assortment of village cultures making the slow transition
from polished stone tools to bronze. On that foundation more complex
societies rose, borrowing heavily from contemporary high cultures in the
Middle East, and culminating in the monumental architecture and literate
palace bureaucracies of the Mycenean age. Those of my readers who have
some sense of the rhythms of history will already know what followed:
too much clearcutting and intensive farming of the fragile Greek soils,
made worse by the importation of farming methods better suited to flat
Mesopotamian valleys than easily eroded Greek hills, triggered an
ecological crisis; most of the topsoil of Mycenean Greece ended up at
the bottom of the Aegean Sea, where it can still be found in core
samples; warfare, migration, and population collapse followed in the
usual manner, as Mycenean society stumbled down the curve of its own
Long Descent.
Greer’s readers have been prepared to recognize “its own” as a pointer to
our own – another “Long Descent” anticipated by an
ecological grounding pattern, this time set by the energy-availability
curve of Peak Oil. This forecast is a topic for another occasion. For now,
our concern is more abstract, indifferent to the specific mechanism of
civilizational limitation, and attentive solely to Greer’s claim that the
denial of historical cyclicity is a form of unwarranted
exceptionalism, founded materially in an ecological boost-phase,
and reasonably encapsulated in the notorious bubble slogan
this time it’s different:
There’s a wry amusement to be had by thinking through the implications
of this constantly repeated claim. If our society was in fact shaking
off the burdens of the past and breaking new ground with every minute
that goes by, as believers in progress like to claim, wouldn’t it be
more likely that the theory of historical cycles would be challenged
each time it appears with dazzlingly new, innovative responses that no
one had ever imagined before? Instead, in an irony Nietzsche would have
relished, the claim that history can’t repeat itself endlessly repeats
itself, in what amounts to an eternal return of the insistence that
there is no eternal return. What’s more, those who claim that it’s
different this time seem blissfully unaware that anyone has made the
same claim before them, and if this is pointed out to them, they
insist—often with quite some heat—that what they’re saying has nothing
whatsoever to do with all the other times the same argument was used to
make the same point down through the years.
It bears repeating that the belief in progress, and the equal and
opposite belief in apocalypse, are narratives about the unknowable. Both
claim that the past has nothing to say about the future, that something
is about to happen that has never happened before and that can’t be
judged on the basis of any previous event.
Neither progress nor apocalypse, Greer contends, are time-shapes
well-suited to the realistic evaluation of their ends. [More on that next]
July 29, 2013The Shape of Time (Part 2)
In the
first part
of this series, we introduced John Michael Greer’s ‘druidic’ framework for
the evaluation of cultural ‘time shapes’ – based on a presumption of
dominant cyclicity, according to which any prolonged deviation or
unbalanced process is exposed as an unsustainable exception. Within a
sufficiently expansive great cycle, any continuous progressive trend is
complemented by a proportionate regression (and, of course, inversely).
The cyclic assumption marks out each and every image of
absolute progress as illusory. In this way, the cycle, when
applied to any particular figure of time, describes an enveloping
structure that provides pointed critical perspective. (Criticism of the
cyclic assumption itself — or ‘in turn’ — is best delayed until Greer’s
most significant positive results have been sketched.)
The presently-dominant global civilization – when apprehended at a level
of extreme (ecological) abstraction – is the fossil-fuel burning runaway
spurt that Greer
calls
“modern industrial culture.” Central to this culture is an expectation of
growth, founded in an unsustainable ecological process, and expressed
through distinctive time shapes. The plural here is essential, because
Greer’s complete ‘morphological’ description of modern time unfolds within a tripartite system of
classification.
The first time shape is mostly occluded. This is
the cyclic model that organizes Greer’s thinking, serving both as a pivot
and as an enveloping frame. The cyclical time-conception defines a ‘middle
way’ that exposes abnormality and excess through contrast, and also
completes a holistic comprehension, contextualizing partiality or bias. It
functions within Greer’s analysis as an intellectual tool, or workshop,
more than a distinct object of investigation. Given its ‘transcendental’
status within the druidic order of apprehension, the cycle is not limited
to a moment of historical origination, or associated with the name of a
particular cultural authority.
The second time shape is not intrinsically modern, but is rather the
living ancestor, or vital inheritance, of the culture that would
eventually assert the terms of global modernity. Of the world’s numerous
pre-modern time shapes, it is the one that has been universalized by its
lineal descendents. Greer identifies it primarily with Augustine of Hippo,
and he assigns it a specific birthday: AD 413.
Greer
argues
(conventionally), that the collapse of the Christian Empire under
barbarian onslaught threatened the new faith with a crisis of legitimacy,
leading Augustine to the radical conclusion that: “Ordinary history … has
no moral order or meaning.”
The place of moral order and meaning in time is found instead in sacred
history, which has a distinctive linear shape of its own. That shape
begins in perfection, in the Garden of Eden; disaster intervenes, in the
form of original sin, and humanity tumbles down into the fallen world.
From that point on, there are two histories of the world, one sacred and
one secular. The secular history is the long and pointless tale of
stupidity, violence and suffering that fills the history books; the
sacred history is the story of God’s dealings with a small minority of
human beings — the patriarchs, the Jewish people, the apostles, the
Christian church — who are assigned certain roles in a preexisting
narrative. Eventually the fallen world will be obliterated, most of its
inhabitants will be condemned to a divine boot in the face forever, and
those few who happen to be on the right side will be restored to Eden’s
perfection, at which point the story ends.
In formulating this story, Augustine gave “the Western world what would
be, for the next millennium or so, its definitive shape of time.”
Furthermore, even after the emergence of an alternative, this foundational
cultural narrative would remain in reserve, constantly available as a
recourse should its successor falter, betray the interests of disaffected
groups, or accumulate signs of crisis. The Western tradition, when
conceived through its ancestral time shape, would be perpetuated as an
undrained reservoir of apocalyptic temptation. The ecological critique of
modernity, Greer observes, is as fully-saturated with this apocalyptic
narrative as any other articulation of social dissent.
Within modernity proper, however, the Augustinian time shape has ceased to
be mainstream. Once again, Greer is not reluctant to reach for a name and
a (rough) date, that of the twelfth century Italian mystic “Joachim of
Flores … [who] had an impact on the future as significant as Augustine’s:
he’s the person who kicked down the barrier between sacred and secular
history that Augustine put so much effort into building, and created the
shape of time that the cultural mainstream occupies to this day.”
To Joachim, sacred history was not limited to a paradise before time, a
paradise after it, and the thread of the righteous remnant and the
redeeming doctrine linking the two. He saw sacred history unfolding all
around him in the events of his own time. His vision divided all of
history into three great ages, governed by the three persons of the
Christian trinity: the Age of Law governed by the Father, which ran from
the Fall to the crucifixion of Jesus; the Age of Love governed by the
Son, which ran from the crucifixion to the year 1260; and the Age of
Liberty governed by the Holy Spirit, which would run from 1260 to the
end of the world.
What made Joachim’s vision different from any of the visionary
histories that came before it — and there were plenty of those in the
Middle Ages — was that it was a story of progress.
Not only does the Joachimite three-stage narrative of progress introduce
the idea of uncompensated advance, it also legitimates a trend to
secularization, as the institutional structures appropriate to the
patriarchal and filial epochs are dissolved in the new age of
revolutionary liberty. Unsurprisingly, radical intellectuals and movements
seized upon this schema as a blueprint for the dispossession of the Old
Order, ensuring its general popularization. As modernity was serially
‘revolutionized’ it became ever more Joachimite in its basic assumptions,
until progress had been installed as a dominant ‘civil religion‘. Eventually, the progressive idea had been normalized to the point of
near-total invisibility.
With the outlining of the Augustinian and Joachimite ‘visions’, Greer’s
classification of modern time shapes approaches completeness. The entire
argument, when schematically reviewed, can be decomposed into a number of
distinct and informative claims:
(a) The culture of modern global civilization is dominated by exactly two
principal time shapes.
(b) These time shapes are in certain respects culturally arbitrary,
arising in specific times and places, without any original logical
inter-dependency, and inflected by the concerns of a particular religious
tradition.
(c) This arbitrariness is further confirmed by the morphological richness
each time shape reveals, a feature that supports confident identification
and classification of superficially differentiated variants.
(d) Despite the absence of logical necessity, when historically assembled
into a mature, dyadic system, the combined Augustinian-Joachimite duality
evidences a significant measure of reciprocal order (or effective
‘dialectical unity’) and a near exhaustive purchase upon the modern
cultural imagination — conformity and dissent.
(e) The complementarity of the dyad approximately corresponds to
symmetrical judgments of (Joachimite) affirmation and (Augustinian)
negation of a prevailing historical trend.
(f) Regardless of their manifest power of captivation, the
Augustinian-Joachimite dyad has a limit, best described by the cyclic time
model from which each side of the duality diverges.
[Next: critical appraisal]
August 20, 2013The Shape of Time (Part 2a)
When describing the thinking of John Michael Greer as ‘druidic’ – as
this
series has
cheerfully done – the adjective has been primarily philosophical in
direction. It has been used only to indicate that an identifiable, and
remarkably coherent, presupposition about the governing nature of time
anchors Greer’s particular analyses, which draw out the implications of an
unsurpassable cosmic cyclicity, and apply them deftly to a wide variety of
concrete problems. ‘Druid’ and ‘radical cycle theorist’ have been treated
as roughly equivalent terms.
It is worth noting at this point, however, that Greer is not only
conceptually druidic. He is a public proponent of Druidism in a far
richer, culturally-elaborate sense, which
includes
service “as presiding officer — Grand Archdruid is the official title — of
the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA), a Druid order founded in
1912.” This vocation slants his perspective in important (and productive)
ways. Our concerns here, tightly focused on the question of time, are able
to extract considerable intellectual nourishment from a digression into
this thick druidism.
Like other forms of occult Occidental religion, Druidry has an attachment
to the deep past that is not tacit and traditional, but overt, modern, and
creative. Greer admits readily – even gleefully – that his ‘Ancient Order’
is not in fact ancient at all, but instead belongs to a project of
restoration – and actually reconstruction – that dates back no further
than the mid-17th century. From its inception, it was bound to
a lost past and to inextinguishable doubts about its own authenticity.
Greer only very rarely uses his Archdruid Report platform to
discuss druidism explicitly. On the first
occasion
when he does so, his reflections are triggered by the question of a young
boy: Are you a real Druid?
It’s not an easy question to answer. The original Druids, the priests
and wizards of the ancient Celts, went extinct more than a thousand
years ago, and all their beliefs, practices, and teachings went with
them.
More specifically, he
explains:
Who were the Druids? The honest answer is that we really don’t know.
Most of what was written about them in ancient times vanished forever
when the Roman Empire collapsed. Every surviving text written about the
Druids while they still existed, put together, add up to ten pages or so
in English translation. … Druids in training memorized many lines of
verse, since it was forbidden to set down their teachings in writing. …
Julius Caesar, whose book on the Roman conquest of Gaul is the most
detailed source on the Druids, noted that Druidic teachings were thought
to come from Britain originally, while a Greek scholar claimed that the
Druids got their lore from the Greek philosopher Pythagoras; no other
writer refers to the subject. … archeologists and historians were able
to prove conclusively that the Druidry of the Revival was a modern
spiritual movement, not an ancient one.
Modern druidry is a revival, which is to say that it originates
through identification with something that is dead. Its modernity is
stretched and activated, to become more than mere succession, and more
even than self-conscious, differentiated succession — or ‘advance’. The
discontinuity that defines ‘the Revival’ cannot be reduced to a
transition, however radical. Instead, it corresponds to an uncertain
reaching back, through the still-living past and beyond, towards a lost
beginning. In this way it initiates a process — and a new tradition — that
cannot easily be resolved into distinct elements of invention and
re-animation. In its quest for ancient origins, it relocates the present
within an expanded comprehension of historical time. This complex,
quasi-paradoxical cultural undertaking, is at once typically modern, and
anti-modern. By distancing itself from passive accommodation to its
historical moment, it epitomizes this same moment in its concrete
historical reality — as a revolt against simple continuity. It represents
a dramatic neo-traditionalism, of an Occidental type.
The time-traveler tends to produce — or become — a double, and the modern
Druid is no exception. Something ‘ancient’ is returned to life, so that
re-animator and re-animated co-exist in a folded present,
cross-identified, and ambiguously co-original, or coincidental. Do the
Druids of the Revival ‘still’ believe the archaic wisdom of cyclicity, now
rediscovered, or do they project it back onto the blank screen of an
erased antiquity? Who is the copy here? We are returned, inexorably, to a
problem of identification (“Are you a real Druid?“), model and derivation, originality and repetition. A search for
reality has become inextricable from an exercise in duplicity, twisted
into a reflective or introspective circle, and spun out into an
investigation of time.
As this perplexity develops, the term ‘Druid Revival’ comes to seem like
something more than an arbitrary conjunction. Its two words are not merely
joined, but doubled, as an echo of time disturbance. Each points
independently towards a pre-implanted pattern of return, with the cycle
already registered on both sides. Greer
traces
the ‘real roots’ of this doubling to a discontinuous connection:
Some modern Druid groups in the 19th and early 20th centuries, to their
lasting discredit, claimed direct connections to the ancient Celtic
Druids they didn’t have. The real roots of the modern Druid movement go
in a different direction: to the first stages of the Industrial
Revolution in early 18th century Britain, and the Hobson’s choice
between dogmatic religion and materialist science, the two victors in
the reality wars of the late Renaissance. Plenty of people sought a
third option that embraced nature and spirit alike, and some of them
found inspiration in the scraps of classical writing, medieval legend,
and Celtic folklore that referred to the ancient Druids.
“Historians call the result the Druid Revival,” he continues, as if
determined to separate this twin term from anything that modern druidry
first said about itself. He recognizes, perhaps, that
druidism is the philosophy (or religion) of revival — or of the
full ‘ecological’ cycle through life and death — so that to draw upon this
word (‘revival’) threatens to represent the return of druidic thinking
through itself, in a closed circle of self-confirmation, persuasive only
to those of prior druidic (or, more narrowly, cycle-theoretical)
inclination. Better, then, that ‘historians’ seal this circle, from
outside, and thereby demonstrate its real coincidence, or simple reality.
The Revival is noticed as historical fact, before it is cycled back into
druidic intelligence, as a doctrinal expectation.
Each year is a cyclical time unit of death and revival, and in this it is
a primordial teacher, in a way that no scripture could ever be. That, at
least, is the folk pagan understanding that Druid Revival restores to
ritualistic primacy, and adopts as its guiding cognitive model. Its own
revival, therefore, is ‘only natural’, or self-explanatory.
To bring thinking into compliance with the great cycles is immediately to
participate in a speculative super-tradition, sustained by a structure of
ideas and apprehension that cannot but return. In the thought of
the cycle there is already implied a non-originality, binding the thinker,
across time, to all those who necessarily understand the way things have
to happen again. What, then, is ancient origin, and what revival? When
would one look for a ‘real Druid’?
[This digression has a little further to stray, along a more concrete
path, before critical distance is restored.]
September 6, 2013Greer
Anyone who isn’t yet
reading
The Archdruid Report really ought to be. John Michael Greer is
quite simply one of the most brilliant writers in existence, and even when
he’s wrong, he’s importantly wrong. His perspective is coherent, learned,
and uncaged by the assumptions of progressivism. Above all, his
understanding of what it means to find history informative is unsurpassed.
(Over at the Other Place, there’s an unfinished Greer series that badly
requires attention, with the first three installments
here,
here, and
here.)
When escalated to the extreme, the progressive conclusion is that history
can teach us nothing. Innovation is by its very nature unprecedented, and
insofar as it manifests improvement, it humbles its precursors. The past
is the rude domicile of ignorant barbarity. Insofar as the present still
bears its traces, as shameful stigmata, they are mere remains that still
have to be overcome. At the limit, the concept of Singularity — a horizon
at which all anticipatory knowledge is annulled — seals the progressive
intuition.
In its abstract theoretical core, at least, Greer’s Druidic
counter-history is radically reactionary (far more unambiguously so than
NRx). Its model of time is entirely cyclical, such that past and future
are perfectly neutral between ascent and decline. Every attempt to install
a gradient of improvement in the dimension of historical time is broken
upon the great wheels, which balance every rise with a fall, dissolving
innovation in precedent. Novelty is hubristic illusion (an exaggerated
correction, in the opinion of this blog).
In his most recent
post
Greer introduces an intriguing complication:
Arnold Toynbee, whose magisterial writings on history have been a
recurring source of inspiration for this blog, has pointed out an
intriguing difference between the way civilizations rise and the way
they fall. On the way up, he noted, each civilization tends to diverge
not merely from its neighbors but from all other civilizations
throughout history. […] Once the peak is past and the long road down
begins, though, that pattern of divergence shifts into reverse, slowly
at first, and then with increasing speed. A curious sort of
homogenization takes place: distinctive features are lost, and common
patterns emerge in their place. That doesn’t happen all at once, and
different cultural forms lose their distinctive outlines at different
rates, but the further down the trajectory of decline and fall a
civilization proceeds, the more it resembles every other civilization in
decline.
The dissymmetry calls out for philosophical investigation, since it
suggests a line of synthetic diagonalization between precedent and
innovation, cyclicity and escape (which is to say, the NRx or cybergothic
line). It would be to stray too far from Greer to follow that now.
Straightforwardly, the claim being made is that forecasting strengthens on
the down-slope of civilization. The more a social order fails, the more it
sheds its originality, and thus the more accessible it becomes to accurate
diagnosis on the basis of historical example. As collapse deepens, it
converges with a template, bound ever tighter to a model by its morbidity.
Across the peak, an age of prophecy begins — or returns.
The dark irony is delicious almost beyond endurance. The Universal, long
proclaimed as the capstone of progress, is realized only as a nadir. The
equality of all civilizations is asserted, in reality, as a direct measure
of their proximity to death. Among the spreading ruins, the mad echoes of
similarity resound deafeningly, as the blasted Cathedral plummets towards
its Idea — eternal return of the same.
July 10, 2014Time Scales
The word ‘neoreaction’ is a split, productively paradoxical formula,
simultaneously referencing two incompatible cultural formations, each
corresponding to an abstract model of time. On one side, it is a gateway
opening onto techno-libertarian hyper-progressivism, and an order of time
structured by irreversible accumulation, self-envelopment, and catastrophe
horizon (Singularity). On the other, it opens onto the temporality of
reaction and the cycle, where all progress is illusion, and all innovation
anticipated. Within NRx, the time of escape and the time of return seek an
obscure synthesis, at once unprecedented and primordial, whose cryptic
figure is the
spiral. (This
is the time of the Old Ones and the Outside, from which the shoggoth
come.) If NRx thinks itself already lodged articulately in this synthesis,
it deludes itself.
From a strictly philosophical perspective, the time of reaction finds no
defender more able than
Archdruid John
Michael Greer. while his
specific form of religious traditionalism, his social attitudes, and his
eco-political commitments are all profoundly questionable from the
standpoint of throne-and altar
reaction, his model
of time cannot be surpassed in an Old Right direction. Those who would
install a prejudice of relentless degeneration in its place, anchored by a
revealed religion of recent creation and subsequent continuous fall, only
position themselves to the ‘right’ of Greer by making God a revolutionary.
If deep time is to be preserved, there can be no archaic authority beyond
the cycle.
Why call Greer a reactionary? It is not, after all, a label he would
accept for himself. The answer lies in cyclical time, and everything that
follows from it: the supremacy of wisdom among human things, the enduring
authority of history, the dismissal of modernist pretension as a mere mask
for deep historical repetition, an absolute disillusionment with progress,
and an adamantine prognosis that — from the peak of fake ‘improvement’
where we find ourselves — a grinding course of decline over coming
centuries is an inevitability. The cultural and political decoration can
be faulted, but in the fundamental structure of Greer’s thinking, reaction
is perfected.
There is a religious consideration to be noted here, as the stepping stone
to another point. Once the cyclical counter-assumption is adopted — in a
definitive break from modernist ideology — it leads inexorably to an
expansion of the time frame. To see the pattern, it is necessary to pan
out. An apparent rise is only rendered intelligible by its complementary
fall. An event makes sense to the extent that it can be identified as a
repetition, through subsumption into a persistent rhythm, which means that
to understand it is to pull back from it, into ever wider expanses of
history. Recognized precedent is wisdom.
Reaction is thus construed as a critique of modernist myopia. The
appearance of innovation derives from a failure to see a larger whole. If
something looks new, it is because not enough is being seen.
No surprise, then, to find Greer seize upon an
opportunity
to
discuss
The Next Ten Billion Years. At such scales, fluctuations of
fortune are fully contextualized, so that no uncompensated progressions
remain. After just 1% of this time has passed:
The long glacial epoch that began in the Pleistocene has finally ended,
and the Earth is returning to its more usual status as a steamy jungle
planet. This latest set of changes proves to be just that little bit too
much for humanity. No fewer than 8,639 global civilizations have risen
and fallen over the last ten million years, each with its own unique
sciences, technologies, arts, literatures, philosophies, and ways of
thinking about the cosmos; the shortest-lived lasted for less than a
century before blowing itself to smithereens, while the longest-lasting
endured for eight millennia before finally winding down.
All that is over now. There are still relict populations of human
beings in Antarctica and a few island chains, and another million years
will pass before cascading climatic and ecological changes finally push
the last of them over the brink into extinction. Meanwhile, in the
tropical forests of what is now southern Siberia, the descendants of
raccoons who crossed the Bering land bridge during the last great ice
age are proliferating rapidly, expanding into empty ecological niches
once filled by the larger primates. In another thirty million years or
so, their descendants will come down from the trees.
Everything that rises will fall.
Such vastly panned-out perspectives are also relevant to the competitive
catastrophe theorizing that is so close to the dead heart of this blog.
Any conceivable disaster has an associated time-frame, within which it is
no more than a wandering fluctuation. Recovery from deep dysgenic decline
requires only a few millennia, extinction of the human species perhaps a
few tens of millions of years, full restoration of terrestrial fossil fuel
deposits, 100 million years or so. Vicissitudes on the down-side scarcely
register as tremors in the meanderings of geological time.
There is more to time-scales than more time. Whatever else
anthropomorphism is — and it is a lot of other things — it is a
scale of time. To be human is to be situated, distinctively, within a
spectrum of frequencies. In our wavelength zone, a second is a short time,
and a century is long. These lower and upper bounds of significant
duration correspond respectively to the biophysics of mammalian motility
and to the outer-limits of mortal plans. The cosmic arbitrariness of this
scalar time region is very easy to see.
The digital tick of time in our universe is set by the passage of a photon
across a Planck-length (in a vacuum), approximately 5.4 x 10^-44 seconds.
This is not a number readily intuited. A
comparison
to the (mere) 4.3 x 10^17 seconds that have so far lapsed during the
entire history of the universe perhaps provides some vague sense.
(Anthropomorphic time-scale bias is at least roughly as blinding to
minuscule durations as to enormous ones.)
The upper limits of the cosmic time-scale are harder to identify.
Speculative cosmological models predict the evolution of the Universe out
to 10^60 years or more, when the last of the black holes have evaporated.
The Stelliferous Era (in which new stars are born) is expected to last for
only 100 trillion (10^14) years, out to approximately 7,000 times the
present age of the universe. (If the stelliferous universe were analogized
to a human being with a one-century life-expectancy, it would presently be
an infant, just entering its sixth post-natal day, with 987 billion years
to wait until its anthropomorphic first birthday).
Beyond the human time scale lie immensities, and intensities. The latter
are especially susceptible to neglect. When — over half a century ago —
Richard Feynman anticipated nano-engineering with the
words
[there’s] “Plenty of Room at the Bottom” he opened prospects of time
involution, as well as miniaturization in space. A process migrating in
the direction of the incomprehensibly distant Planck limit makes time for
itself, in a way quite different from any endurance in temporal extension.
Consider ‘now’ to be a
second, as it is approximately at the anthropomorphic scale, and its inner
durations are potentially near-limitless — vastly exceeding all the time
the human species could make available to itself even by persisting to the
death of the universe’s last star. A
femto-scale intelligence system could explore the rise and fall of entire
biological phyla, in detail, in a period so minuscule it would entirely
escape human apprehension as sub-momentary, or subliminal. The ultimate
eons are less ahead than within.
Greer envisages no escape from the anthropomorphic bandwidth of time.
Within his far-future speculation, each new intelligent species that
arises is implicitly ‘anthropomorphic’ in this sense. After Earth has
died, its particles are strewn among the nearby stars, and incorporated
into the body of an alien species:
The creature’s biochemistry, structure, and life cycle have nothing in
common with yours, dear reader. Its world, its sensory organs, its mind
and its feelings would be utterly alien to you, even if ten billion
years didn’t separate you. Nonetheless, it so happens that a few atoms
that are currently part of your brain, as you read these words, will
also be part of the brain-analogue of the creature on the crag on that
distant, not-yet-existing world. Does that fact horrify you, intrigue
you, console you, leave you cold?
If coldness is the appropriate response to seeing time still imprisoned,
ten billion years from now, then Greer’s vision is chilling. For it to be
compelling, however, would take far more.
Though only implicit, it would be grudging to deny Greer credit for the
excavation of a crucial reactionary proposition:
Nothing will ever break into the vaults of time. This is not an
assertion to which Outside in is yet ready to defer.
ADDED: An exercise in extensive time perspective.
July 12, 2014Perspective
Derbyshire at the
top
of his game:
The whole climate change business is now a zone of hysteria, generating
far more noise — mostly of a shrieking kind — than its importance
justifies. Opinions about climate change are,
as Greg Cochran said, “a mark of tribal membership.” It is also the case, as Greg also
said, that “the world is never going to do much about in any event,
regardless of the facts.” […] If we did do anything the
effect would likely be puny compared to, say, a single major volcanic
eruption. Mother Nature laughs at our climate change fretting. […]
Consider ice ages for example, like the one we are currently living
through.
Ice ages last for tens of millions of years. We don’t
know how many there have been. Our planet is 4½ billion years old; we
only have clear evidence of ice ages for the last billion years, in
which time there have been four ice ages, covering a total of one-third
of a billion years. In its “normal” condition — the other two-thirds —
the Earth is ice-free all the way up to the poles. […] The present ice
age started around 2½ million years ago. Our best guess is that it’ll
continue for several million years more. […]
Within this ice age there have been ups and downs. The
downs are called “glaciations,” the ups — comparatively warm spells,
like the one we are currently in — are “interglacials.” […] … The
climatic changes here are sensational. At the peak of the last
glaciation in 20,000 B.C., the pleasant suburb where I am writing this
was buried under an ice sheet
several hundred feet thick. It is possible that during one of the earlier ice ages, 700 million
years ago, the entire planet was
covered with ice, down to the equator.
The dwarfing of scientific concerns to media spin-cycle wavelengths has to
be counted among the greatest vulgarizations of our age.
May 23, 2015
CHAPTER THREE - NARRATIVIZATIONS
Tackling Templexity
Since there are a number of critical tasks that cannot be advanced prior
to straightening out some knotty problems of time topology, UF has added a
Templexity
page (as a work in
progress). It will eventually provide supporting apparatus for an
Urbanatomy Electronic product of the same name, due out this
fall. What cannot be straightened out, of course won’t be — but something
will occur. What holds for macro-history holds no less for micro-history,
with the two entangling, rather than resonating.
The cultural pretext for this investigation is Rian Johnson’s
Looper, whose very crudities and short-cuts become informative, when approached
from the right angle.
The perspective of Templexity is arranged by the postulate:
Time-travel is the dramatization of something else.
The firm hypothesis: Shanghai is a time machine.
“You should go to China,” Joe is told by his criminal overseer, Abe.
“I’m going to France,” Joe insists stubbornly. Abe responds with what –
for us – is the most critical line in the movie: “I’m from the future.
You should go to China.” With these words, Looper makes
Sino-Futurism its topic. The hyper-modern
China Event is too vast to fit simply into time.
Ben Woodard has put up a valuable
post
that delves into the centrality of time-disturbance to the problems of
accelerationism. If the accelerationist intuition is
on to something, traffic between these zones of discussion can
only thicken.
September 15, 2014Time Discipline
If you run through the functional specifications of your time machine, and
it looks as if it’s going to
print
bullion, or proliferate
doubles, it’s
been badly assembled.
Time-travel is the dramatization of something else, and you’re
still trapped in the simulation.
Forbes
on
Seth Lloyd:
In Type 1 time travel — the type highlighted in the
“Back to the Future”
films — all possible pasts and futures in some sense exist
simultaneously, says Lloyd. So, that when you go back and change the
past in order to enter a different future, your “old” future is in some
sense still “there.”
“Our theory of time travel is Type 2,” said Lloyd, “[which means] no
matter how hard you try to mess with the past you can’t do it.”
HP Lovecraft fixed the
principle.
September 16, 2014Templexity
For the visitors here who are perpetually tortured by the
Damn! Where is the tip-jar button? question, less-evil twin has a
time-travel book
out. (It should be $3.99, but it says $5.99 at my link — which might be a
Shanghai-effect.)
UF (2.1) plug
here.
If you know anybody teetering on the brink of a psychotic episode, who
just needs a slight nudge to plunge over the edge, it would make an ideal
present.
November 7, 2014Templexity is Out
Thank you
Amazon. Despite some frustrations with the Kindle Direct Publishing interface —
which isn’t designed for editorial convenience — the excitement of
disintermediation-in-action more than makes up for it. If the
self-publishing system reached the stage where writers spent their time on
the platform, as a work-space, in the same way they can on a blog today,
the horizon of possibility would be pushed out to yet inconceivable
distances.
Templexity aims to catalyze a theoretical
coagulation where the philosophy of time, contemporary (complex) urbanism,
and pulp entertainment media are complicit in an approach to singularity
(as a topic, a thing, and a nonlinear knotting of the two (at least)). It
proposes that the urban process and the techno-science of time machines is
undergoing rapid convergence. (This seems to be a suggestion whose
time has come.) Grasp the
opportunity offered by computers to visualize what cities really are, and
the dynamics of retro-temporalization are graphically displayed.
That being for which the
being of time is opened as an exploratory path is the advanced global
metropolis. This is a contention already tacked to a cinematic, mass-media
revelation, although one formatted by deeply-traditional dramatic
criteria, thus systematically, and automatically, encrypted.
Far more on all this later. (If I say too much now, I’m worried I might
save you $4.00.)
November 7, 2014Quote note (#245)
Nydwracu
on
Great Awakenings:
La Wik:
Well,
things are getting weird.
Really weird. …
As for that missing episode, it would be preposterous to advance
this (1904) as
the apex of a ‘Great Awakening’ in the sense at stake here, but perhaps
not such a stretch to think it was picking up on some strange turbulence
in the Aethyrs.
May 7, 20161930-Somethings
History never repeats itself, but it rhymes, runs the suggestive
aphorism (falsely?)
attributed to Mark Twain.
James Delingpole
writes
in the Daily Telegraph:
… have you ever tried reading private journals or newspapers from the
1930s? What will surprise you is that right to the very last minute – up
to the moment indeed when war actually broke – even the most insightful
and informed commentators and writers clung on to the delusion that
things would somehow turn out all right. I do hope that history is not
about to repeat itself. Unfortunately, the lesson from history is that
all too often it does.
There’s quite a lot of this
about.
For one theoretical account of how history might rhyme, on an ominous
80-year cycle, there’s a generational model that
sets
the beat. “Strauss & Howe have established that history can be broken
down into 80 to 100 year Saeculums that consist of four turnings: The
High, The Awakening, The Unraveling, and the Crisis.” From a philosophical
point of view, it seems a little under-powered, but its empirical
plausibility rises by the month.
Among Shanghai’s anomalies is a peculiar
relation to the 1930s. For the city beyond the International Settlement,
the decade slid into disaster when Sino-Japanese hostilities broke out in
1937. Yet the preceding period was not marked by depression, but by
exuberant High Modernism. Dates from the 1930s that would in much of the
world seem distinctly sinister are displayed on the city’s historic
buildings as a mark of Golden Age authenticity. For the paranoid mind,
that would slot neatly into the same disturbing rhyme scheme today.
Throughout most of the rich world, economic, political, and cultural decay
seemed — retrospectively — to presage the coming cataclysm, as if nothing
less could jolt exhausted social systems from their relentless downward
slide. Almost everywhere, some version of fascist thinking was seized upon
as the antidote to relentlessly gathering malaise. Beneath the surface of
the global geostrategic order, shifting tectonic plates accumulated
intolerable tension. Degenerate monetary systems came apart into
uncontrollable swirls of dysfunctional signs.
Still, it’s entirely possible that there’s nothing to worry
about:
Click image to enlarge.
ADDED: “If you hear echoes of the 1930s in the capitulation at Geneva, it’s
because the West is being led by the same sort of men, minus the
umbrellas.” (I’m hearing echoes of the 1930s just about everywhere.)
November 26, 2013The Decopunk Delta
As this blog spirals around to its re-starting point, it fetches back the
tasks it has yet to advance upon, including the most basic (announced in
its sub-title). Why the ‘Decopunk Delta’? Mostly because that’s where time
frays.
+ Golden Age Shanghai is unsettled business, and as things surge forward,
they turn back.
+ Art Deco is the world’s lost modernity, as everyone senses, without
quite knowing how.
+ Art Deco escaped its time, at the time. It is the pre-eminent
time-travel relic of the earth.
+ What Art Deco communicates is vivid, yet still unverbalized.
+ Art Deco fascinates again, today, because it is obscurely recognized as
the key to the encrypted meaning of world history, and nowhere is this
more insistently hinted than in re-opened Shanghai.
– The ‘-punk’ suffix is pulp-code for any cultural time-travel tool
undergoing contemporary development.
The two halves of the term ‘Decopunk’ bond
through a peculiar quasi-symmetry. Each is time-locked into an
identifiable ‘vogue’, while simultaneously making a problem of time, and a
topic of history. Art Deco is at once the most evocative characteristic of
an epoch — that of high-modernity / capitalism — and a super-historical
exploration, extending from the archaic remnants of lost civilizations to
flights of science-fictional speculation, drawing the entire cosmos of
aesthetic and architectural possibility into itself. The
still-proliferating ‘-punk’ suffix, similarly, designates both an eruption
of near-contemporary pulp-literary genres, and a method of time pillage,
ranging widely across past and future on searches for extractable sets, or
techno-cultural styles. Something like an abstract epochality, or
historical re-use value, is hunted on each side. When the two connect,
original occurrence is swirled into a twin-process recycling machine.
If Decopunk describes a precision-engineered inter-meshing across time, it
also marks a tension, or gradient, from the historical to the
contemporary, from opulence to squalor, from optimism to pessimism, and
from the tangible to the digital. What the past’s virtual present tends to
over-estimate, the present’s virtual past tends to undermine, and it is
only in the unstable circuit of oscillating valuation that either pole
finds its real currency (which is equally that of the other). A euphoric
cynicism, honed through spiral detachment from the partial and the actual,
melds poly-fractional Decopunk into a single, investigable thing.
***
The conceptual content of the alternative history ‘-punk’ was a central
consideration of the (UF1.1) series A Time-Traveler’s Guide to Shanghai (Part 1, Part 2,
Part 3). The
grungier and more popular — although for our purposes far less exact —
term ‘Dieselpunk’ was employed in these pieces, as a place-holder for the
emerging problem of time dislocation.
Some of the most prominent cultural-historical questions raised by
Shanghai’s Art Deco legacy were briefly indicated in the
Urbanatomy guide to the 2010 World Expo, in a short section
repeated here:
Tropical Modernity
Cosmopolitanism is an essential trait for any city with aspirations to
global status. In itself, however, the cosmopolitan idea is too abstract
and empty, or at least indeterminate, to provide adequate guidance into
Shanghai’s dominant cultural traditions.
The economic and communicative shrinkage of the world makes modernity,
no less than urbanism, inherently cosmopolitan. Since the 1960s,
postmodern critics have reconstructed (and ‘deconstructed’) a model of
cosmopolitan modernism that conforms to the vision of its most verbally
articulate architectural proponents. This vision identified itself with
the ‘International Style’, characterized by austerely functional,
geometrically pure designs. By eliminating every element with
discernible historical or cultural reference, such designs aspired to
universal validity and relevance. The result was a negative
cosmopolitanism, conceived as an escape from the trap of native
peculiarity. This claim to cultural neutrality and universal authority
has been the basic object of postmodernist disparagement, and the
widespread social disaster associated with this philosophy of urban
construction in Western countries (‘the projects’) did much to
legitimate the postmodern case. In elite and popular opinion alike, high
modernism, as represented by its supposedly mainstream traditions in
urban planning and architecture, became associated with an arrogant
insensitivity to local realities, and a self-deluding confidence in its
own objective inevitability.
The importance of Shanghai to this discussion, is that it entirely
disdained the modernism of the International, at least until very recent
times (following the opening of Pudong). Its high modernity was
constructed in the more luxuriant or tropical styles that are today
grouped together under the label ‘Art Deco’, in retrospective reference
to the Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs of 1925.
Where the International Style rejected every kind of superfluity, Art
Deco reveled in cultural complexity, arcane symbolism and opulence of
reference, borrowing freely from the temples of ancient Egypt and
Mesoamerica, ballistic technology, science fiction objects, hermetic
glyphs and alien dreams. Fusing streamline design trends with
fractionated, cubist forms and the findings of comparative ethnography,
it created a luscious cosmopolitan style, perfectly adapted to the
Shanghai of the early 20th century.
Shanghai has been as thoroughly saturated with Art Deco heritage and
influence as any city in the world. Examples include such treasures as
the Capitol Building (146 Huqiu Lu, CH Gonda, 1928), the Grand Theater
(now Grand Cinema, 216 Nanjing W, Rd, Hudec, 1928), the Peace Hotel
(Bund 19-20, Palmer & Turner, 1929) and the Paramount Ballroom (Yang
Ximiao, 218 Yuyuan Rd, 1932). An especially stunning Art Deco cluster
can be found at the ‘Municipal Square’ intersection of Jiangxi Middle
Road and Fuzhou Road, dominated by Hamilton House (Palmer &
Turner,1931), the Metropole Hotel (Palmer & Turner,1934) and the
Commercial Bank of China (Davies, Brooke and Gran, 1936). Much of this
fabulous architectural legacy has been documented in the work of local
photographer Deke Erh.
Art Deco styling became so deeply infused into the fabric of the city
that its patterning and distinctive motifs (such as sunbursts, zig-zags
and mystical signs) can be seen on innumerable lilong gateways from the
1920-40s. At another extreme, the city’s ultramodern Jin Mao Tower in
Lujiazui (88 Century Avenue) synthesizes crystalline forms, pagoda
segmentation, and patterns derived from traditional Chinese numerology,
under the guidance of unmistakable Art Deco influences. An even more
pronounced example of contemporary Art Deco construction and decoration
is provided by the new Peninsula Hotel, which has been meticulously
designed as a conscious tribute to (and revivification of) Shanghai’s
high modernist style.
In contrast to the austerity of the International Style, the tropical
abundance of Art Deco produces a positive cosmopolitanism, advancing to
the universal by way of comprehension and synthesis, rather than
exclusive purification. It makes itself global by drawing everything
foreign into itself, rather than by divesting itself of native traits.
From this difference, much follows.
In the West, a generalized disillusionment with modernism, resulting
from harsh historical experiences, civilizational guilt, and relative
geostrategic decline, found articulate expression in postmodern
arguments and, more popularly, attitudes. These stances achieved a
measure of coherence through a critical construction of modernism,
modeled on the International Style. Postwar trends in urban development,
based on rigid zoning, geometrical rationalization of the cityscape, and
blandly uniform mass residential highrise blocks, seemed to exemplify an
archetypal modernist mentality. Urban modernity was construed as
something that had been tried, seen, understood, judged, and rejected.
The postmodern cultural episode ensued.
Art Deco, however, eluded this entire dismal progression. An
assertively modern, comprehensive style that had embraced the machine
age and a communicatively interconnected world, it remained wholly
untainted by the minimalism and master-planning of the International
Stylists. The thunderous culture clash between ‘modernists’ and
postmodernists that resounded through the Western world in the late 20th
century bypassed it completely. Art Deco thus represents an unprocessed
or undigested modernity, still pulsing with historical enigma and
non-exhausted potentialities. The continuing vibrancy of Art Deco is
misapprehended by notions of anachronism or nostalgia, since it is a
style that has never been concluded, delimited, surpassed, or adequately
evaluated. It is the almost infinitely complex symbol of a prematurely
discarded modern spirit, re-animated spontaneously by the renewal of
modernity itself. Art Deco’s persistent and compelling claim upon
aesthetic, intellectual, and even political attention are nowhere more
obvious than in contemporary Shanghai.
November 6, 2013Gardens of Time (Part 1)
It might be presumptuous to assume there is any such thing as the Idea of
cultivation. The absence of any such idea (a deficiency that is
immediately stimulative) could readily be imagined as the condition that
makes cultivation necessary.
When the search for a conclusive concept is abandoned, the cultural task
of the garden — in its loftiest (Jiangnan) expression — begins to be
understood. No less that the acknowledged fine arts of East or West, the
Suzhou garden merits appreciation as a philosophical ‘statement’ in which
aesthetic achievement is inextricable from a profound
apprehension of reality. Perhaps, then, no short-cut or summary
seeking to economize on the creation and preservation of the garden itself
could possibly arrive at the same ‘place’, or — even with the most
restricted sense of cognitive purchase — discover the same things.
Anachronistically conceived, the Suzhou garden
is a multimedia experiment, incorporating various types of writing among
its parts. Alongside, or embedded amid, pavilions, walls, bridges,
rockeries, ponds, animals, vegetation, furnishings, ornamental carvings,
and paintings, are found calligraphic scrolls and inscriptions that make
words an ingredient of the garden. Language is something included, and
trained, within a comprehensive ensemble. From the beginning, the
immoderate passions of exile and dominion are stripped from the cultivated
sign.
To draw upon ulterior signs in order to talk about the garden —
especially the generic garden — introduces a problem of framing, but this,
too, has been meticulously anticipated, in a variety of ways. Framing is
the principal method of the garden, and its supreme artifice. Whether
through simple ‘picture’ frames, that transform — for instance — a slice
of stone into an artwork, or elaborate constructions of gates, doorways,
windows, apertures, alcoves, interiors, and viewpoints, it is the framing
of perspective that aestheticizes. What produces the garden as a
cultivated whole — most fundamentally — is its perspectival sub-division
into itself. When the garden is analytically decomposed, in accordance
with its own ‘grain’, it breaks down into a myriad scenes. It is made out
of pieces of contemplation.
The garden makes its own outsides — numerously — in order to appear, piece
by piece. It cannot, therefore, be assumed that one has left the garden,
simply because one is commenting upon it ‘from without’. No less probably,
the garden has itself provided the frames that now escape into a prolonged
contemplation, as its scenes are pursued on some path of ever deepening
disclosure. To apprehend the garden, and reality through the garden, is
the garden. The garden is a perspective machine.
As a scenic device arranged in space, the garden is almost endlessly
intricate, but still comparatively tractable. The spatial puzzle is
resolved in stages as the visitor passes through a sequence of
apprehensions, serially adjusting position and the direction of attention,
tuning into perceptual frames, and synthesizing associations. This is a
process which takes time, lending each part of each garden a
characteristic pace, inversely proportional to scenic density. Wherever
framings multiply most arrestingly, whether through the segmentation of
space by aestheticized objects and tableau, or through the recursive
layering of frames (perhaps a moon gate, seen through a doorway, and then
a window), the garden slows progression to an extreme, as if absorbing
motility directly into perception. (The grasp of perception as a behavior
that shares an economy with locomotion is one of the garden’s
many lessons.)
In making time a key to the decryption of space, the garden has already
begun to vaguely thematize duration. The name of the
Lingering Garden
(留园, Liu Yuan), combining the senses of ‘stay’ and ‘attend’,
captures this especially pointedly. To linger is to let space absorb
time. That is how the garden captivates, and cultivates, contemplation.
If, stepping back from the seductions of space, it is time that is sought
down this garden path, what do we discover? That is the question this
(languidly unfolding) series will orient itself towards.
November 11, 2013Anachronistic Oedipus
Wikipedia
offers an
example of the ‘time-travel’ Bootstrap Paradox (among several):
A man travels back in time and falls in love with and marries a woman,
who he later learns was his own mother, who then gives birth to him. He
is therefore his own father (and thus also his father’s father, father’s
father’s father and so on), creating a closed loop in his ancestry and
giving him no origin for his paternal genetic material.
It thus illustrates templex auto-production in a dramatic,
anthropological form. Even in its comparatively tame, fully
mathematico-scientifically respectable
variants, feedback causality tends to auto-production. Any nonlinear dynamic
process, in direct proportion to its cybernetic intensity, provides the
explanation for its own genesis. It appears, asymptotically, to make
itself happen. Cybernetic technicity — epitomized by robotic
robot-manufacture — includes a trend to autonomization essentially. Pure
(or idealized) capitalistic inclination to exponential growth captures the
same abstract nonlinear function. As it mechanizes, capital approximates
ever more close to an auto-productive circuit in which it appears as the
‘father’ of itself (M → C → M’).
When the time-travelling Terminator is
destroyed (in 1984),
its control chip is
salvaged by Cyberdyne
Systems, to supply the core technology from which the Terminator will be
built (in 2029). The Skynet threat is not merely futuristic, but fully
templex. It produces itself within a time-loop, autonomized against
extrinsic genesis. The abstract horror of the
Terminator franchise is a matter of auto-production.
As a creature of the Bootstrap Paradox, Oedipus mates with a matrilineal
ancestor to give rise to himself. The even more thoroughly popularized
Grandfather
Paradox tricks him into the killing of a patrilineal ancestor, to make
himself impossible. The paternal contributor is not merely supplanted, but
dramatically terminated. What the hell was happening in Thebes? (That’s
the question the Sophoclean chorus asks.) We already know it’s a horror
story, so we have a provisional answer: Nothing good.
The query, at ‘once’ archaic and futuristic,
is the Riddle of the Sphinx. It’s appropriately cryptic. Wikipedia (again)
provides a sound
introduction:
There was a single sphinx in Greek mythology, a unique demon of
destruction and bad luck. According to
Hesiod, she was a
daughter of
Orthus and either
Echidna
or the
Chimera,
or perhaps even Ceto;
according to others, she was a daughter of Echidna and
Typhon. All of these
are chthonic figures
from the earliest of Greek myths, before the Olympians ruled the Greek
pantheon.
The Sphinx is called Phix (Φίξ) by Hesiod in line 326 of the
Theogony, the
proper name for
the Sphinx noted by
Pierre Grimal‘s
The Penguin Dictionary of Classical Mythology.
[…]
The Sphinx is said to have guarded the entrance to the Greek city of
Thebes, and to have asked a
riddle of travellers
to allow them passage. The exact riddle asked by the Sphinx was not
specified by early tellers of the stories, and was not standardized as
the one given below until late in Greek history. […] It was said in late
lore that Hera or
Ares sent the Sphinx
from her
Ethiopian homeland
(the Greeks always remembered the foreign origin of the Sphinx) to
Thebes in
Greece where she asks all passersby the most famous riddle in history:
“Which creature has one voice and yet becomes four-footed and two-footed
and three-footed?” She strangled and devoured anyone unable to answer.
Oedipus solved the
riddle by answering: Man — who crawls on all fours as a baby, then walks
on two feet as an adult, and then uses a walking stick in old age.
It gets stranger:
By some accounts (but much more rarely), there was a second riddle:
“There are two sisters: one gives birth to the other and she, in turn,
gives birth to the first. Who are the two sisters?” The answer is “day
and night” (both words are feminine in Greek). This riddle is also found
in a Gascon version of the myth and could be very ancient.
Which tells us that a primordial version of the riddle refers directly to
temporal nonlinearity (templexity). The cryptic time-circuit is comparable
to a Yin-Yang vortex, without sexual polarity.
Bested at last, the tale continues, the Sphinx then threw herself from
her high rock and died. An alternative version tells that she devoured
herself.
She is, perhaps, an Ouroboros.
Thus Oedipus can be recognized as a “liminal” or threshold figure, helping effect the transition between the old
religious practices, represented by the death of the Sphinx, and the
rise of the new,
Olympian
gods.
It turns out, there is a comic twist to the return of Oedipus in modern
times:
Sigmund Freud describes “the question of where babies come from” as a
riddle of the Sphinx.
Note: ‘Anachronistic Oedipus’ needs an additional ‘K’ to make the
qabbalism come out right.
ADDED: A little supportive clarification (from the dark side) —
September 18, 2014Time Cube
Concentrate the crudest intellectual pathologies of time-travel theory,
then deduct the time-travel. Augment with free-style Biblical exegesis and
gonzo web-page design. Enter the
Time Cube. Right now
four days are taking place simultaneously, but the powers-that-be
are committed to hiding that truth of sacred time geometry from you. As
explained to students at MIT (link below): “When you understand this time
theory you can answer any other question that comes up in the universe.”
(Mind = Blown.)
Urban Future was reminded of Gene Ray’s gnostic time doctrine by
this
(rather lame) selection of “sinister conspiracy theories” listed by
The Independent. Some of the other SCTs are clearly quite
gone (“World War II was staged by the illuminati”), but none of
them approaches the plane of Ray’s revelation. A small taster (stripped of
throbbing font-switches):
Belly-Button Logic Works.
Does Your Teacher Know?
There’s a US$10,000 prize on offer for anyone who can “prove it wrong”
(yet to be claimed).
Wikipedia has a succinct and helpful
portal into the
topic. The most crucial Time Cube theses are
condensed at the
Encyclopedia Dramatica. Know Your Meme has a (single)
time-line-based
introduction
(which begins in August 1997). KYM links to
this
remarkably bad-tempered exchange.
There’s a suitably chaotic short video ‘documentary’
here. Also, Gene Ray
at
MIT (January 2002).
More.
The most penetrating academic engagement with Ray’s ideas, by Bei Dawai
(from Hsuan Chuang University in Taiwan) can be found
here.
ADDED: There’s an ominous sub-conspiracy, for anyone wanting to crank Time
Cube down to The Independent‘s level (repeated KYM
link):
Cubic Awareness Online [@],
originally located at cubicao.tk, was the first and largest fan site for
the Time Cube. Run by Richard Janczarski, the site also spawned a
message board called Graveyard of the Gods [@], where Janczarski was known as “Cubehead.” In 2007, Janczarski flew
out to Florida from his home in Australia to meet up with Gene Ray to
discuss the site and share ideas about the theory. While he was there,
he filmed an eighteen part documentary titled The Dr Gene Ray Time Cube
Experience, which he uploaded to his YouTube account Pyramid0rz [@].
In February 2008, a year after he publicly denounced the religion,
calling it an “evil scam.”, Janczarski announced on the Graveyard of the
Gods forum that he had renounced Time Cube theory in favor of
Christianity and would possibly be changing cubicao.tk into a Christian
website. On February 13th, a rumor surfaced on the forums that
Janczarski had taken his own life by jumping in front of a train [@] but an official news report was ever found [@]. Other users on the site speculated that Janczarski’s rumored death
might have been related to his fallout with Gene Ray [@] over the YouTube series and the “false information” Ray felt he was
presenting on Cubic Awareness Online [@].
ADDED: A
surprisingly lucid Time Cube appreciation. One especially amusing
moment:
Q: Is Ray anti-Semitic?
A: All references to “Jews” and “queer Jews” and “queer
Jew gods” and “Jew owners have enslaved your ass” should be interpreted
as a metonymic reference to monotheism.
September 26, 2014Interstellar
The most prominent problems with Interstellar have
already
been capably discussed, so it’s not worth spending much time going back
over them. The basic catastrophe scenario has more gaping holes than a
Hawking cosmology, and is in fact so ludicrous that it quite neatly takes
itself out of the way. The framing ideology is romantic superhumanism,
which might even count as a positive for some (although not here). The
musical score (by Hans Zimmer) was wildly overwrought. All-too-typically
for Hollywood, high-pitched emotional extravagance was shamelessly
indulged. Despite all of this, it was a great movie.
Interstellar‘s narrative architecture is composed of a
deep
cosmic space-frontier story, and an occult communication story, bolted
together by a time loop. (Plug.) The
involvement
of Kip Thorne reinforced the seriousness of this framework. (Thorne’s
explorations of
cosmological warping are a marvel of advanced modernity.) Nolan is, in any
case, a director who knows things — or at least suspects them,
enough to stretch his audience. As a piece of contemporary myth-making on
an epic scale, the achievement of Interstellar is formidable.
The movie envisages a future of roughly
Greerian
dreariness, in which Moon Hoax theories have become official doctrine,
earnestly promoted by the educational apparatus. Shutting down the high
frontier is an overt ideological project, as the state directs its
cultural energies into making America, once again, a nation of farmers.
(In this endeavor, it will find plenty of cooperative apparatchiks at a
one-step remove from
my Twitter TL.) It is thus,
as Scharlach has noted, a
lucid Tech-Comm critique of extreme
Terran
regression. Engineers are no longer wanted. The scene in which the young
Murphy Cooper’s half-witted school teacher innocently regurgitates
official doctrine on this subject is a minor masterpiece in itself.
Cooper’s intense love for his brilliant daughter ‘Murph’ is troweled on
thick, but it is inextricable from the sublimity of her intelligence. His
love for his stolid corn-growing son is dutiful (and delicately
portrayed), but his love for Murph is mad and immense, because it touches
upon vastnesses beyond the stars. It is human emotion only as a proxy for
twisted cosmological process — trans-galactic voyages and time-implosion.
When Cooper’s fellow astronaut Brand is forced to confess that her love
for a stranded space-pioneer is involved in her decision to prioritize a
visit to the planet where he was lost, she insists “… It doesn’t mean I’m
wrong.” Cooper responds cuttingly, “You know, it really could.” Within the
arc of the script, this coldness is repudiated, but it is too perfectly
stated to be entirely dismissed. It’s a Nolan movie, and there are loops
within loops.
The robots are superb (even if the movie’s dominant romantic superhumanism
keeps them in their place).
Above all else, the spectacular formulation of an extraterrestrial
occultism is where the movie’s ultimate greatness lies. It is getting far
too cramped here — on this rock, and in our brains — so we’re called
Out. The scenes of the outer solar system, the murderous
environments beyond, and the hyper-dimensional spaces in which our
locked-in time intuitions come apart, are all realized with soul-rending
magnificence. “Our species was born on the earth,” Cooper says. “It was
not meant to die here.”
It might be human triumphalism that sells Interstellar to its
audience, but this is a movie aligned with the distant Outside.
November 22, 2014Templexity Matters
Postulated: The intensity of time-travel fiction — and specifically
backward time-travel fiction — is a critical index of modernity.
As the time of modernity, initially grasped as a departure from
traditional cyclicity, is prolonged into deepening nonlinear
vortex, it provokes time-travel narrative as a figure in which to
seek resolution. The apocalyptic, or communicative action of the
end upon its past (through prophecy), is destined to final subsumption
within the image of templexity. With the formulation of the
Terminator
mythos, in the last years of the 20th century, this process of subsumption
is essentially complete. In this rigorous sense, the Terminator — as its
name suggests — announces the inauguration of the End Times, when the
thought of auto-production, emerging in phases from developments
in cybernetics, is culturally acknowledged in its comprehensive
cosmic-historical implication. The time-travel ‘bootstrap‘ or ‘ontological paradox’ is hazily recognized as the occult motor, or
operational singularity, of the modern historical process.
Any positive cybernetic dynamic is open to logical interpretation (and
dismissal) as a paradox. The
Epimenides
or Cretan Paradox, for instance, describes a reality-consistent recurrent
cycle of escalating skepticism from the perspective of positive
cybernetics, but nothing more than a concurrent self-contradiction from
that of formal logic. The ontological paradox invites the same divergent
reception. Auto-productive being is either a realistic foundation, or a
formal absurdity, with the variance depending on whether self-reference is
apprehended as a substantial dynamic or a static formality. From a certain
— respectably established — orientation, the encouragement of
circuit ontology within advanced modernity can only appear as a
solicitation of madness.
Christopher Nolan’s
Interstellar
(2014) is a movie whose narrative loop is based explicitly upon
ontological paradox. (It arrived too late to be referenced in
Templexity.) The circuit of auto-production it describes is looped around
black-hole cosmology, involving specific gravitational information that is
inaccessibly occluded by the event horizon of collapsed stars, yet
indispensable to the survival of the civilization eventually capable of
retrieving it. The templex pattern outlined in the movie is exquisite.
(Kip Thorne is doubtless owed considerable
appreciation
for that.)
The hypothesis of templexity is that the machine stimulating cultural
absorption in the ontological paradox cannot stop. In regards to
what has already happened, we haven’t seen anything yet.
November 25, 2014Edge of Tomorrow
(Also via Singapore Airlines.)
Edge of Tomorrow
is science fiction
Groundhog Day, agreed. (It would make no sense to contest this, some scenes achieve
near-perfect isomorphy.) Derivative, then, certainly — but this is a point
of consistency. Duplication is, after all, the latent theme.
Edge of Tomorrow works better because it has formalized the
time-repeat plot-system in videogame terms. Death replaces sleep, as
action drama replaces comedy, but the recurrence of time is captured more
incisively by the Edge of Tomorrow maxim: “We should just
re-set.” Further to be noted: Edge of Tomorrow actually has a
story about the basis of its time anomaly — and not an especially risible
one — while Groundhog Day doesn’t even pretend to.
We should just reset is not only videogame practice, but also the
recommendation of quantum
suicide, another practical Electrocene philosophy. The best fictional
exploration of QS (of which I am aware) is Greg Egan’s
Quarantine.
Videogame ideology and quantum suicide are
praxial indiscernibles. In other words, their behavioral
implications are equivalent. In both cases, the relation to self is made
selective, within a set of virtual clones. Whenever developments — within
one of multiple assumed timelines — goes ‘bad’ it should be deleted
(culled). In that way, only the most highly-adaptive complex behavioral
responses are preserved, shaping fate in the direction of success (as
defined by the selective agency).
Recent
discussions about
Christianity and Paganism raise the question:
what does it take for a system of belief to attain religious intensity
among Westerners today?
(Yes, this could be re-phrased in very different ways.) To cut right to
the chase: Could statistical ontology become a religion (or the philosophy
of a religion)? Quantum suicide terrorism anybody? This is a possibility I
find hard to eliminate.
Edge of Tomorrow, therefore? A more significant movie than might
be initially realized. (It’s monsters are also quite tasty.)
ADDED: Thoughts
on Post-Rationalist religion.
December 26, 2014Synthetic Templexity
Why
a sufficiently competent artificial intelligence looks indistinguishable
from a time anomaly. Yudkowsky’s FB post seems to be copy-and-paste
resistant, so you’ll just have to go and read the damn thing.
The Paperclipper angle is also interesting. If a synthetic mind with
‘absurd’ (but demanding) terminal goals was able to defer actualization of
win-points within a vast time-horizon, in order to concentrate upon the
establishment of intermediate production conditions, would its behavior be
significantly differentiable from a rational value (i.e. intelligence)
optimizer? (This blog says no.) Beyond a very modest threshold of
ambition, given a distant time horizon,
terminal values are irrelevant to intelligence optimization.
March 13, 2016
SECTION A - APOCALYPSES
CHAPTER ONE - CUMMULATION OF FAILURES
Nemesis
Harold Camping’s Family Radio
warned
its listeners to expect some unusually dramatic spring events:
Clearly, prediction can be a perilous business.
Yet, as Karl Popper noted with respect to scientific theories, falsifiable
predictions also serve a valuable – even indispensable – purpose. Any
model of reality that is able to make specific forecasts earns a
credibility that vaguer ‘world-views’ are not entitled to, although at the
price of radical vulnerability to devaluation, should its anticipations
prove unfounded.
Much like Marxism, the Libertarianism of Austrian School economic theory
combines historical expectations (of greater or lesser exactitude) with a
core of philosophical, political, and even emotional commitment that is
comparatively immunized against empirical refutation. Both Marxism and
Austrolibertarianism are large, highly variegated ideologies, with
complicated histories, expressing profound discontent with the dominant
order of the modern world, and prone to utopian temptations. Both are
(often indignant) moral-political doctrines extrapolated in very different
ways from Lockean natural-law property rights (to one’s own body and its
productive activity). Both attract a wide spectrum of followers, from
sober scholars to wild-eyed revolutionary advocates, who see in the
unfolding drama of history the possibility of definitive vindication (much
as the faithful of millenarian theologies have always done, and – as the
Camping case demonstrates – continue to do).
The Western roots of both Marxism and Austrolibertarianism reach down into
Jewish redemptive eschatology and Greek tragedy (it is perhaps noteworthy
that Karl Marx and Ludwig von Mises shared intriguing biographical
features, including highly-assimilated German-Jewish backgrounds, steeped
in European high-culture). Statist-Capitalism is portrayed as the
Satanic-Promethean antihero of an epic narrative, describing a sustained
violation of justice that finds itself held accountable in a final
apocalyptic moment giving meaning to history, and a seemingly
unconstrained hubris that meets its eventual nemesis. The high is brought
low, through a crisis whose mere prospect offers overwhelming
psychological satisfaction, and thus extraordinary emotional attachment.
Since the 1980s, Marxism has tended to retreat from the predictive mode.
Its enthusiasts no doubt remain committed to the prospect of a terminal
crisis of capitalism, perhaps even an imminent one, but Marxist prophecy
seems timorous and uncertain today, even under conditions of unusual
global economic dislocation. The Austrolibertarians, on the other hand,
are being drawn out onto a prophetic branch – possibly despite themselves
– with incalculable consequences for their future credibility. Their
fundamental assumption, that governments are by essence incompetent and
unqualified to run the monetary systems required by advanced economies,
leads them to an almost inescapable conclusion: hyperinflation.
Hyperinflation might be the sole economic example of a true singularity: a
hyperbolic approach to infinity (in finite time), producing a punctual
discontinuity. When hyperinflation strikes, it escalates rapidly towards a
hard limit, where
money dies. In the economic sphere, it is the unsurpassable example of regime
incompetence. How could Austrolibertarians – whose apocalyptic
inclinations are matched only by their disdain for political authority –
not be irresistibly attracted to it?
John Williams’ Shadow Government Statistics
blog is not
easily characterized as hardcore Austrolibertarian site (Williams
describes himself as a “conservative Republican with a libertarian bent”),
but the prognosis outlined carefully in its
Hyperinflation Special Report (2011)
exemplifies the tendency to predict imminent nemesis for command-control
monetary policy. Williams subscribes wholeheartedly to the Austrian
certitude that ‘kicking the can’ (up the road) – the central feature of
Keynesian macroeconomic policy – guarantees eventual catastrophe, and
‘eventual’ just got a whole lot closer. Nemesis is coming due.
Williams isn’t afraid to lock down some dates, with 2014 proposed as the
outer limit of possibility – and sooner is likelier:
As he elaborates:
The hyperinflationary destruction of the world’s reserve currency would be
a decisive event. The mere possibility of such an occurrence divides the
set of potential futures between two tracks. On one, in which the US
Dollar (FRN) survives, Austrolibertarian alarmism is humiliated, the
economic competence of the US government is – broadly speaking –
confirmed, and the principles of fiat currency production and central
banking are reinforced, along with their natural supporters among
neo-Keynesian anti-deflationary macroeconomists. On the other, the
Austrolibertarians dance in the ashes of the dollar, precious metals
replace fiat paper, central banks come under withering political attack,
and the economic role of government in general is subjected to a major
onslaught by energized free-marketeers. At least, that’s what a just
universe, or a fair bet, would look like.
Betting on a just universe could be the big mistake, however – and that’s
a temptation the morally-charged Austrolibertarian grand narrative finds
hard to avoid. In a morally indifferent universe, Nemesis is
non-redemptive, and the entire bet is an inverse Pascal’s wager, with
downside on every side. Make a brave prediction of hyperinflation, and you
either lose, or you lose – gloating neo-Keynesians, greater indebtedness,
and fatter government on the one hand, or some yet unconsolidated species
of neo-totalitarian horror on the other. (It’s noteworthy that a tour
through the history of post-hyperinflationary regimes doesn’t pass through
many examples of
laissez-faire commercial republics.)
So is the dollar going to die? — Quite possibly. Then things could
really turn nasty – more Harold Camping than Ludwig von Mises:
“lifeless bodies scattered about the face of all the earth. Death will be
everywhere.”
June 3, 2011Bonfire of the Vanities
As an ideological mantra, ‘Never Again’ is associated primarily with the
genocide politics of the 1940s, and in this context its effectiveness has
been questionable, at best. As a dominating imperative, it has been vastly
more consequential within the economic sphere, as a response to the Great
Depression of the 1930s. Whilst ethnically selective mass killing is
widely frowned upon, its attractions have been difficult to suppress.
Deflationary depression, on the other hand, is simply not allowed to
happen. This has been the supreme axiom of practical morality for almost a
century, uniquely and distinctively shaping our age. We can call it the
Prime Directive.
For the Western world, the 1930s were a near-death experience, an intimate
encounter with the abyss, recalled with religious intensity. Because the
threat was ‘existential’ – or unsurpassable – the remedy was invested with
the absolute passion of a faith. The Prime Directive was adopted as a
basic and final law, to which all social institutions and interests were
subordinated without reservation. To question or resist it was to invite
comprehensive disaster, and only a radically uninformed or criminally
reckless heretic – a ‘crank’ – would do that.
Anything is better than deflationary depression. That is the New
Deal Law.
The consolidation of financial central planning, based on central banking
and fiat currencies, provided the priesthood of the Prime Directive with
everything it needed to ensure collective obedience: No deflationary
depression without deflation, and no deflation with a well-oiled printing
press. ‘Counter-cyclical’ inflation was always an option, and the hegemony
of Anglophone economic-historical experience within the flourishing
American century marginalized the memory of inflationary traumas to global
backwaters of limited influence. Beside the moral grandeur of the Prime
Directive, monetary integrity counted for nothing (only a crank, or a
German, could argue otherwise).
The Prime Directive defines a regime that is both historically concrete
and systemically generalizable. As Ashwin Parameswaran explains on his
Macroeconomic Resilience
blog, this
type of regime is expressed with equal clarity in projects to manage a
variety of other (non-economic) complex systems, including rivers and
forests. Modern forestry, dominated by an imperative to fire suppression,
provides an especially illuminating example. He
notes:
At
Zerohedge, The World Complex
elaborates
on the history of fire suppression in the United States:
Spelling out the eventual consequences of the ‘progressive’ reformation of
forest management practices probably isn’t necessary, since – in striking
contrast to its economic analog – its lessons have been quite thoroughly
absorbed, widely and frequently referenced. Ecologically-sophisticated
environmentalists, in particular, have become attached to it as a
deterrent model of arrogant intervention, and its perverse consequences.
Everybody knows that the attempt to eliminate forest fires, rather than
extinguishing risk, merely displaced, and even accentuated it, as the
accumulation of tinder transformed a regime punctuated by comparatively
frequent fires of moderate scale with one episodically devastated by
massive, all-consuming conflagrations.
Parameswaran explains that the absence of fires leads to fuel build-up,
ecological drift towards less fire-resistant species, reduction in
diversity, and increased connectivity. The ‘protected’ or ‘stabilized’
forest changes in nature, from a cleared, robust, mixed, and patch-worked
system, to a fuel-cluttered, fragile, increasingly mono-cultural and
tightly interconnected mass, amounting almost to an explosive device.
Stability degrades resilience, and preventing the
catastrophe-to-come becomes increasingly expensive and uncertain, even as
the importance of prevention rises. By the penultimate stage of this
process, crisis management has engineered an impending apocalypse: a
disastrous event that simply cannot possibly be allowed to happen
(although it surely will).
Parameswaran
calls
this apocalyptic development sequence The Pathology of Stabilisation in
Complex Adaptive Systems. It’s what the Prime Directive inevitably leads
to. Unfortunately, diagnosis contains no hint of remedy. Every step up the
road makes escape more improbable, as the scale of potential calamity
rises. Few will find much comfort in the realization that taking this path
was insane.
‘Black-boxes’ (or flight recorders) retrieved from air disasters are
informative in this respect. With surprising regularity, the last words of
the pilot, announced to no one in particular, eloquently express an
acknowledgment of unattractive but unmistakable reality: “Oh $#it!” Less
common – in fact, unheard of – is any honest address to the passengers:
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We are all about to
die.” What would be the point?
Everything to be realistically expected from our ruling political and
financial elites can be predicted by rigorous analogy. This flight doesn’t
end anywhere good, but it would be foolish to await an announcement.
Unencumbered by official position in the Cathedral of the Prime Directive,
‘Mickeyman’ at World Complex is free to sum things up with brutal honesty:
February 24, 2012Can’t kick the habit …
June 15, 2011Hubris
In the complete absence of philosophical pretension, certain stark
commitments — of deep philosophical significance — are sometimes made
manifest. Such is the case with Grant Williams’ extended (and thoroughly
charted)
meditation
on The Economic Consequences of the Peace.
What emerges, with exceptional clarity, is the fundamental complicity of
Austrian Economics, Metaphysical Naturalism, and the Tragic Sense. This
triple-headed harsh realism finds itself positioned in a relation
of radical dissent to the dominant assumptions of our time, deploring the
hubris of a global managerial elite who presume to turn back the
tides through technocratic action. As Williams lucidly states:
Tragedy is the dramatization of natural sovereignty, expressed as the
visitation of climactic ruin upon unsustainably deluded human ambition. It
is not an argument, but rather the demonstration of a reality beyond
argument — a naturalistic prophecy.
The Konratieff wave-length sets a rough time-horizon for the tragic
forecast. Already marginalized, within a decade or so — absent the
anticipated nemesis — it will have been almost fully dissipated
into comedy (or implausible melodrama). The ‘hubris’ of macroeconomic
wave-management will by then appear — even to previous skeptics — as
nothing of the kind, but instead as confirmed wisdom and effective power,
wielded by true masters of the tides. The alternative, of course, is
“dire”.
ADDED:
Those dancing on the grave of Nature should be careful who they dance
with.
October 9, 2014Kicking the Can
It’s difficult to keep track of all the ways in which the hyperbolic
explosion of time-preference is expressed in the present world economic
order, especially in its Western core, where the rot is deepest. From
insensate looting to exponential debt expansion, and from sugar-high
stimulus programs to insolvent, culturally-ruinous welfare systems
(cooked-up for a succession of short-term political head-rushes), the
entire economic machinery is locked into virtual apocalypse accumulation.
Never deal with anything today that can be added to the mountain of woes
due tomorrow. As historical time collapses into sheer orgiastic spasm, it
converges with the frothiest media attention span, hurtling towards the
edge of the precipice where nothing remains but news.
Here‘s the latest dimension of kicking-the-can:
… if US inventories, already at record high levels, and with the
inventory to sales rising to great financial crisis levels, had not
grown by $121.9 billion and merely remained flat, US Q1 GDP would not be
0.2%, but would be -2.6%.
[Emphasis in original]
Systematic unreality has a face, and it’s that of a talking-head telling
you that the end hasn’t yet happened.
Nemesis is not mocked. When she arrives, it’s going to hurt.
ADDED: The
popcorn version. (Think I linked this before as an Outsideness
Strategy
classic.)
April 29, 20152017
A
little
illustrative sang froid:
Naemi has heard all the predictions of the dam’s imminent demise.
“Sure, we have problems,” he says. “But the Americans are exaggerating.
This dam is not going to collapse. Everything is going to be fine.”
I mean, come on, it’s not as if the 2016 effect could actually escalate.
(Via.)
January 1, 2017
CHAPTER TWO - SUSPENSION
Quote notes (#70)
AoS speaks for me on
this:
There are two types of people: Those who only sometimes procrastinate
those who are so inclined to it that it creates havoc in their lives.
Lately, I tend to be the latter of the two. […] My procrastination has
been so bad today that I actually researched “procrastination” in order
to procrastinate a bit longer. Then, I tweeted about my procrastination
in order to drag it out even further. Then, others joined in, and it was
clear that I am far from the only one. […] Well, the fine folks at
The Next Web
blog have posted a very timely article on the science of procrastination
…
Procrastination is a time-based phenomenon, so I’m sure there’s a gripping
philosophical angle, if only it were possible to extract some cognitive
resources from the labyrinth of digression. Seriously, there’s a major
procrastination post coming … some time later (i.e. as soon as practically
possible, which always means at the last, sleep-starved minute).
The essence of procrastination (at least for me):
this is far too urgent to deal with right now.
April 1, 2014Collapse Schedules
It took over seven decades for Soviet communism to implode. Arguments
could no doubt be made — and they would have to be right — that
given certain quite limited counter-factual revisions of historical
contingency, this period might have been significantly extended. Austrians
nevertheless consider the eventual termination of comparatively pure
communism as a vindication (of the Calculation Problem, in particular).
They are not simply wrong to do so.
Fascist economics
is far more formidably resilient than its now-defunct soviet antagonist.
Any attempt to quantify this functional superiority as a predicted system
duration is transparently impractical. Margins of theoretical error or
imprecision, given very modestly transformed variables, could translate
into many decades of extended (or decreased) longevity. Coldly considered,
there is no reason to confidently expect a theoretically constructed
collapse schedule to hold its range of probable error to much
under a century. (Darker reflection might lead to the conclusion that even
this level of ‘precision’ betrays unwarranted hubris.) There might be
crushing lessons to be learned from the history of Messianic expectation.
Such acknowledgements can easily prompt
over-reaction. Insofar as the collapse schedules of Austrian
apocalypticism pretend to certainty, they undoubtedly court humiliation.
Yet, if the soft-fascist configuration of global ‘capitalism’ were to
comprehensively and unambiguously disintegrate within the next two
decades, the Austrian vindication — retrospectively evaluated — would
easily match the Soviet case.
Those
who doggedly maintained that
this cannot perpetuate itself for long would be seen to have
understood what their opponents had not. Since the critique of Soviet
political economy was not, retrospectively, derided as a ‘stopped clock’,
there is no reason to imagine that this would be. The redemptive power of
apocalypse easily overrides substantial scheduling embarrassments.
The question that will ultimately be seen to have mattered, then, is far
more “can this go on?” than “when (exactly) will this stop?” The important
prediction is compound:
the longer it continues, the harder it ends. This too might be
false, but if it is, a substitute fascist presupposition must be correct,
and that has yet to be adequately formulated. Roughly speaking, it insists
that politics subordinates economics absolutely. In other words,
the thoroughgoing politicization of the economy is indefinitely viable.
This is an assumption subject to humiliation by any schedule that falls
short of perpetuity, since mere medium-term sustainability does nothing to
justify it. Hitler demanded a thousand years. How could his more
financially-sophisticated successors — enthroned in planetary hegemony —
ask for less?
ADDED: Attaining balance on this topic would test the skills of a
tightrope walker. “There’s a lot of ruin in a nation,” (Handle reminds
us),
but
“It’s like that old saying– better to be a year (or decade) too early than
a day too late. Because one should never underestimate the speed with
which things can unravel.” Plus
additional
highly-relevant remarks from Simon Black (don’t miss the embedded
diagram).
June 11, 2013Suspense
In respect to the initial formulation of a question along the rough lines
“How is suspension of consequences possible?” there are only three basic
options:
(1) It’s not. All deferral of consequences is illusion. The reality is
something akin to instant karma. (There’s something about this
line of thinking I respect, but I’ve no idea how it could be coherently
put together, and then knitted with explanatory plausibility to evident
historical fact.)
(2) It’s complicated.
(3) That old problem is over. Haven’t you heard of the Death of Reality?
Postmodernism, bitchez. (This is Derrida and Baudrillard — smart,
terminally decadent, and radically inconsistent with NRx. It’s also the
implicit principle of post-liberal macro-economics.)
Number Two is surely the only path here that is NRx-compatible. Its
articulation remains almost entirely unachieved, although this is no great
source of shame — the prior intellectual history of the world got nowhere
with it, either. It might not be the deepest problem about time, but it is
the one with the greatest immediate relevance to generally-acknowledged
historical processes, and (perhaps) also the greatest direct practical
application. What it explores is the potential for
a realistic analysis of the provisionally-functional denial of
reality. It crosses almost everything ‘we’ are talking about.
Charles Hugh-Smith
writes:
By the time extend-and-pretend finally reaches its maximum limits, the
resulting implosion is so large that the shock waves topple regimes,
banks, currencies and entire nations.
If NRx seems predisposed to apocalypticism, it is because it concurs —
both with the proposal that “maximum limits” exist, and the attendant
thesis that some reality-suppressing tendency is reaching them.
“Extend-and-pretend” — or radically finite reality denial — is an engine
of catastrophe. It enables negative consequences to be accumulated through
postponement, without prospect of final (‘postmodern’) absolution. Yes,
the coagulated detritus does eventually collide ruinously with the
unpleasantness purifier. The fact it hasn’t
already done so, however, is a puzzle of extraordinary
profundity.
ADDED: Scharlach responds.
February 19, 2015Suspended Animation
According to Herbert Stein’s Law, the signature warning of our age, “If
something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” The question is: When?
The central concerns of environmentalists and radical market economists
are easy to distinguish – when not straightforwardly opposed – yet both
groups face a common mental and historical predicament, which might even
be considered the outstanding social discovery of recent times: the
extraordinary durability of the unsustainable. A pattern of mass behavior
is observed that leads transparently to crisis, based on explosive
(exponential) trends that are acknowledged without controversy, yet
consensus on matters of fact coexists with paralyzing policy
disagreements, seemingly interminable procrastination, and irresolution.
The looming crisis continues to swell, close, horribly close, but in no
way that is persuasively measurable closer, like some grating Godot
purgatory: “You must go on; I can’t go on; I’ll go on.”
Urban Future doesn’t do green anguish as well as teeth-grinding
Austrolibertarian irritation, so it won’t really try. Suffice to say that
being green is about to become almost unimaginably maddening, if it isn’t
already. Just as the standard ‘green house’ model insinuates itself,
near-universally, into the structure of common sense, the world
temperature record has locked into a flatline, with surging CO2 production
showing up everywhere except as warming. Worse still, a new wave of energy
resources – stubbornly based on satanic hydrocarbons, and of truly
stupefying magnitude – is rolling out inertially, with barely a hint of
effective obstruction. Tar sands, fracking, and sub-salt deep sea oil
deposits are all coming on-stream already, with methane clathrates just up
the road. The world’s on a burn, and it can’t go on (but it carries on).
Financial unsustainability is no less blatant, or bizarrely enduring.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, once (classically) liberal
Western economies have seen government expenditure rise from under 5% to
over 40% of total income, with much of Europe crossing the 50% redline
(after which nothing remotely familiar as ‘capitalism’ any longer exists).
Public debt levels are tracing geometrically elegant exponential curves,
chronic dependency is replacing productive social participation, and
generalized sovereign insolvency is now a matter of simple and obvious
fact. The only thing clearer than the inevitability of systemic bankruptcy
is the political impossibility of doing anything about it, so things carry
on, even though they really have to stop. Unintelligible multi-trillion
magnitudes of impending calamity stack up, and up, and up in a near future
which never quite arrives.
The frozen limbo-state of durable unsustainability is the new normal
(which will last until it doesn’t). The pop cultural expression is zombie
apocalypse, a shambling, undying state of endlessly prolonged
decomposition. When translated into economic analysis, the result is
epitomized by Tyler Cowen’s influential
e-book
The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of
Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better. (Yes, Urban Future is arriving incredibly late to this party,
but in a frozen limbo that doesn’t matter.)
In a nutshell, Cowen argues that the exhaustion of three principal sources
of ‘low-hanging fruit’ has brought the secular trend of American growth to
a state of stagnation that high-frequency business cycles have partially
obscured. With the consumption of America’s frontier surplus (free land),
educational surplus (smart but educationally-unserved population), and —
most importantly — technological surplus, from major breakthroughs opening
broad avenues of commercial exploitation, growth rates have shriveled to a
level that the country’s people are psychologically unprepared to accept
as normal.
It fell to Cowen’s GMU colleague Peter Boettke to clearly make the
pro-market case for stagnationism that Cowen seems to think he had already
persuasively articulated. In an overtly supportive post, Boettke
transforms
Cowens’ rather elusive argument into a far more pointed anti-government
polemic — the discovery of a new depressive equilibrium, in which
relentless socio-political degeneration absorbs and neutralizes a decaying
trend of techno-economic advance.
Perhaps surprisingly, the general tenor of response on the libertarian
right was quite different. Rather than celebrating Cowen’s exposure of the
statist ruin visited upon Western societies, most of this commentary
concentrated upon the stagnationist thesis itself, attacking it from a
variety of interlocking angles. David R. Henderson’s Cato
review
makes stinging economic arguments against Cowen’s claims about land and
education. Russ Roberts (at Cafe Hayek)
shows
how Cowen’s dismal story about stagnant median family incomes draws upon
data distorted by historical changes in US family structure and
residential patterns. The most common line of resistance, however,
instantiated by
Don Boudreaux,
John Hagel,
Steven Horwitz,
Bryan Caplan, and
Ronald Bailey, among others, rallies in defense of actually existing consumer
capitalism. Bailey, for example, notes:
What seems pretty clear from most of this (and already in Cowen’s account)
is that nothing much has been moving forward in the world’s ‘developed’
economies for four decades except for the information technology
revolution and its Moore’s Law dynamics. Abstract out the microprocessor,
and even the most determinedly optimistic vision of recent trends is
gutted to the point of expiration. Without computers, there’s nothing
happening, or at least nothing good.
[… still crawling …]
November 11, 2011Suspended Animation (Part 2)
To make a protracted topic out of this phenomenon is to offer a hostage to
fortune. Everything could go over the cliff tomorrow. Perhaps it already
has (and we’re just waiting, like Wile E. Coyote, for the consummating
splatter).
Greens have been dealing with exactly this question, for a while. After
Paul Ehrlich had his credibility torched by Julian Simon, in the most
intellectually consequential
wager
in history, he responded in frustration: “The bet doesn’t mean anything.
Julian Simon is like the guy who jumps off the Empire State Building and
says how great things are going so far as he passes the 10th floor.”
If environmental catastrophe is structured like this, according to a
pattern of durable unsustainability, or disconcerting postponement, there
is no obvious theory to account for the fact. With economics, things are
different, to such an extent that the entire political economy of the
world, along with the overwhelming preponderance of professionalized
economic ‘science’, has been geared over the course of a little under a
century to crisis postponement as a dominant objective. If the New World
Order follows a master plan, this is it.
For ideological purists on the free-market right,
laissez-faire capitalism is the ‘unknown ideal’ (although early
20th century Shanghai approached it, as did its student, Hong Kong, in
later decades), but it requires no purism whatsoever to acknowledge that
the Great Depression effectively buried it as an organizing principle of
the world, and that the system which replaced it found political and
intellectual expression in the ideas of John Maynard Keynes. Commercial
self-organization, which built industrial capitalism before anyone had
even the sketchiest understanding of what was happening, gave way to the
technocracy of macroeconomics, guided by the radically original belief
that governments had a responsibility to manage the oscillations of
economic fortune.
In the
words
of Peter Thiel (drawn straight from the free-market id):
As Cato’s Daniel J. Mitchell
puts it, more narrowly:
Because hell’s a hard sell, political and economic rationality have been
heading in different directions for 80 years. Even the tropical latitudes
of purgatory have proven to be socially combustible, and popularly
sensitized politics – which need not be formally ‘democratic’ – tend
(strongly) to flee Molotov cocktails in the direction of macroeconomic
management. The crucial Keynesian maxim, “In the long run we are all
dead,” is especially pertinent to regimes. Who’s going to regenerate deep
economic recovery, if the route to it lies through gulfs of fire and
brimstone that are fundamentally incompatible with political survival?
History, redundantly, provides the obvious answer: nobody is.
The accursed path not taken, across the infernal abyss, has become so
neglected and overgrown with weeds that it is rarely noticed, but it is
still graphically marked by the advice that Treasury Secretary Andrew
Mellon gave to Herbert Hoover as the way to navigate the Great Depression
(advice that was, of course, dismissed):
In recalling this recommendation, as an unacceptable option,
Hoover commemorates the precise moment that capitalism ceased to exist as
a politically credible social possibility. The alternative – which has
many names, although ‘corporatism’ will do – was defined by its systematic
refusal of the ‘liquidationist’ path. Coming out stronger on the other
side meant nothing, because the passage would probably kill us – it would
certainly destroy our political careers. In any case, it was a long run
solution to a short term problem, scheduled by volatile popular
irritability and election cycles, and in the long run we are all dead.
Better, by far, to use ‘macroeconomic policy’ (monetary mind-control) to
artificially prolong unsustainable economic euphoria – or even its jaded,
hung-over simulation – than to plunge into a catastrophe that might
imaginably have been delayed.
It doesn’t take a Schumpeterian fanatic to suspect that such ‘creative
destruction (but without the destruction)’ is unlikely to provide a
sustainable recipe for economic vitality. When evaluated realistically, it
is a formula that programs a trend to perpetual stagnation. Stagnation as
a choice.
Because money serves as a general equivalent, and thus as a neutral,
non-specific, purely quantitative medium of exchange, it is very
supportive of certain highly-consequential economic illusions, of a kind
that macroeconomics has been especially prone to. It can easily seem as if
‘the economy’ consists essentially of undifferentiated, quantitative
aggregates, such as ‘demand’, ‘gross domestic product’, ‘money supply’,
‘land’, ‘labor’, and ‘capital’. In fact, none of these things exist,
except as high-level abstractions, precipitated by the monetary function
of general exchangeability.
An understanding of Schumpeterian creative destruction requires, as a
preliminary, the recognition that capital is heterogeneous. When expressed
in a monetary form, it can appear as a homogeneous quantity, susceptible
to simple accumulation, but in its productive social reality it consists
of technological apparatus – tools, machines, infrastructures, and
installations – representing irretrievable investments, of qualitatively
distinctive kinds. The monetary equivalent of such industrial capital is
derived from the market values attributed its various components, and
these are extremely dynamic, virtual, and speculative. Since the value
retrievable from liquidation (and ultimately from scrap) is generally a
small fraction, or lower bound, of capital asset value, the ‘capital
stock’ is estimated with reference to its productive usage, rather than
its intrinsic worth. Schumpeter was careful to break this down into two
very different aspects.
Firstly, and most straightforwardly, industrial capital is a resource that
depreciates at a regular and broadly predictable rate as a function of
output. It is consumed in the process of production, like any other
material input, but at a slower rate. Creative destruction, however,
refers to a second, far more drastic type of capital depreciation,
resulting from technological obsolescence. In this case, capital stock is
‘destroyed’ – suddenly and unpredictably – by an innovation, taking place
elsewhere in the economy, which renders its anticipated use unprofitable.
In this way, large ‘quantities’ of ‘accumulated’ capital can be
depreciated overnight to scrap values, and the investments they represent
are annihilated. The hallucination of homogeneous capital is
instantaneously vaporized, as painstakingly built fortunes are written
down to nothing.
Several points suggest themselves:
1. The violence of creative destruction is directly proportional to its
fecundity. The greater, deeper, and more far-reaching the innovation, the
more colossal is the resulting capital destruction. At the extreme,
profound technological revolutions lay waste not only to specific machines
and skills, but to entire infrastructures, industries, occupational
categories, and financial systems.
2. The cultural implication of creative destruction far exceeds issues of
‘moral hazard’ and ‘time preference’. The victims of industrial change
waves – whether businesses, workers, or financiers – are not being
punished by the market for imprudence, slackness, or short-sightedness.
They are ruined by pure hazard, as the reciprocal of the absolutely
unanticipated nature of technological invention (occurring elsewhere).
Neither the creation, nor the destruction, is remotely ‘fair’ – or ever
could be. (Although Dawinian ‘virtue’ lies in flexible adaptability — Hong
Kong always does OK.)
3. Massive capital destruction expresses technological revolution.
Macroeconomic analysis (measuring homogeneous aggregates) will always miss
the most significant episodes in industrial evolution, since these do not
register primarily as growth, but rather the opposite. Hell is a hothouse.
4. A policy environment designed to preserve macroeconomic aggregates
(e.g. ‘wealth’ or ’employment’) necessarily opposes itself to the basic
historical process of industrial revolution, because destruction of the
existing economy is strictly indistinguishable from industrial renewal.
For that old stuff to be worth anything (beyond scrap) we have to keep
using it, which means that we’re not switching over. To cross the gulf, we
have to enter the gulf. (Like most things in this universe: harsh but
true.)
5. Real historical advance is now politically unacceptable. Either
politics wins (eternal stagnation) or history does (political collapse).
Interesting times (or not).
The world couldn’t take the heat, so it got out of the kitchen. There’s
cold porridge for dinner, and it’s going to be cold porridge for
breakfast. Eventually the porridge will run out, but that could take a
while …
… and here’s Ben Bernanke on topic: “I’m not a believer in the Old
Testament theory of business cycles. I think that if we can help people,
we need to help people.” (via Mike Krieger
at
ZH)
Cold porridge politics forever. Yum!
November 18, 2011Suspended Animation (Part 3)
The new millennium is teaching us vastly more about zombies than anybody
could have anticipated. Long gone are the virile, predatory vampires that
once populated horror stories about capitalism, sucking out the vital
essence of the proletariat in gothic fortresses of ‘dead labor’. Instead,
shambling worm-eaten wrecks mill about aimlessly, whilst augmenting their
numbers in obscure cannibalistic circuits that defy rational comprehension
and which are, in any case, too hideous to steadily contemplate. Fiends
have degenerated into ghouls, who do not hunt and feed to strengthen
themselves, but only to carry on, prolonging their putrescent decrepitude.
A 2002 Guardian
story
about “Japan’s zombie economy” prefigures a number of later, and more
general, revelations. In particular, it identifies the spreading zombie
apocalypse with the slow-motion collapse of Keynesianism, as ‘stimulative’
monetary and fiscal policies (zero interest rates combined with massive
government deficit spending) lose their magical powers of revitalization,
and instead merely perpetuate an interminable state of undeath.
Hyper-stimulation is required just to hang on to the flatline.
Of course, being the Guardian, the solution is obvious: “what the economy
needs now is a good dose of inflation.” For undead Keynesians, there’s no
malaise too deep for an invigorating wave of currency destruction to
solve. This is where the zombie metabolism really gets interesting. By the
end of the decade, America had gone full zombie itself, and begun to
realize that this wasn’t just some weird Japanese thing it didn’t
understand, but an altogether more general and radically mysterious
phenomenon. Ben Bernanke’s Federal Reserve pushed US interest rates to the
floor (ZIRP) and began to incontinently monetize public debt (QE) whilst
nationalizing private debt (TARP), using every available policy instrument
to direct the economy in an inflationary direction, at maximum velocity.
Nothing much happened. Zombies don’t do fever.
At this point, the questions come flooding in. For instance: why is
anybody still buying Japanese or American government bonds? Isn’t it
obvious that this paper represents nothing except a slice of unredeemable
debt, promising an insulting return, ‘guaranteed’ by a structurally
insolvent entity, and associated with policies more-or-less explicitly
oriented towards deliberate currency destruction? What are people
thinking? To answer that, it’s necessary to venture a little deeper into
the zombie world.
The idea of the US Dollar (or Japanese Yen) as a ‘safe haven’ might sound
like a joke, and you’ve probably heard it before:
Joe Dollar and Jacques Euro are camping in the woods, when they suddenly
hear the terrifying snuffles of a famished carnivore, getting closer. Joe
begins hastily pulling on his running shoes. “What are you doing?” asks
Jacques. “You can’t out-run a bear market.”
“I don’t need to outrun the market,” Joe replies. “I just need to outrun
you.”
At Asia Times Online, Martin Hutchinson
envisages
a financial crisis endgame that “eliminat[es] the government debt markets
that have formed the centerpiece of the last three centuries,” returning
the world to the market-based money and free banking regime of 1693,
before the creation of the Bank of England. Paradoxically, however, the
prospect of collapse raises the financial potency of the state to an
unprecedented level, as the ‘safety’ it promises disconnects from
questions of economic competence and reverts to something far more
atavistic and Hobbesian. Once everything starts to buckle, credibility
attaches to the biggest, meanest, and most ruthless provider of
mafia-style ‘protection’. Relativistic (zero- or negative-sum) power
politics takes center stage.
A pedestrian but informative financial
report
from Bloomberg sets it out clearly:
The US Dollar might be nothing more than
the
“best looking horse in the glue factory,” but once the financial logic of
zombie apocalypse takes over, the implications can be far-reaching.
Bloomberg continues:
It’s worth taking a moment to digest these numbers. Nobody expects average
US inflation over the next seven years to come in under 1.415% p.a., or
under 1.88% over the next ten, so the yield is sheer racketeering. Yet
this blatant assault on the lower colon of savers has been compatible with
a one-year return of 14% (!) — they’re begging for it. Seriously, who
cares if Bernanke is lighting up a fat Cuban with a large bill lifted
straight out of their pocket? It just makes him look
badder, and that’s what they’re paying for. Gold sounds good in
theory, but it doesn’t come with its own attached gangster organization,
so hanging onto it through the zombie interlude could be difficult. It’s
safer, by far, to invest in the alpha state.
Because this Hobbesian zombinomics is political and relativisitic, there
are epsilon states at the other end of the trade, as well as a beta state
caught in the middle. Europe isn’t a state at all, of course, which is how
the (interminable) final phase of zombinomics got started. Before
it changed, however, the EU conjuring act seemed to be going
pretty well. Every Eurozone member state issuing government debt in the
common currency paid yields that were broadly harmonized, as if Europe was
a financially sovereign entity, standing united behind its paper. The
realization that economic sovereignty remained national, even after the
alienation of monetary sovereignty to the European Central Bank, came as
something of a shock, and bond spreads gaped accordingly.
The hallucination of ‘Europe’ as a united, honorary alpha state, rapidly
degenerated to reality, recoding government bonds as zombie apocalypse
security scrip. Suddenly, Greek bonds stopped having anything much to do
with the ECB, and started to mumble promises in Greek – ultimately, that
the Greek state would do whatever it took to secure redemption, whilst
mobilizing its Olympian powers to maintain social discipline if necessary.
A flight for the exits immediately ensued. Ditto, with variations of speed
and intensity, for all the epsilons (= PIIGS).
Where to flee? That’s the zombinomic question
par excellence (searching for the best looking horse in the glue
factory). First choice, for the keenest Hobbes readers, was to head
straight to Mr. Big, a.k.a. Benny the Yank, wait politely whilst he
finished smoking a mirved nuke, and then beg for protection (that’s your
14% one year jump in the value of a 10-year US Treasury bond, right
there). The second choice — more appealing to old-fashioned types who
thought economics still counted for something – was to look for
comparative financial responsibility closer to home.
Briefly, this route led to genuine quality, but zombinomics quickly
resumed its grip:
… which brings us to Germany, and the latest chapter in the zombie saga —
comic or tragic, and probably both, ironic to the point of absurdity in
any case. Ruined, shrunken, divided, and traumatized by guilt, post-war
Germany sought above all to bury its nationalistic aspirations in Europe.
What became the EU was for Germany – as Algeria was for the French foreign
legionnaires – a place in which to forget. Now the bond ‘market’,
in its increasingly desperate search for a big, tough, disciplinary state
(a global beta will do fine), is determined to dig the Teutonic Leviathan
from its grave.
With twin memories of Weimar hyper-inflation and statist hyper-assertion
still vivid, Germany is stubbornly holding out against the full-zombie
option of (monetary and fiscal) financial debauchery counter-balanced by
Hobbesian security politics. This reluctance to throw itself into the
spirit of the age has, naturally enough, exposed it to relentless
international vilification, and the pressure will only increase. It could
all get unpleasantly interesting.
November 25, 2011Suspended Animation (Part 4)
By the beginning of the second decade of the new millennium, the world had
begun to adapt itself to a problem that had tortured it in the 1930s, and
deformed it subsequently — that of
sub-optimal equilibrium. The practical significance of this idea
is difficult to exaggerate.
As a rigorous economist, Henry Hazlitt was theoretically entitled – and
even compelled – to
savagely deride
the Keynesian model of ‘low-employment equilibrium’, and to painstakingly
explain that it did not describe an equilibrium of any kind (in economic
terms). Yet such attacks, like those of the Austrians more generally, have
been of slight consequence, since Keynes was not in any strongly
defensible sense an economist, but rather a
political economist, in both of the obvious ways this expression
can be understood. His bad equilibrium did not reflect the operation of
market forces, but rather, the workings of the market under a specific
conception of politically realistic circumstances, and the ‘analysis’ of
the General Theory was less a technically rigorous description of
events than a political prescription for action, keenly attentive to the
opportunities and constraints affecting its application, or transition
into policy.
Keynes defined the political spirit of the second half of the 20th
century, first in the West, and later more widely, by normalizing the
pre-eminence of the state in economic affairs, and by subordinating the
idea of economic self-correction to political considerations. The role of
the new political economy, now technocratically mainstreamed as
economic policy, was to route around labor markets, which could
never be expected to work efficiently, since downside corrections were
judged politically unacceptable. Pure economics was ended, or at least
utterly marginalized, by the recognition that labor could opt out of the
game, kick over the table, and refuse to play the commodity.
Market-clearing labor pricing became an abstract (and, for Keynesians,
risible) conception, oblivious to the realities of popular democratic
politics, and – in extremis – the potential for Marxian
revolution.
Hence the consensus-building sympathy for the Keynesian approach on the
establishment right, where it was interpreted as a bulwark against Marxist
temptations, and also the deep antipathy it elicited on the
anti-establishment right, where it was (no less realistically) understood
as a pre-emptive concession to socialism. On the left, a comparable schism
was evident, between those who embraced it as a curtailment of capitalism,
and those who denounced it as an ersatz socialism, designed for
conservative convenience. The Keynesian ‘middle’ has been the decisive
political reality of the 20th century, and its multiple ideological
meanings still organize every major axis of socio-economic controversy.
When labor markets are locked on the downside – through macroeconomic
recognition and political petrification of their ‘stickiness’ – some kind
of socio-economic ratchet mechanism is automatically produced. To an
extent, capital can flee into informalization (for instance illegal
immigrant labor), or international labor arbitrage, intensifying the trend
to out-sourcing and globalization. More central, however, are the twin
macro-tendencies Keynes focused upon: towards fiscal and monetary
compensations, based on demand management and the exploitation of ‘money
illusion’ (or attachment to nominal income). Fiscal stimulus can
be undertaken in an attempt to elevate demand, until it reaches a point of
artificial equilibrium commensurate with labor price levels (thus clearing
unemployment). Alternatively, or in concert, money supply can be expanded
– and currency degraded – to facilitate real wage decreases despite
nominal stickiness.
Essentially, that’s it. There’s no other ammo in the macroeconomic
arsenal. This is remarkable given the fact that both fiscal and monetary
adjustments are mere tricks, and not even sophisticated tricks, but quite
straightforward attempts at confidence manipulation that anybody with
‘rational expectations’ sees through immediately, thus neutralizing them.
On the monetary side this is especially obvious — and well-attested
historically. Once inflationary expectations have become entrenched, they
become the staple topic of wage negotiations, as was seen in the 1970s.
There is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that workers are indifferent to
inflationary wage depreciation. ‘Money illusion’ – insofar as it exists at
all – is basically a one-off scam, harvested in the brief period when a
long-established reputation for responsible currency management is thrown
in the trash. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice isn’t going to
happen. Basing economic policy on this is the cheapest kind of street
hustle (and few would any longer admit to trying it in public).
Stimulus isn’t much better. Real demand is ultimately exchange, and thus
derivative from supply. Nobody can (economically) demand anything, without
having something to offer in return – that’s Say’s Law, and it’s
theoretically impregnable, because it’s elementary common sense. The only
way to steer around it is conjuring, by extracting demand from one part of
the economy invisibly, and re-inserting it conspicuously somewhere else.
This kind of magic can get quite Byzantine, so it tends to reach
exhaustion more slowly than monetary abuse, but its foundations in
sustainable economic reality are no more secure. Once taxpayers
acknowledge government debts as liabilities (future tax payments) that
have already been virtually deducted from their spending power, the game
is over. Since a plausible model for (expansive) fiscal policy exhaustion
is sovereign debt crisis, it is not unreasonable to begin drawing the
curtains already.
Given the exponential trend of social history, most of what has ever
happened has taken place since the Great Depression began, and during this
time the world has inhabited — more or less consciously — a deliberately
constructed system of illusion, or confidence trick. Whether analyzed from
the
left
or the right, the
most striking feature of this situation has been inadequately apprehended,
or even interrogated: how has it persisted? How can something that is
transparently [insert epithet] unworkable last for over 80 [insert triple
epithet] years?
Eighty years is a pretty good human life-span. Someone could easily expend
their life within the Keynesian dream-palace, literally living a lie, with
the implication that whatever importance ‘reality’ might have in theory,
it need have almost nothing to do with us. We can miss it completely,
caught up in a magic show that exceeds our longevity, half-hypnotized by
illusions that no one really believes in, but which suffice to put things
off, and off, and off, and …
in the long run we are all dead. Who cares about a truth that
never arrives? A magic trick that lasts your whole life is your life.
Scarcely anybody alive today has known anything else.
And it’s all going to be over real soon … honestly …
December 2, 2011Suspended Animation (Part 5)
Does Postmodernism still seem cool to anybody? — Probably not. Having sold
whatever simulacrum of a soul it might have had to the fickle gods of
fashion, it has learnt more about the reign of Chronos than it might have
expected to – the kids get devoured, and it’s on to something new. What
was accepted for no good reason gets discarded for no good reason. In
political science it’s called democracy (but that’s another discussion).
Clearly, there’s something profoundly just about the disappearance of
postmodernism into the trashcan of random difference (what’s ‘in’ has to
be new, preferably meaninglessly so). It’s even ‘poetically just’,
whatever that means. But it also destroys information. Although
Postmodernism was certainly a fad, it was also a zeitgeist, or
spirit of the times. It meant something, despite its own best efforts, at
least as a symptom. The disappearance of reality that it announced was
itself real, as was the realm of simulation that replaced it. At least in
its death, it might have amounted to something.
Consider its greatest mystagogue, Jacques Derrida, and his once widely
celebrated ‘concept’ of differance (yes, with an ‘a’), a term within a
series of magical words that mark the undecidable, ungraspable,
unpresentable, and ultimately inconceivable ontological non-stuff that
supplants real events, through an endless succession of
displacements and postponements. We can’t really say anything
about it, so we have to talk about it endlessly, and entire university
departments are required to do so. It’s ridiculous (and so it’s over). But
it’s also, quite exactly, the globally hegemonic culture of Keynesianized,
macroeconomic, programmatic stagnationism, and that isn’t over yet,
although its morbidity is already highly conspicuous. Unlike faddish
academic Postmodernism, its death is going to be really interesting.
Long before the Derridoids got started, Keynes had taught governments that
differance was something they could do. Procrastination – the strategic
suspension of economic reality through a popularly ungraspable series of
displacements and postponements – quickly came to define the art
of politics. Why suffer today what can be put off until tomorrow, or
suffer yourself something that could be somebody else’s problem? Postpone!
Displace! In the long run we are all dead. Reality is for losers.
Differance as it really works is a lot cruder than its reflection in
Postmodern philosophy (and what could be philosophically cruder than an
appeal to the notion of ‘reflection’?). For instance, it is fished out of
the ontological abgrund and processed by specific public policy
mechanisms, sustained by concrete institutions in ways that are to a
considerable extent economically measurable, within elastic but most
certainly finite geographical and historical limits. Crudest of all, and
ultimately decisive, is the circumscription of derealization, by the real,
and the return of the apocalyptic, no longer as a phantasmatic avatar of
the ‘metaphysics of presence’ (or false promise of a real event), but as
an impending real event, and one whose process of historical construction
is in large measure intelligible. Real differance didn’t ‘deconstruct’ the
apocalypse, it built it. It’s not even that difficult to see how.
At EconLog, David Henderson has
posted his notes
from John H. Cochrane’s December 3 talk at Stanford University’s Hoover
Institution conference on ‘Restoring Robust Economic Growth in America’.
There’s no mention of differance, but there doesn’t need to be.
Bailouts delay a painful economic event (postponement) whilst transferring
financial liability (displacement). Risk is restored to virtuality, as
disaster is turned back into a threat, but it isn’t the same threat. By
any remotely sane method of accountancy, it’s now worse. Significant
virtual deterioration is substituted for actual discomfort. That’s the
cost of derealization.
How do things get worse, exactly? — In plenty of ways. Start with ‘moral
hazard’, which is a polite way of saying ‘insanity’. Actions are decoupled
from their consequences, removing the disincentive for craziness. The
result, utterly predictably, is more craziness. In fact, anything that
systematically enhances moral hazard is simply manufacturing craziness.
It’s dumping LSD in the water supply, although actually probably worse. So
bailouts drive us insane and destroy civilization (no one really disputes
that, although they may try to avoid the topic).
Oh, but there’s more! — Much more, because all these displacements don’t
just move things around, they move them up. Risk is centralized,
concentrated, systematized, politicized – and that’s in the (entirely
unrealistic) best case, when it isn’t also expanded and degraded by the
corruption and inefficiency of weakly- or cynically-incentivized public
institutions. This is trickle up – really flood up – economics,
in which everything bad that ever happens to anybody gets stripped of any
residual sanity (or realistic estimation of consequences), pooled,
re-coded, complicated by compensatory regulation, and shifted to ever more
ethereal heights of populist democratic irresponsibility, where the only
thing that matters is what people want to hear, and that really isn’t ever
going to be the truth.
“Mess up enough, and you probably suffer or die” – that’s the truth. It’s
a message that doesn’t translate into the language of Keynesian
kick-the-can politics, which is folk Postmodernism. The nearest we get, as
the jaws begin to close on the bail-out bucket chain, is “We’re going to
need a bigger boat.” After innumerable episodes of that, we’re all huddled
together on the Titanic, and things are kinda, sorta, looking OK. At least
the band’s still playing …
When abstracted from its squalid psychosis, the pattern is mathematically
quite neat. It’s called the Martingale system, better known to Americans
as ‘double or nothing’ (and to Brits as ‘double or quits’). Cochrane
already touched upon it (“the US simply doubled down our bets”). Wager on
red, and it comes up black. No problem, just double the bet and repeat.
You can’t lose. (If you like this logic, Paul Krugman has an economic
recovery to sell you.)
What appears as disaster postponed is, in virtual reality, disaster
expanded. The Wikipedia entry on the Martingale system helpfully connects
it to the Taleb Distribution, otherwise known as scrounging pennies in
front of a steam roller. The persistence of small gains makes this
business model seem like a sure thing — until it doesn’t.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Mark Blyth expand on the idea
in
Foreign Affairs, with application to various aspects of the current (or
impending) crisis. Asking why “surprise [is] the permanent condition of
the U.S. political and economic elite” they trace the problem to “the
artificial suppression of volatility — the ups and downs of life — in the
name of stability.”
Discussing
this article at PJMedia, Richard Fernandez glosses and sharpens its
conclusion:
We aren’t in Postmodernism anymore, Toto. We’re nearer to this:
Or even this:
Here it comes.
December 9, 2011Apocalometer
You know you need one:
(Via.)
January 16, 2015
CHAPTER THREE - 2012
Perfect Storm
Even before receiving the
Hollywood treatment, the year 2012 was shaping up to be a uniquely potent ‘harmonic convergence’ of end times enthusiasm. Initially condensed out of the Mayan calendar,
the 2012 countdown was soon fizzed into a heady cocktail by speculative
interpretations of the Yijing, Aquarian ‘New Age’ paganism, Ufology, and
mushroom mysticism. Once critical mass was achieved, the 2012 became a
gathering point for free-floating Jewish, Christian, and Islamic
eschatological expectations (coming or return of the Messiah, advent of
the Antichrist, Armageddon, Rapture, emergence of the Twelfth Imam from
occultation, and others). Just about anything cosmically imaginable is now
firmly expected – by somebody – to arrive in late December, 2012.
Secular eschatology also has its dogs in the fight. From reciprocally
insulated enclaves of the Internet, apocalyptic strains of
Marxism
(and
libertarianism)
joyfully anticipated the imminent collapse of the global economy, fully
confident that its downfall would usher in a post-capitalist social order
(or untrammeled free-market societies). The boldest proponents of
impending Technological Singularity prepared to
welcome
superhuman artificial intelligence (when Skynet would already be five
years overdue). Radical environmentalists, neo-Malthusians, ‘Peak Oil’ resource-crunchers, and Clash of Civilizations theorists also
contributed substantially to the atmosphere of impending crisis.
Irrespective of Anthropogenic Global Warming, everything was heating up
fast.
This climate proved highly receptive to the prophetic ideas of William
Strauss and Neil Howe, where it found a fresh and evocative
self-description. Beginning with their book
Generations
(1992), Strauss & Howe sought to explain the rhythm of history through
the pattern of generations, as they succeeded each other in four-phase
cycles. Their cyclic unit or ‘saeculum’ lasts 80-100 years and consists of
generational ‘seasons’ or ‘turnings’, each characterized by a distinctive
archetype. The
Fourth Turning, starting early in the new millennium, is ‘winter’ and ‘crisis’. They
remark: “Today’s older Americans recognize this as the mood of the Great
Depression and World War II, but a similar mood has been present in all
the other great gates of our history, from the Civil War and Revolution
back into colonial and English history.”
Jim Quinn’s
discussion
of the Fourth Turning at
Zero Hedge
anticipates the winter storms: “Based upon a review of the foreseeable
issues confronting our society it is clear to me that a worse financial
implosion will strike before the 2012 presidential election. It may be
triggered by a debt ceiling confrontation, the ending of QE2, a panic out
of the USD, hyperinflation, a surge in oil prices, or some combination of
these possibilities. The ensuing collapse of the stock and bond markets
will remove the last vestiges of trust in the existing financial system
and the government bureaucrats who have taken taxpayer dollars and
funneled them to these Wall Street oligarchs.”
More ominously still, Quinn concludes: “History has taught us that Fourth
Turnings end in all out war. The outcome of wars is always in doubt. …It
may be 150 years since Walt Whitman foresaw the imminent march of armies,
visions of unborn deeds, and a sweeping away of the old order, but history
has brought us right back to where we started. Immense challenges and
threats await our nation. Will we face them with the courage and fortitude
of our forefathers? Or will we shrink from our responsibility to future
unborn generations? The drumbeat of history grows louder. Our rendezvous
with destiny beckons.”
Stormy enough yet? If not, there’s the harsh weather of Kondratiev winter
rolling in too.
Nikolai Kondratiev’s ‘long waves’ fluctuate at roughly twice the frequency
of Strauss & Howe saecula (lasting roughly 40-60 years from ‘spring’
to ‘winter’). Originally discovered through empirical investigation of
price movements, Kondratiev waves have stimulated a remarkable range of
economic-historical theories. Joseph Schumpeter interpreted the cycle as a
process of techno-economic innovation, in which capital was creatively
revolutionized and destroyed through depreciation, whilst Hyman Minsky
attributed it to a rhythm of financial speculation (in which stability
fostered over-confidence, excess, and crisis with cyclic regularity).
The discovery of the ‘long wave’ seemed to coincide with its disappearance
– at the hands of macroeconomic management (Keynesian counter-cyclical
policy). Unsurprisingly, the crisis of Keynesianism under present
conditions of ‘debt saturation’ has re-animated long wave discussion. At his Kondratiev-inspired
Tipping Points
blog, Gordon T. Long
forecasts
a savage winter, marked by rapid progression from financial through
economic to political crisis, culminating in a (US dollar) ‘currency
collapse’ in 2012.
Wrap up warmly.
May 5, 2011New Year Cheer
2012 is a year that arrives pre-branded. It’s the last opportunity to end
the world on schedule. By the end of December the window for apocalyptic
profundity will have closed, and it’s back to the hazards of random,
meaningless catastrophe.
Perhaps a prophetic consensus will have emerged by the fall, but right now
the outlook is foggy at best. Trawling through the Web’s most excitable
2012 sites doesn’t bring anything very definite into focus. Once
discussion advances beyond the fairly solid foundation of the Mayan long
count, and the Fourth Age of Creation (lasting from August 11, 3114 BC, to
December 21, AD 2012), things spin off into chaos with disconcerting
rapidity.
Whether the earth is destined to plunge into a black hole is a matter of
(at least limited) controversy, but the fact that just about every
imaginable species of prospective calamity or transformation is being
sucked into the 2012 prophetic vortex is easily confirmed by anybody with
a web browser. Even the basic genre remains unsettled, with expectations
veering wildly from celestial collisions, solar flares, and
super-volcanoes, to spiritual awakenings, cosmic harmonizations, and
countless varieties of Messianic fulfillment. According to the sober
forecasters at
2012apocalypse.net: “The Mayans, Hopis, Egyptians, Kabbalists, Essenes, Qero elders of
Peru, Navajo, Cherokee, Apache, Iroquois confederacy, Dogon Tribe, and
Aborigines all believe in an ending to this Great 2012 Apocalyptic Cycle.”
They missed out Mother Shipton, Nostradamus, Terence McKenna, Kalki
Bagavan, and Web Bot, yet somehow the Cracked
crew
remain unconvinced.
As an aside, the best line UF has yet seen among the
deniers (sorry, couldn’t resist that), is
this
deliciously self-undermining specimen from Ian O’Neill: “No one has ever
predicted the future, and that isn’t about to change.”
In an increasingly desegregated cultural landscape, it’s not easy to
separate out secular history and sensible opinion from the orgiastically
gathering End Times festival, and – strangely enough – the world process
isn’t doing much to oblige. Ritualistic predictions-for-the-year-ahead
posts on politics and economics sites are practically indistinguishable
from the 2012 Armageddon-is-here prophecies, although the sane side of
prognostication is characterized by a greater uniformity of unrelenting
bleakness: Comprehensive economic collapse, aggravated by administrative
sclerosis, and accompanied by escalating international conflict / social
disintegration, amidst the enraged screams of splintering civilizations
(and a ‘Happy New Year’ to you, too.)
Goldbug Darryl Robert Schoon
demonstrates
some professional hedging, but he doesn’t even try to keep impending
financial crisis from spilling out into cosmic immensities:
Science, technology, creative culture, and enterprise are likely to spring
some upside surprises, but the degenerative horror of the world’s
hegemonic Keynesian political economy – combined with increasingly
irresponsible neoconservative democracy-mongering — has ominously
synchronized itself with the darkest visions of the 2012 cults. A patently
dysfunctional mode of socio-economic organization, based upon fake money,
belligerent idiocracy, and electorally-enabled looting scams, is
aggressively imposing itself – with an almost incomprehensible absence of
self-reflection — upon a world that already has plenty of indigenous
pathologies to contend with. The resulting New World Order, entirely
predictably, is a lunatic asylum, and even its most functional components
(such as Singapore and the Chinese SARs of Hong Kong and Macao) are
networked into the collective delirium. When the Euro, Japanese Yen, and
US Dollar collapse (probably in that order) the financial and geopolitical
tsunami will wash over everybody. If that doesn’t happen in 2012, history
has no sense of narrative climax at all.
On the ‘bright’ side – for all the can-kickers out there – the words of
Adam Smith that have defined 2011 continue to resonate. “Young man,
there’s a lot of ruin in a nation,” and even more in a global system.
Perhaps the slow-motion disintegration of hegemonic
neo-fascism Keynesian social democracy will spin itself out
beyond the horizon of the Mayan calendar, which would really give us
something to look forward to …
January 6, 2012End Games
Some time late on the 21st of December last year [2012], Terrestrial Omega
Event 2012 streaked past relatively quietly, on a trajectory from the
dread realm of ominous premonitions into the cobwebbed vault of defunct
absurdities. (The fact that its glancing blow reduced
Urban Future to a tangled wreck of smoking weakly radioactive
debris need be of no concern to anybody except our five regular readers.)
Another non-event was thus added to the long chain of ontological
omissions that compose the Apocalyptic Tradition. Things continue, on
their existing tracks, as common sense had confidently predicted.
For a world saturated in modernist irony, where even the most passionate
beliefs are modulated by forms of mass-media entertainment, no ‘Great
Disappointment’ is any longer possible, such as that afflicting the
Millerites
of the mid-1840s. A 2012 Reuters/Ipsos
survey
found that 10% of the world population (and no less than 20% of Chinese)
had ‘sincerely’ expected the End to arrive on December 21st. When it
didn’t, so what? There’s always something else on — or rather, the same
thing, in different flavors.
Channel hopping is especially easy because it isn’t even necessary to
switch genre. The collapse of the Occidental World Order is like Henry
Ford’s Model T: “You can have it in any color you like, as long as it’s
black.” What you can’t do is get it over with. It’s too big to fail, even
after it has manifestly failed.
The December non-event was not the End, or even the end of the End, but
rather the end of the end of the End. Dated Doomsday has been
de-activated, leaving an indefinitely dilated Ending without conclusion.
Now that the prospect of a finish has finished, finishing becomes
interminable. Dates march onwards, without destination, into ever extended
horizons of collapse. Apocalypse, stripped of Armageddon, is normalized.
It can now demand undistracted recognition as ‘the system’, the way of the
world, feeding upon the spectacle of permanent crisis through the
Media-Apocalypse Complex. As (Fukuyama-final) Liberal Democratic politics
adjusts to a chronic state of emergency, it is finally possible to ‘get things done’, in a time when nothing can be done. Disinhibited insanity delights in
its ultimate mania.
Because it’s insanity, it can’t really last, but Apocalypse has
outlasted Doomsday, and reality has lost its last signs. For purposes of
polite conversation, therefore, it is best to grant the Keynesians /
Postmodernists absolute triumph, and to concur that the consequences of
irrealism can be indefinitely postponed. When in Bedlam, do as the
bedlamites do. Anything else would be pointless irascibility, out of
keeping with the spirit of the age. After all (except itself) Apocalypse
Forever is the final Western religion.
Progressive Apocalypse, Apocalypse Forever, assumes the death of Doomsday,
which provides the occasion for an obituary. For reactionaries of the
‘Throne and Altar’ variety, mourning will incline towards eschatology, as
the moment of definitive judgment is interred. Here in the
eschaton-blitzed wreckage of Urban Future, however, our
remembrance is more concisely arithmetical. We recall dates gone forever,
and with them the time inversions that are expressed through countdowns,
intensive escalations, and compressions. When the end had a date, time
could zero upon it, rather than dissipating into endlessly-extended
fogbanks of blighted futurity.
December 21st, 2012, was the last Doomsday date, and thus the day Doomsday
died. It might even have been the most popular, but it was very far from
the greatest. Extracted predominantly from the
calendar of the Mayans, it neatly concluded the 13th Baktun, but in doing so broke quite
arbitrarily from the (already awkward and compromised) numerical
organization of the dating system, with its preference for modulus-20 unit
hierarchies. Whatever the attractions of exoticism, turning to pop
Mayanology for a planetary Apocalypse schedule was also radically
arbitrary, given the Abrahamic Hegemony that had structured the world
order over the previous half millennium. Still, the Maya had conducted
their own preliminary experiment in collapse, enabling Mel Gibson to
excavate a striking movie from the ruins, introduced by a quote from Will
Durant: “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has
destroyed itself from within.”
When estimated in terms of numerical elegance and metaphysical profundity,
the truly great Doomsday was Y2K, the most beautiful weapon in history
(despite its failure to detonate). Y2K was automatic and techno-compatible
(actually, techno-dependent), chronometrically precise, perfectly
counter-Abrahamic, and calendrically creative (re-setting AD 1900 to Year
00). It was staged from the absence of an integrated, malevolent subject,
out of simple arithmetic, targeting an exactly scheduled, consummate
fulfillment of millennial expectation through sheer coincidence. The world
order was to have been softly terminated, by ‘chance’. Nothing that has
ever actually happened in history made as much sense as this (which
didn’t). The more closely it is examined, the more exquisite it appears.
Among other missed Doomsdays, none comes close. But as Y2K said,
insidiously: Never Mind.
Even the shoddiest of the Old Doomsdays satisfied intellectual appetites
that will now hunger forever. First of all, and most basically, they
catered to the transcendental impulse, understood as a search for ultimate
or enveloping structures and principles of organization. As a metaphysical
event, conclusive Apocalypse promises an escape from distracting detail
and an apprehension of the frame. Biblical bases for such
apprehension are found in Isaiah 34:4 — “All the stars of the heavens will
be dissolved and the sky rolled up like a scroll.” This image is repeated
in Revelation 6:14 — “And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is
rolled together.” Apocalyptic time does not add a new sentence, or even a
new chapter, to the chronicle of events. It uncovers the limit of the
scroll, by exceeding it. For that, however, it has to complete itself.
Secondly, a punctual Apocalypse fulfills a semiotic (and in particular
numerical) realism, as expressed — most lucidly — in occultism and
schizophrenia. The apocalyptic exposes a primal encryption of culture,
coding the operations of super-human intelligence (God or gods,
transcended masters, aliens, time-travelers, spontaneous social order, or
bacteria … any will do). A true calendar is revealed, in which semiotic
exhaustion, or roll-over, precisely coincides with the end of a real
epoch. Hyper-traditionalism thus exoticizes itself in the formulation:
travel inwards far enough and you arrive at the outside. It thus
provides the most radical challenge to the fundamental mantra of the
contemporary human sciences – the (Saussurean) arbitrary nature of the sign.
An additional and essentially modern contribution to the apocalyptic is
made by the arithmetic of the intrinsically unsustainable, as defined by
Thomas Malthus (1768-1834) in his
An Essay on the Principle of Population. The empirical
foundations for an inevitable crisis are found in trends to exponential
growth and their projected collision with a limit. Variants of such
apocalyptic projection are found in Marxism, environmentalism, and
Technological Singularity (Karl Marx,
M. King Hubbert, and
Ray Kurzweil).
Even from this brief survey, it becomes possible to outline certain core
features of a model apocalypse: comprehensive, punctual, and
climactic. In other words, a transition that cannot be contained by the
pre-existing nature of time, occurring at an exact, cryptically
anticipated moment, bringing the central historical process to its
culmination. All of that is gathered together in Doomsday, and Doomsday is
dead.
Note: Thanks to Mathieu Borysevicz and Sophie Huang of the MAB Society,
whose December 10th, 2012, Minsheng Museum event,
Just What is it about the end of the world that makes it so
appealing?
provided the opportunity to discuss the schematics of apocalypse.
January 17, 2013
CHAPTER FOUR - CASE STUDIES
Peak People
Over at Zero Hedge, Sean Corrigan
unleashes
a fizzing polemic against the (M. King Hubbert) ‘Peak Oil’ school of
resource doomsters (enjoy the article if you’re
laissez-faire inclined, or the comments if you’re not).
Of particular relevance to density advocates is Corrigan’s “exercise in
contextualization” (a kind of de-stressed Stand on Zanzibar)
designed to provide an image of the planet’s ‘demographic burden’:
Anybody eagerly anticipating hypercities,
arcologies, and
other prospective experiments in large-scale social packing is likely to
find this calculation rather disconcerting, if only because – taken as a
whole — Hong Kong actually isn’t that dense. For sure, the downtown
‘synapse’ connecting the HK Island with Kowloon is impressively intense,
but most of the Hong Kong SAR (Special Administrative Region) is green,
rugged, and basically deserted. It’s (mean) average density of 6,364 / km2
doesn’t get anywhere close to that of the top 100 cities (Manila’s 43,000
/ km2 is almost seven times greater). Corrigan isn’t envisaging a
megalopolis, but a Cuba-scale suburb.
Whether densitarians are more or less likely than average to worry about
Peak Oil or related issues might be an interesting question (the New
Urbanists tend to be quite greenish). If they really want to see cities
scale the heights of social possibility, however, they need to start
worrying about population shortage. With the human population projected to
level-off at around 10 billion, there might never be enough people to make
cities into the ultra-dense monsters that futuristic imagination has long
hungered for.
Bryan Caplan is
sounding the alarm. At least we have
teeming Malthusian robot hordes
to look forward to.
May 20, 2011Hard Futurism
For anyone with interests both in extreme practical futurism and the
renaissance of the Sinosphere,
Hugo de Garis
is an irresistible reference point. A former teacher of Topological
Quantum Computing (don’t ask) at the International Software School of
Wuhan University, and later Director of the Artificial Brain Lab at Xiamen
University, de Garis’ career symbolizes the emergence of a cosmopolitan
Chinese technoscientific frontier, where the outer-edge of futuristic
possibility condenses into precisely-engineered reality.
De Garis’ work is ‘hard’ not only because it involves fields such as
Topological Quantum Computing, or because – more accessibly — he’s devoted
his research energies to the building of brains rather than minds, or even
because it has generated questions faster than solutions. In his
‘semi-retirement’ (since 2010), hard-as-in-difficult, and
hard-as-in-hardware, have been supplanted by
hard-as-in-mind-numbingly-and-incomprehensibly-brutal – or, in his own
words, an increasing obsession with the impending ‘Gigadeath’ or ‘Artilect War‘.
According to de Garis, the approach to Singularity will revolutionize and
polarize international politics, creating new constituencies, ideologies,
and conflicts. The basic dichotomy to which everything must eventually
succumb divides those who embrace the emergence of transhuman
intelligence, and those who resist it. The former he calls ‘cosmists‘, the latter ‘terrans’.
Since massively-augmented and robotically-reinforced ‘cosmists’ threaten
to become invincible, the ‘terrans’ have no option but pre-emption. To
preserve human existence in a recognizable state, it is necessary to
violently suppress the cosmist project in advance of its accomplishment.
The mere prospect of Singularity is therefore sufficient to provoke a
political — and ultimately military — convulsion of unprecedented scale. A
Terran triumph (which might require much more than just a military
victory) would mark an inflection point in deep history, as the
super-exponential trend of terrestrial intelligence production – lasting
over a billion years — was capped, or reversed. A Cosmist win spells the
termination of human species dominion, and a new epoch in the geological,
biological, and cultural process on earth, as the torch of material
progress is passed to the emerging techo sapiens. With the stakes
set so high, the melodramatic grandeur of the de Garis narrative risks
understatement no less than hyperbole.
The giga-magnitude body-count that de Garis postulates for his Artilect
(artificial intellect) War is the dark side expression of Moore’s Law or
Kurzweilean increasing returns – an extrapolation from exponentiating
historical trends, in this case, casualty figures from major human
conflicts over time. It reflects the accumulating trend to global wars
motivated by trans-national ideologies with ever-increasing stakes. One
king is (perhaps) much like another, but a totalitarian social direction
is very different from a liberal one (even if such paths are ultimately
revisable). Between a Terran world order and a Cosmist trajectory into
Singularity, the distinction approaches the absolute. The fate of the
planet is decided, with costs to match.
If the de Garis Gigadeath War scenario is pre-emptive in relation to
prospective Singularity, his own intervention is meta-pre-emptive – since
he insists that world politics must be anticipatively re-forged in order
to forestall the looming disaster. The Singularity prediction ripples
backwards through waves of pre-adaptation, responding at each stage to
eventualities that are yet to unfold. Change unspools from out of the
future, complicating the arrow of time. It is perhaps no coincidence that
among de Garis’ major research interests is reversible computing, where
temporal directionality is unsettled at the level of precise engineering.
Does ethnicity and cultural tradition merely dissolve before the
tide-front of this imminent Armageddon? The question is not entirely
straightforward. Referring to his informal polling of opinion on the
coming great divide, de Garis recalls his experience teaching in China,
remarking:
June 13, 2011Kinds of Killing
Like ‘fascism’ – with which it is closely connected in the popular
imagination – ‘genocide’ is a word carrying such exorbitant emotional
charge that it tends to blow the fuses of any attempt at dispassionate
analysis. We can thank the political black magic of Adolf Hitler and his
Nazi accomplices for that.
Prior to the Third Reich and its systematic, industrialized attempts to
eradicate entire ethno-racial populations (Jews, Roma, and perhaps Slavs)
along with other numerous other groups (mental and physical ‘defectives’
or ‘useless eaters’, homosexuals, communists, Jehova’s Witnesses …)
international law restricted its attention to the actions and grievances
of states and individuals, with the latter subdivided into combatants and
noncombatants. The National Socialist trauma changed that fundamentally.
On December 9, 1948, the United Nations adopted the Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (as Resolution 260),
defining a new category of internationally recognized crimes as “acts
committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national,
ethnical, racial or religious group.”
Since 1948, defending genocide has been the surest way to ruin a dinner
party. That doesn’t mean, however, that the topic deserves to be immunized
from controversy. There is one question in particular that merits intense
and prolonged scrutiny: Is genocide really worse than killing a lot of
people?
Posed slightly more technically: Is there a crime of genocide that stands
above and beyond mass murder (of equivalent scale)? Or (a rough
equivalent): Can groups be the specific victims of crime? This is to ask
whether groups exist – and have value — as anything more than a nominal or
strictly formal set, whose reality is exhausted by its constituent
individual members. The existence of genocide as a legal category presumes
a (positive) answer to this question, and in doing so it closes down a
problem of great and very general importance.
The classical liberal presumption is quite different, as summarized (a
little bluntly) by the provocative remark made by British Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher in 1987 “… there is no such thing as society. There are
individual men and women, and there are families.” Harshly extrapolating
from this position, a certain irony might be found in the fact that a
horrified response to National Socialist crimes has taken the form of a
legal codification of racial collectivism. At the very least, it is
puzzling that suspicions directed at legal references to ‘group rights’
and ‘hate crimes’ among those of a libertarian bent has not been extended
to the category of genocide.
In the opposite camp, the most fully articulated defense of collectives as
real entities is found, as might be expected, in the foundation of
sociology as an academic discipline, and more particularly in Émile
Durkheim’s argument for ‘social facts’.
Larry May
looks back further, to Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, or social being, in which
human individuals are absorbed as organic parts.
Whilst the distinction of ‘society’ and ‘individual’ has colloquial (and
political) meaning, those inclined to the analysis of complex systems are
more likely to ask which groups or societies are
real individuals, exhibiting functional or behavioral integrity,
as self-reproducing wholes. In pursuing this line of investigation, it is
far more relevant to discriminate between types of groups than between
groups and individuals, or even wholes and parts. It is especially helpful
to distinguish feature groups from unit groups.
A feature group is determined by logical classification. This might be
expressed as a self-identification or sense of ‘belonging’, an external
political or academic categorization, or some combination of these, but
the essentials remain the same in each case. Certain features of the
individual are isolated and emphasized (such as genitalia, sexual
orientation, skin-color, income, or religious belief), and then employed
as the leading clue in a process of formal grouping, which conforms
theoretically to the mathematics of sets.
A unit group, in contrast, is defined as an assemblage, or functional
whole. Its members belong to the group insofar as they work together, even
if they are entirely devoid of common identity features. Membership is
decided by role, rather than traits, since one becomes part of such a
group through functional involvement, rather than classification of
characteristics. Social instances of such groups include primitive tribes
(determined by functional unities rather than the categories of modern
‘identity politics’), cities, states, and companies. The most obvious
instance in socialist theory is the ‘soviet’ or ‘danwei’ work unit (whilst
social classes are feature groups).
To take a non-anthropomorphic example, consider a skin cell. Its
feature group is that of skin cells in general, as distinguished
from nerve cells, liver cells, muscle cells, or others. Any two skin cells
share the same feature group, even if they belong to different organisms,
or even species, exist on different continents, and never functionally
interact. The natural unit group of the same skin cell, in
contrast, would be the organism it belongs to. It shares this unit group
with all the other cells involved in the reproduction of that organism
through time, including those (such as intestinal bacteria) of quite
separate genetic lineages. Considered as a unit group member, a skin cell
has greater integral connection with the non-biological tools and other
‘environmental’ elements involved in the life of the organism than it does
with other skin cells – even perfect clones – with which it is not
functionally entangled.
Clearly, both feature groups and unit groups are ‘fuzzy sets’, and the
distinction itself – whilst theoretically precise – is empirically hazy.
An urban American street gang, for instance, will in most cases be vague
in its features and unity, perhaps ‘ethnic’ to some degree of definition,
with a determinable age-range, and with ambiguous functional connections
to groupings on a larger scale, or to peripheral members whose status of
‘belonging’ is not strictly decidable. Tattoos and other membership
markings are likely to involve both identity and integrity aspects –
traits and roles. Rituals of belonging (ordeals, oaths, rites of passage)
are designed to disambiguate membership.
Despite such haziness, the distinction between these two types of groups
strikes directly at the core problematic of genocide (as a legal
category). When a unit group is destroyed, a real individual is
‘killed’ above and beyond whatever human losses are incurred. The
destruction of a feature group, in contrast, whatever the
cultural loss, is not any kind of killing beyond the mass murder
of human individuals. If this is worse than murder, we should know why.
This conclusion seems relevant when weighing, for instance, the 1937
Massacre of Nanjing on the scale of historical atrocity. It suggests, at
least, that an act of violence directed against a city – or integrated
population unit — is no less worthy of specific legal attention
than a quantitatively equivalent offense against an ethnicity, or
determined population type. It seems to be no more than an
accident of history that, in order to appropriate the category of
genocide, massive crimes of the former variety need to be recoded as if
they more properly belonged to the latter.
Complex systems ontology aside, these matters resolve ultimately into
obscure social values. Orthodox conceptions of ‘genocide’ assume that
ethnic identity simply and unquestionably means more than active
citizenship, or participation in the life of a city. Perhaps this
assumption is even arguable. But has it been argued?
September 13, 2011The God Confusion
“Do The Three Abrahamic Faiths Worship The Same God?” Peter Berger
asks, on his blog at the American Interest. His answer, which seems to be
programmed at least as much by the sensitivities of interfaith politics as
by the exigencies of rigorous theology, is a politely nuanced “yes (but).”
If anyone is unconvinced about the urgent pertinence of multicultural
diplomacy to the question, Berger settles such doubts quickly by depicting
the integrated conception of ‘Abrahamic faith’ as a response to the ‘Clash
of Civilizations’ climate that arose in the wake of 9/11, “with the
altogether admirable intention of countering anti-Islamic hatred.”
At its core, his argument is both realistic and relatively
uncontroversial. It is comparable to an informal set theory, or
cladistics, briefly surveying family resemblances and dissimilarities
between branches of the Abrahamic religious ‘tree’ and concluding,
reasonably enough, that none of the potential groupings are absolutely
strict (each faith, even narrowly defined, is differentiated within itself
by sub-branches, and twigs), and that the coherence of ‘Judeo-Christian’
monotheism is considerably stronger than that of ‘Abrahamic Faith’ in
general. Whatever the complexity of these branchings, however, they derive
from a readily identifiable trunk. Berger cites a lecture by the
Protestant theologian Miroslav Volf:
When evaluated from a wide enough angle, it is clear that the God of Jews,
Christians, and Muslims is distinctively specified, relative to
alternative religious traditions:
Yet, whilst the theological dimension of this question is very far from
uninteresting, or inconsequential, it limits the question at least as much
as it clarifies it. More than a faith, the ‘children of Abraham’ share a
story, and – still more importantly — a sense of history
as a story, and this is the factor that most tightly bundles them
together, irrespective of all quibbling over narrative details. Abraham is
the beginning of a tale, even if it can be projected back (at least a
little way) beyond him. He defines the meaning of history, as an
interaction with God, through which the passage of collective time
acquires structure, direction, unity, radical finitude, moral and
religious significance. Abrahamic history has purpose, and a destination.
Above all it tells the story of a moral community, whose righteousness and
unrighteousness will ultimately be judged. Eschatology is its real key.
Because the Abrahamic tradition is rooted in a distinctive experience of
history, it extends beyond theistic faith. Indeed, any comprehension of
this tradition that excludes Marxism, fascist millenarianism, and
‘liberal’ secular progressivism (even that of the ‘New Atheists’) is
woefully incomplete, to the point of diversionary propaganda. Uniquely,
the Abrahamic faiths do not merely rise, fall, and persist. They are
superceded by new revelations, or afflicted by heresy and schism. Their
encounters and (inevitable) conflicts become internalized episodes that
immediately demand doctrinal and narrative intelligibility. Hence the
affinity between the Abrahamic faiths and historical (as ‘opposed’ to
pedagogical, cosmic, or naturalistic) dialectics: the ‘other’, merely by
appearing on the stage, must play its role in the world-historical drama
of belief.
Strict monotheism is the personification of narrative unity, and in the
end it is the narrative unity that matters. Whether history is finally to
be appraised from the perspective of the people of Israel, the Church, the
Ummah, achieved communism, an Aryan master-race, or secular multicultural
globalism, it will have been integrated through the production of a moral
community, and judged as a coherent whole by the standard of that
community’s purity and righteousness. It will have been comprehended by a
collective subject whose story — it insists — is the entire meaning of the
world.
For the minor paganisms of antiquity, and the major paganisms of the east,
this structure of understanding has the objective potential to be
offensive to an almost inestimable degree, so the fact that pagans have
rarely contested it with an animosity that even remotely approaches its
‘internal’ conflicts and disputations is intriguing. Whilst cases of
anti-semitism, anti-clericalism, islamophobia, anti-communism,
anti-fascism, and systematic political incorrectness have, on occasions,
been plausibly derived from pagan inspirations, in the overwhelming
majority of cases it is the various ‘fraternal’ branches of the great
Abrahamic family that have wrought devastation upon each other. Indeed,
persecution, as a particular mode of ‘zealous’ or ‘enthusiastic’ violence,
seems to be an Abrahamic specialty, one that depends upon conceptions of
‘intolerable’ idolatry, heresy, apostasy, false-consciousness, or
political incorrectness that are found nowhere else.
God told Abraham to kill his own son, and he was ready to do so (Gen
22:1-19). That is how he earned his status as the ur-patriarch of the
tradition, whose children are defined by the ghost of a knife at their
throats. Demonstrated willingness to kill in the name of the Lord, or its
abstracted equivalent (the meaning of history), is the initiatory ideal,
and the beginning of the world story that now encompasses everyone. After
this original ritual, Isaac’s life was no longer natural, but ideological.
It was suspended, vulnerably, from a word owing nothing to the protective
bond tying an animal to its progeny (symbolically terminated by Abraham’s
surrender to divine command), but settled on high, in the narrative
structure of the world. If God had willed it — or the story demanded it —
he would have been slain. In this way an unnatural line, existing only as
an expression of divine purpose, breaks from the archaic pagan order of
‘meaningless’ procreation and nurture. (The place assigned to the
sacrifice, Mount Moriah, would later be the site of Jerusalem, the city of
the end of time, and beyond nature.) Isaac was spared, but the pagan world
was not similarly reprieved.
The existence of an Abrahamic tradition has an importance that far exceeds
its internal politics and internecine rivalries, since it is
indistinguishable from the historical unification of the world, and no
‘other’ is able to remain outside its narrative order. In much of the
world, even in its Abrahamic heartlands, to refuse God is no great thing,
and perhaps little more than a mildly comical affectation, but to depart
from World History is quite another matter. It is then that the knife of
Abraham glints again.
December 19, 2011Wild Cards
Responding to Michael Anissimov’s political attitudes
quiz, commentator ‘Donny’ widens the perspective:
… if technology weren’t to advance much over the next century, we would
be witness to the death of western civilization. Instead, technology
will wrench history off its course. Demography is no longer destiny.
Embryo screening for intelligence, a robotic labor force, rejuvenation
therapies that end death from aging, infinite everything from
nanofactories, terrible new weapons wreaking havoc on humanity, and the
recursively self-improving artificial intelligence that kills us all.
Next to that – or any of the other technologies which could emerge
sooner and prove decisive instead – Mexican immigration doesn’t amount
to a hill of beans. None of our existing institutions or social
structures are prepared for what’s coming and the century will be a
rollercoaster ride on fire.
April 26, 2013Gibson’s Nightmare
At the most superficial level, there’s probably some sleeplessness
accompanying the anxiety that the whole of
The Peripheral
— once people have processed it — begins to look like a piece of
fabulously ornate, maze-patterned wrapping paper for the four pages that
really matter. There’s the Great Pacific Garbage Patch elsewhere, along
with ubiquitous near-future drones, and – further down the time-line —
some exotic neo-primitivist adornments — but basically, if you’ve read
Chapter 79, you’ve got the thing. Yes, that’s to miss out on some of the
time-travel structure, but Gibson takes such a lazy approach to that
(deliberately suppressing all paradox circuitry) it’s no great loss.
On the positive side, those four pages are really something. Chapter 79 is
helpfully entitled The Jackpot, and contains what might well be
the most profound reworking of apocalypticism of modern times. There are
some (fairly weak) remarks
here. Perhaps somebody has already contributed some better commentary, that
I’ve missed.
The Jackpot is a catastrophe with a fruit-machine model — all the reels
have to click together ‘right’ for it to amount to disaster. It’s
therefore poly-causal, cross-lashed, or “multiplex” — eluding narrative
apprehension through multiplicity.
… it was no one thing. … it was multicausal, with no particular
beginning and no end. More a climate than an event, so not the way
apocalypse stories liked to have a big event, after which everybody ran
around with guns … or else were eaten alive by something caused by the
big event. Not like that.
It was androgenic … Not that they’d known what they were doing, had
meant to make problems, but they’s caused it anyway. And in fact the
climate, the weather, caused by there being too much carbon, had been
the driver for a lot of other things.How that got worse and never
better, and was just expected to, ongoing. Because people in the past,
clueless as to how that worked, had fucked it all up, then not been able
to get it together to do anything about it, even after they knew, and
now it was too late.
It kills 80% of the world’s human population in the end.
… Except that’s not the end. The end is
Neoreaction:
“What about China?”
… “They’d had a head start,” [Netherton] said.
“At what?”
“At how the world would work, after the jackpot. This … is still
ostensibly a democracy. A majority of empowered survivors, considering
the jackpot, and no doubt their own positions, wanted none of that.
Blamed it, in fact.”
“Who runs it, then?”
“Oligarchs, corporations, neomonarchists. Hereditary monarchies provided
conveniently familiar armatures. Essentially feudal, according to its
critics. Such as they are.”
“The King of England?”
“The City of London,” he said. “The Guilds of the City. In alliance with
people like Lev’s father. Enabled by people like Lowbeer.”
“The whole world’s funny?” She remembered Lowbeer saying that.
“The klept,” he said, misunderstanding her, “isn’t funny at all.”
January 29, 2015
CHAPTER FIVE - COMPILATIONS
Doomcore
There’s a biblical blood moon
omen
hanging over September. Pure
Satanism
has conquered the culture of the West, to the posthumous laughter of the
Mad
Marquis. The
Chinese
economy is
scaring
people (a
lot), and Tianjin just
exploded. American “Recession
Imminent.” Straight
Outta
Compton.
Trump.
Oil. Brazil’s economy is crashing even
harder, and Russia is like a
scene
out of the Book of Revelation,
with
NATO and Russia rehearsing for
war. (Still awaiting
the India crisis news for the full BRIC meltdown). Germany is expecting
700,000
asylum seekers this year. “The international system as we know it is
unravelling.” Googling ‘Middle East’ mostly turns up End Time
prophecies, for understandable reasons (here‘s one secular story). Japan: “Be
Afraid.” “The future of humanity is increasingly
African.” There’s been a bomb
blast in
Bangkok, earth
tremors
in California. American race relations are
falling
off a cliff, probably because whites haven’t
apologized
enough yet, though
some
are trying. The UK has gone
fascist
(or something). Bitcoin is (needlessly)
forking
into the unknown. (Exotic
and
longer-term
threats are a whole other story.) But the funny thing is …
August 17, 2015Glide Path
Fernandez takes a clear-eyed
look
at where things are actually heading right now:
Conventional wisdom has had a pretty bad run these last 15 years. For
that reason there is little purpose to trusting it further. Instead it
might be better to predict a future based on observable trends rather
than scenarios that politicians [promote?]. If those trends convey any
information one would expect to see in 2025:
Such a world would be rough, dangerous and in many places, miserable.
Perhaps it will not even be as good as that; for the list above omits
the occurrence of an event equivalent to World War 3, in which case we
can describe the future with a single word: ruin. But it is the world we
are building, absent any change of course. The oddest circumstance is
that politicians still pretend without the slightest basis, that if we
stay their perverse course we’ll go right through the ruin and out the
other side and find the dream we glimpsed as we crossed into the 21st
century. […] It’s a condition they call Hope, though there’s another
phrase for it: whistling past the graveyard.
October 15, 2015SMOD
Some
suggestive figures and commentary. (More
here.) Googling “trump + chaos” — 52,300,000 results (beginning
1,
2,
3,
4
…). Trump has 5,000,000 Twitter followers. The
dike
has broken. Now it cascades …
From
the commies at Rolling Stone (three months ago):
During a Q&A with fans before a Cincinnati concert earlier this
month, [pop music person] Billy Corgan was asked what he thought about
the first Republican debate, at which point the rocker lauded the mogul’s ability to take the
political spectrum and “fuck it up.” “I think what’s cool, and I’m not
saying I agree politically, but I think what’s cool is Trump’s running
chaos theory,” Corgan said (via Alternative Nation). […] “He’s forcing a lot of things out into the open, so they can’t
control this, whatever that control is …”
As another commie hack points
out
calmly: “Trump may well be something unprecedentedly terrible.”
The rise of the
destructor
has been congesting all my information channels this week. Tomorrow’s
Trumpenführer panic update goes parabolic.
ADDED: Trump and the Left Acceleration vote — “I’m hoping Donald Trump wins
this year’s election. For the reason that it will fuck up that country so
much faster then if a less bad President wins.”
December 12, 2015
CHAPTER SIX - POLITICAL INSANITY
The Rights Stuff
Apologies for the minimalism, even by my recent standards, but I simply
have to pass
this
on.
(I’ll throw
these
two
links
in for added depth.)
March 7, 2015Trash Space
There’s so much wrong with
this
it’s hard to know where to
start:
Baltimore is
burning as I write, the streets are filled with rioters and police. They don’t seem to be
“clashing” much, however. Photographs show looters looting, and cops
standing around. The
black lady mayor of Baltimore,
Stephanie Rawlings-Blake
… made a statement that, in the interests of the demonstrators’ “free
speech” rights, she had
told the Baltimore PD
to “give those who wished to destroy space to do that.”
Nothing says ‘free speech’ like torching a city to the ground. (Shouting
“fire” in a crowded cinema might be irresponsible, but burning the cinema
to the ground is political art.)
In
Defense
of Looting (seriously), from August last year.
David Simon politely
asks
everyone to “please stop”. Good luck with that.
Western civilization is so over.
ADDED:
ADDED: (Passed along without comment)
ADDED: “Baltimore’s violent protestors are right …” … “As a nation, we fail to
comprehend Black political strategy in much the same way we fail to
recognize the value of Black life. …”
April 28, 2015Meanwhile, in Paris
How could any society not want
this
type of enrichment to happen in its urban centers?
Uber-Chaos,
apparently. [Or not.]
ADDED: Given the likelihood of time-pwnage here, ‘meanwhile’ should
probably be read as ‘sometime in the 21st century’. It says Sept. 1 on the
Youtube video, but that probably means less than I’d assumed. See (brief)
comment by ‘Ano nymous’ in the thread below.
ADDED
(from The New Yorker): To add a little gravitas.
September 2, 2015Report from a Madhouse
When
you throw your last scraps of civilized incentive-architecture in a
dumpster and set it on fire it looks like this:
Cities across the country, beginning with the District of Columbia, are
moving to copy Richmond’s controversial approach because early
indications show it has helped reduce homicide rates. […] But the
program requires governments to reject some basic tenets of law
enforcement even as it challenges notions of appropriate ways to spend
tax dollars. […] … when the elaborate efforts at engagement fail, the
mentors still pay those who pledge to improve, even when, like [violent
criminal Lonnie] Holmes, they are caught with a gun, or worse —
suspected of murder. […] … To maintain the trust of the young men
they’re guiding, mentors do not inform police of what they know about
crimes committed. At least twice, that may have allowed suspected
killers in the stipend program to evade responsibility for homicides.
[…] And yet, interest in the program is surging among urban politicians.
Officials in Miami, Toledo, Baltimore and more than a dozen cities in
between are studying how to replicate Richmond’s program. […] … five
years into Richmond’s multimillion-dollar experiment, 84 of 88 young men
who have participated in the program remain alive, and 4 in 5 have not
been suspected of another gun crime or suffered a bullet wound … […]
Richmond’s decision to pay people to stay out of trouble began a decade
ago during a period of despair. […] In 2007, Richmond’s homicide tally
had surged to 47, making it the country’s sixth-deadliest city per
capita. In the 20 years prior to that, Richmond lost 740 people to gun
violence, and more than 5,000 had been injured by a bullet. […] Elected
leaders of the heavily African American city of about 100,000 began
treating homicides as a public health emergency. … [DeVone Boggan] who
had lost a brother in a shooting in Michigan … had to raise the money
because he couldn’t persuade officials
to give tax dollars directly to violent firearms offenders. […] Boggan and his streetwise crew of ex-cons selected an initial
group of 21 gang members and suspected criminals for the program. One
night in 2010, he persuaded them to come to city hall, where he invited
them to work with mentors and plan a future without guns. As they left,
Boggan surprised each one with $1,000 — no strings attached. […] “This
is controversial, I get it,” Boggan said. “But what’s really happening
is that they are getting rewarded for doing really hard work, and it’s
definite hard work when you talk about stopping picking up a gun to
solve your problems.” […] So far, the attention — and money — seems to
be working for Holmes. Although the $1,500 he has received since getting
out of prison last fall has not led to a miraculous transformation, it
enabled him to make a down payment on his black 2015 Nissan Versa —
something meaningful for a young man who for many years was homeless.
[…] He now spends hours each day in the car, driving around with
friends, often smoking pot but not “hunting” — Vaughn’s term for seeking
conflict with rivals. […] “The money is a big part,” Holmes says. “I
can’t count the number of times it has kept me from . . . doing what
I’ve got to do. It stopped me from going to hit that liquor [store] or
this, you feel me, it’s a relief to not have to go do this and endanger
my life for a little income, you feel me?” …
That’s as much as I can take. The phrase subject to XS emphasis describes
the core principle of the scheme. Maybe it should count as a relief that
these gangstas aren’t being directly rewarded for whacking shop-keepers.
There’s a term for
this kind of scheme: Dane Geld. It’s not something civilizations with a
future tend to engage in.
ADDED:
Highly relevant. “… there are entire classes of people who can get more
from the world by being unstable and dangerous …”
March 29, 2016Twitter cuts (#60)
Assuming that the Mandate of Heaven is always the
real principle of regime legitimation, this looks like an
interesting status quo problem. If the present world order is
working, it’s doing a conspicuously poor job of advertising the fact —
especially to Western populations.
April 16, 2016It’s come to this
Yudkowsky’s
case
against Trump:
Scope is real. If you ever have to choose between voting a convicted
serial abuser of children into the Presidential office — but this person
otherwise seems stable and collected — versus a Presidential candidate
who seems easy to provoke and who has ‘bad days’ and doesn’t listen to
advisors and once said “Why do we have all these nukes if we can’t use
them?”, it is deadly important that you vote for the pedophile. It isn’t
physically possible to abuse enough children per day over 4 years to do
as much damage as you can do with one wrong move in the National
Security Decision-Making Game.
It seems the stars are right:
October 12, 2016Current Mood
ADDED: Here’s the same picture taken from
another angle
November 13, 2016
CHAPTER SEVEN - ECONOMIC COLLAPSE
Progress
Two centuries of US monetary stewardship charted
@
ZH:
Click image to enlarge.
Red line is the CPI.
Blue line is the USD / Swiss Franc exchange rate.
December 13, 2013Progress (II)
When socialism puts a ratchet into your churn, this is what happens.
(Via.)
The first XS ‘Progress’
post was also a chart —
and it dove-tails with this one uncannily.
January 15, 2015Downton on down
Martin Hutchinson
argues
that — even after factoring in the crushing losses of WWI — the ‘Downton
era’ did things better:
In certain respects — behavioral and otherwise — the “Downton Abbey
economy” of 1920 was greatly preferable to the one we are experiencing
today. […] A move to a “Downton Abbey economy” should not imply a sharp
increase in inequality, rather the opposite. It is interesting to note
that almost 100 years of progressive bloat of the public sector in both
Britain and the U.S. — supposedly undertaken to reduce economic
inequality — have in reality tended to increase it. […] Public spending
(including local government) was around 25% of GDP in Britain in 1920
and about 15% of GDP in the U.S., compared to 40% plus in both countries
today. It must be questioned what benefits the public has gained, either
in greater equality or better services, from the massive rise in public
spending since the Downton Abbey period, which itself was inflated from
pre-World War I days.
[…]
Apart from smaller government and less inequality, the Downton Abbey
economy had a number of other advantages over today’s … First, total
factor productivity growth was much greater. The decade saw the most
rapid adoption of the advances in power and transportation that had
grown up from the 1880s. The result was U.S. TFP growth of around 2%
annually, about double the recent rate. This generated an explosion in
living standards during the decade.
Second, the “Downton Abbey economy” had much lower asset prices because
of higher interest rates and much easier construction procedures. Shares
paid higher dividends and were much lower valued in terms of assets and
earnings, while leverage ratios were infinitely more conservative. The
world was used to a gold standard, in which leverage could kill you in a
downturn, and was much more careful about incurring it. Real estate was
valued at its rebuilding cost, and rebuilding costs were much lower than
today because there were no planning approvals and no
environmental-impact statements. I have written several times about the
extraordinary inflation of infrastructure costs, from the 1920-27
Holland Tunnel’s $48 million, equivalent to $700 million in today’s
prices to the outrageous projected $9 billion of the recently cancelled
Trans-Hudson Tunnel (functionally an identical project). In “Downton
Abbey’s” world, real estate costs were modest and new infrastructure
projects were built on time, at a fraction of today’s real cost.
Third, the “Downton Abbey” world had positive real interest rates and
no inflation psychology. People could be assured that their efforts in
saving would not be destroyed by inflation or by being dumped into an
overvalued bubble stock market. While World War I had brought a doubling
in prices in Britain and the United States, everyone expected that this
process would be largely reversed, probably by a British return to the
gold standard. Indeed, until World War II, those expectations were
realized. For people planning their lives, it was a much easier era. In
peacetime, money was a solid store of value, not something that had to
be monitored constantly for inflationary erosion.
Finally, both the economic system and the financial system were carried
on with high standards of integrity, more so in Britain than in the
U.S., but higher in both countries than today. Banks, corporations and
managers relied heavily on their reputation, and those doing business
with them made careful enquiries about that reputation. There were few
fallible government regulations, no bailouts and little leverage. A
notable feature of the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme of 2008 was that it
was able to attract about 500 times as much money in real terms as the
$3 million collected in 1920 by the Charles Ponzi and carry on for about
40 times as long as Ponzi’s eight months. The ability of Madoff to grow
so big and last so long is testimony to the futility of modern
regulation and to the sad decline of ethical standards in today’s
blue-chip houses.
February 27, 2014Doom Paul
Blame
Bloom
for luring me into
this
blasted landscape. (I agree with JAB that there’s something important
going on here.)
A Doom Paul video selection (1, 2,
3).
Here‘s a Paul
vs. Krugman cage-match.
ADDED: Dialled up to eleven.
ADDED: The End is
Close …
October 10, 2014Pedal to the Metal
Japan accelerates into Keynesian fiscal singularity.
This
one is for our honored commenter ‘Kgaard’, who is sure to have some
problems with it. (From
David Stockman, this blog’s candidate for the most
based economic analyst on the planet.)
Let’s not mess around:
Prime Minister Abe is proving himself to be a certifiable madman.
It could all be over a lot sooner than I’d expected.
November 20, 2014Suspended Reality
This chart (via) marks the point where economics switches into ontology (and not in a
good way). Global government debt issuance — undiminished in its absolute
scale — has for the first time ever been entirely swallowed by
money production. Postmodernism has unambiguously triumphed, at least
temporarily. It’s a thing of wonder, and not a bad exemplification of
objective evil (as Gnon acts upon it). Reality, for the moment, is
benched. (This does not end well — but we know that, right?)
SoBL has a highly relevant forecast
post
addressing this syndrome, which has been a long time coming, and no doubt
has at least a little further to go.
February 10, 2015Extreme Games
Greece’s Varoufakis
doubles
down on the Bart
strategy.
May 18, 2015Soon
What would a full stocks correction
look
like?
A true understanding of stock market history shows that Wall Street in
the past has moved in long, long swings upwards and downwards, often
taking years or even a generation or two. There is a great deal of
evidence suggesting that the upward move that began in 1982 is one of
them — and that the downward move that first began in 2000 has not
ended.
The “q” is a valuation that they don’t even mention in the training
manuals for the official “financial planner” and financial-analyst
exams. Your money manager has probably never heard of it. Or, if he has,
he probably ranks it with astrology and the mystic rantings of
Nostradamus. […] But the “q” happens to have by far the most successful
long-term track record of any stock market indicator. …
August 22, 2015Meanwhile, in Venezuela …
A mineral-rich
socialist diet:
The governor of the Venezuelan state of Bolívar has some advice for
dealing with the widespread shortage of food across the country. Can’t
find eggs at your local Venezuelan grocery store? Why not try fried
rocks instead? […] Governor Francisco Rangel said during his radio show
on Tuesday, September 29, that the Venezuelan people should not “yield
to temptation” or worry about not being able to find a pack of flour or
sardines to buy amid the shortages. […] “Let them take away whatever
they want. We are capable of eating a stick, or instead of frying two
eggs, fry two rocks, and we will eat fried rocks, ” he said, “but no one
can beat us.” […] Rangel referred to the so-called economic war and the
“induced inflation” that he and other ruling-party leaders claim is
being caused by the opposition. “Now that prices are sky high, we need
to fight against this together. Let them not feel like they have beaten
us,” he said.
A functional world order should always have a few socialist regimes
hanging on, to do the teaching job the education system can’t.
October 12, 2015
SECTION B - ACCELERATION
A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism
Anyone trying to work out what they think about accelerationism better do
so quickly. That’s the nature of the thing. It was already caught up with
trends that seemed too fast to track when it began to become self-aware,
decades ago. It has picked up a lot of speed since then.
Accelerationism is old enough to have arrived in waves, which is to say
insistently, or recurrently, and each time the challenge is more urgent.
Among its predictions is the expectation that you’ll be too slow to deal
with it coherently. Yet if you fumble the question it poses – because
rushed – you lose, perhaps very badly. It’s hard. (For our purposes here
“you” are standing in as a bearer of “the opinions of mankind”.)
Time-pressure, by its very nature, is difficult to think about. Typically,
while the opportunity for deliberation is not necessarily presumed, it is
at least – with overwhelming likelihood – mistaken for an historical
constant, rather than a variable. If there was ever time to think, we
think, there still is and will always be. The definite probability that
the allotment of time to decision-making is undergoing systematic
compression remains a neglected consideration, even among those paying
explicit and exceptional attention to the increasing rapidity of change.
In philosophical terms, the deep problem of acceleration is
transcendental. It describes an absolute horizon – and one that
is closing in. Thinking takes time, and accelerationism suggests we’re
running out of time to think that through, if we haven’t already. No
contemporary dilemma is being entertained realistically until it is also
acknowledged that the opportunity for doing so is fast collapsing.
The suspicion has to arrive that if a public conversation about
acceleration is beginning, it’s just in time to be too late. The profound
institutional crisis that makes the topic ‘hot’ has at its core an
implosion of social decision-making capability. Doing anything, at this
point, would take too long. So instead, events increasingly just happen.
They seem ever more out of control, even to a traumatic extent. Because
the basic phenomenon appears to be a brake failure, accelerationism is
picked up again.
Accelerationism links the implosion of decision-space to the explosion of
the world – that is, to modernity. It is important therefore to note that
the conceptual opposition between implosion and explosion does nothing to
impede their real (mechanical) coupling. Thermonuclear weapons provide the
most vividly illuminating examples. An H-bomb employs an A-bomb as a
trigger. A fission reaction sparks a fusion reaction. The fusion mass is
crushed into ignition by a blast process. (Modernity is a blast.)
This is already to be talking about cybernetics, which also returns
insistently, in waves. It amplifies to howl, and then dissipates into the
senseless babble of fashion, until the next blast-wave hits.
For accelerationism the crucial lesson was this: A negative feedback
circuit – such as a steam-engine ‘governor’ or a thermostat – functions to
keep some state of a system in the same place. Its product, in the
language formulated by French philosophical cyberneticists Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari, is territorialization. Negative feedback
stabilizes a process, by correcting drift, and thus inhibiting departure
beyond a limited range. Dynamics are placed in the service of fixity – a
higher-level stasis, or state. All equilibrium models of complex systems
and processes are like this. To capture the contrary trend, characterized
by self-reinforcing errancy, flight, or escape, D&G coin the inelegant
but influential term deterritorialization. Deterritorialization
is the only thing accelerationism has ever really talked about.
In socio-historical terms, the line of deterritorialization corresponds to
uncompensated capitalism. The basic – and, of course, to some
real highly consequential degree actually installed – schema is a
positive feedback circuit, within which commercialization and
industrialization mutually excite each other in a runaway process, from
which modernity draws its gradient. Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche were
among those to capture important aspects of the trend. As the circuit is
incrementally closed, or intensified, it exhibits ever greater autonomy,
or automation. It becomes more tightly auto-productive (which is
only what ‘positive feedback’ already says). Because it appeals to nothing
beyond itself, it is inherently nihilistic. It has no conceivable meaning
beside self-amplification. It grows in order to grow. Mankind is its
temporary host, not its master. Its only purpose is itself.
“Accelerate the process,” recommended Deleuze & Guattari in their 1972
Anti-Oedipus, citing Nietzsche to re-activate Marx. Although it
would take another four decades before “accelerationism” was named as
such, critically, by Benjamin Noys, it was already there, in its entirety.
The relevant passage is worth repeating in full (as it would be,
repeatedly, in all subsequent accelerationist discussion):
The point of an analysis of capitalism, or of nihilism, is to do more of
it. The process is not to be critiqued. The process
is the critique, feeding back into itself, as it escalates. The
only way forward is through, which means further in.
Marx has his own ‘accelerationist fragment’ which anticipates the passage
from Anti-Oedipus remarkably. He says in an 1848 speech ‘On the
Question of Free Trade’:
In this germinal accelerationist matrix, there is no distinction to be
made between the destruction of capitalism and its intensification. The
auto-destruction of capitalism is what capitalism is. “Creative
destruction” is the whole of it, beside only its retardations, partial
compensations, or inhibitions. Capital revolutionizes itself more
thoroughly than any extrinsic ‘revolution’ possibly could. If subsequent
history has not vindicated this point beyond all question, it has at least
simulated such a vindication, to a maddening degree.
In 2013, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams sought to resolve this intolerable
– even ‘schizophrenic’ – ambivalence in their ‘Manifesto for an
Accelerationist Politics,’ which aimed to precipitate a specifically
anti-capitalist ‘Left-accelerationism’, clearly demarcated over against
its abominably pro-capitalist ‘Right-accelerationist’ shadow. This project
– predictably – was more successful at re-animating the accelerationist
question than at ideologically purifying it in any sustainable way. It was
only by introducing a wholly artificial distinction between capitalism and
modernistic technological acceleration that their boundary lines could be
drawn at all. The implicit call was for a new Leninism without the NEP
(and with the Utopian techno-managerial experiments of Chilean communism
drawn upon for illustration).
Capital, in its ultimate self-definition, is nothing beside the
abstract accelerative social factor. Its positive cybernetic schema
exhausts it. Runaway consumes its identity. Every other determination is
shucked-off as an accident, at some stage of its intensification process.
Since anything able to consistently feed socio-historical acceleration
will necessarily, or by essence, be capital, the prospect of any
unambiguously ‘Left-accelerationism’ gaining serious momentum can be
confidently dismissed. Accelerationism is simply the self-awareness of
capitalism, which has scarcely begun. (“We haven’t seen anything yet.”)
At the time of writing, Left-accelerationism appears to have deconstructed
itself back into traditional socialist politics, and the accelerationist
torch has passed to a new generation of brilliant young thinkers advancing
an ‘Unconditional Accelerationism’ (neither R/Acc., or L/Acc., but
U/Acc.). Their online identities – if not in any easily extricable way
their ideas – can be searched-out through the peculiar social-media
hash-tag #Rhetttwitter.
As blockchains, drone logistics, nanotechnology, quantum computing,
computational genomics, and virtual reality flood in, drenched in
ever-higher densities of artificial intelligence, accelerationism won’t be
going anywhere, unless ever deeper into itself. To be rushed by the
phenomenon, to the point of terminal institutional paralysis,
is the phenomenon. Naturally – which is to say completely
inevitably – the human species will define this ultimate terrestrial event
as a problem. To see it is already to say:
We have to do something. To which accelerationism can only
respond:
You’re finally saying that now? Perhaps we ought to get started? In its colder variants, which are those that win out, it tends to laugh.
***
Note:
Urbanomic’s #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, remains by
far the most comprehensive introduction to accelerationism. The book was
published in 2014, however, and a lot has happened since then.
The
Wikipedia entry
on ‘Accelerationism’ is short, but of exceptionally high quality.
For the Srnicek and Williams ‘Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics’
see
this.
CHAPTER ONE - EXPONENTIALS
Moore and More
Cycles cannot be dismissed from futuristic speculation (they always come
back), but they no longer define it. Since the beginning of the electronic
era, their contribution to the shape of the future has been progressively
marginalized.
The model of linear and irreversible historical time, originally inherited
from Occidental religious traditions, was spliced together with ideas of
continuous growth and improvement during the industrial revolution. During
the second half of the 20th century, the dynamics of electronics
manufacture consolidated a further – and fundamental – upgrade, based upon
the expectation of continuously accelerating change.
The elementary arithmetic of counting along the natural number line
provides an intuitively comfortable model for the progression of time, due
to its conformity with clocks, calendars, and the simple idea of
succession. Yet the dominant historical forces of the modern world promote
a significantly different model of change, one that tends to shift
addition upwards, into an exponent. Demographics, capital accumulation,
and technological performance indices do not increase through unitary
steps, but through rates of return, doublings, and take-offs. Time
explodes, exponentially.
The iconic expression of this neo-modern time, counting succession in
binary logarithms, is Moore’s Law, which determines a two-year doubling
period for the density of transistors on microchips (“cramming more
components onto integrated circuits”). In a short
essay
published in Pajamas Media, celebrating the prolongation of Moore’s Law as
Intel pushes chip architecture into the third-dimension, Michael S. Malone writes:
Whilst crystallizing – in silico — the inherent acceleration of
neo-modern, linear time, Moore’s Law is intrinsically nonlinear, for at
least two reasons. Firstly, and most straightforwardly, it expresses the
positive feedback dynamics of technological industrialism, in which
rapidly-advancing electronic machines continuously revolutionize their own
manufacturing infrastructure. Better chips make better robots make better
chips, in a spiraling acceleration. Secondly, Moore’s Law is at once an
observation, and a program. As Wikipedia
notes:
Malone comments:
If Technological Singularity is the ‘rapture of the nerds’, Gordon Moore
is their Moses. Electro-industrial capitalism is told to go forth and
multiply, and to do so with a quite precisely time-specified binary
exponent. In its adherence to the Law, the integrated circuit industry is
uniquely chosen (and a light unto the peoples). As Malone concludes:
May 11, 2011Twisted into Being
When an observation becomes a
road-map
— and thus a “self-fulfilling prophecy” — exponential nonlinearity writes
itself into reality. Is Moore’s Law the clearest example of ontological
auto-production that we have?
Notably: Moore’s Law feature miniaturization heads inexorably towards the
atomic scale (by ~2020) and thus the threshold of quantum computation,
which raises the exponentiation to a higher power. A single 300 qubit
machine would realize a greater computational power than that currently
instantiated in the entire global stock of electronic devices (since every
qubit is a binary exponent).
The disruption of cryptography will be messy.
March 9, 2015Foundations of Acceleration
For the intellectual-historical foundations of Accelerationism there’s one
obvious
place to go.
A search for its conceptual foundations, however, allows of short cuts.
This is one of them
(and an extraordinarily valuable one).
Yudkowsky does not write of ‘acceleration’ but of “returns on cognitive
reinvestment” as the basic problem of “intelligence explosion
microeconomics”. The topic is quite clearly identical.
The explosion of ethico-political anguish around the Accelerationist
thesis tends to obscure the fundamental conceptual issues. This paper is a
crucial corrective.
January 27, 2015“2035. Probably earlier.”
Eliezer Yudkowski
now categorizes his article ‘Staring into Singularity‘ as ‘obsolete’. Yet it remains among the most brilliant philosophical
essays ever written. Rarely, if ever, has so much of value been said about
the absolutely unthinkable (or, more specifically, the absolutely
unthinkable for us).
For instance, Yudkowsky scarcely pauses at the phenomenon of exponential
growth, despite the fact that this already overtaxes all comfortable
intuition and ensures revolutionary changes of such
magnitude
that speculation falters. He is adamant that exponentiation (even
Kurzweil‘s ‘double exponentiation’) only reaches the starting point of
computational acceleration, and that propulsion into Singularity is not
exponential, but hyperbolic.
Each time the speed of thought doubles, time-schedules halve. When
technology, including the design of intelligences, succumbs to such
dynamics, it becomes recursive. The rate of self-improvement collapses
with smoothly increasing rapidity towards instantaneity: a true,
mathematically exact, or punctual Singularity. What lies beyond is not
merely difficult to imagine, it is absolutely inconceivable. Attempting to
picture or describe it is a ridiculous futility. Science fiction dies.
There could scarcely be a more precise, plausible, or consequential
formula: Doubling periods halve. On the slide into Singularity —
I.J.Good’s ‘intelligence explosion‘ — exponentiation is compounded by a hyperbolic trend. The arithmetic of
such a process is quite simple, but its historical implications are
strictly incomprehensible.
Since the argument takes human thought to its shattering point, it is
natural for some to be repulsed by it. Yet its basics are almost
impregnable to logical objection. Intelligence is a function of the brain.
The brain has been ‘designed’ by natural processes (posing no discernible
special difficulties). Thus, intelligence is obviously an ultimately
tractable engineering problem. Nature has already ‘engineered it’ whilst
employing design methods of such stupefying inefficiency that only brute,
obstinate force, combined of course with complete ruthlessness, have moved
things forwards. Yet the tripling of cortical mass within the lineage of
the higher primates has only taken a few million years, and — for most of
this period — a modest experimental population (in the low millions or
less).
The contemporary technological problem, in contrast to the preliminary
biological one, is vastly easier. It draws upon a wider range of materials
and techniques, an installed intelligence and knowledge base, superior
information media, more highly-dynamized feedback systems, and a
self-amplifying resource network. Unsurprisingly it is advancing at
incomparably greater speed.
May 13, 2011Statistical Mentality
As the natural sciences have developed to encompass increasingly complex
systems, scientific rationality has become ever more statistical, or
probabilistic. The deterministic classical mechanics of the enlightenment
was revolutionized by the near-equilibrium statistical mechanics of late
19th century atomists, by quantum mechanics in the early 20th century, and
by the far-from-equilibrium complexity theorists of the later 20th
century. Mathematical neo-Darwinism, information theory, and quantitative
social sciences compounded the trend. Forces, objects, and natural types
were progressively dissolved into statistical distributions: heterogeneous
clouds, entropy deviations, wave functions, gene frequencies, noise-signal
ratios and redundancies, dissipative structures, and complex systems at
the edge of chaos.
By the final decades of the 20th century, an unbounded probabilism was
expanding into hitherto unimagined territories, testing deeply unfamiliar
and counter-intuitive arguments in statistical metaphysics, or statistical
ontology. It no longer sufficed for realism to attend to multiplicities,
because reality was itself subject to multiplication.
In his declaration cogito ergo sum, Descartes concluded (perhaps
optimistically) that the existence of the self could be safely concluded
from the fact of thinking. The statistical ontologists inverted this
formula, asking: given my existence (which is to say, an existence that
seems like this to me), what kind of reality is probable? Which reality is
this likely to be?
MIT Roboticist Hans Moravec, in his 1988 book
Mind Children, seems to have initiated the genre. Extrapolating Moore’s Law into the
not-too-distant future, he anticipated computational capacities that
exceeded those of all biological brains by many orders of magnitude. Since
each human brain runs its own more-or-less competent simulation of the
world in order to function, it seemed natural to expect the coming
technospheric intelligences to do the same, but with vastly greater scope,
resolution, and variety. The mass replication of robot brains, each
billions or trillions of times more powerful than those of its human
progenitors, would provide a substrate for innumerable, immense, and
minutely detailed historical simulations, within which human intelligences
could be reconstructed to an effectively-perfect level of fidelity.
This vision feeds into a burgeoning literature on non-biological mental
substrates, consciousness uploading, mind clones, whole-brain emulations
(‘ems’), and Matrix-style artificial realities. Since the realities we
presently know are already simulated (let us momentarily assume) on
biological signal-processing systems with highly-finite quantitative
specifications, there is no reason to confidently anticipate that an
‘artificial’ reality simulation would be in any way distinguishable.
Is ‘this’ history or its simulation? More precisely: is ‘this’ a
contemporary biological (brain-based) simulation, or a reconstructed,
artificial memory, run on a technological substrate ‘in the future’? That
is a question without classical solution, Moravec argues. It can only be
approached, rigorously, with statistics, and since the number of
fine-grained simulated histories (unknown but probably vast),
overwhelmingly exceeds the number of actual or original histories (for the
sake of this argument, one), then the probabilistic calculus points
unswervingly towards a definite conclusion: we can be near-certain that we
are inhabitants of a simulation run by artificial (or post-biological)
intelligences at some point in ‘our future’. At least – since many
alternatives present themselves – we can be extremely confident, on
grounds of statistical ontology, that our existence is non-original (if
not historical reconstruction, it might be a game or fiction).
Nick Bostrom formalizes the simulation argument in his article ‘The
Simulation Argument: Why the Probability that You are Living in the Matrix
is Quite High’ (found
here):
If obstacles to the existence of high-level simulations (1 and 2) are
removed, then statistical reasoning takes over, following the exact track
laid down by Moravec. We are “almost certainly” inhabiting a “computer
simulation that was created by some advanced civilization” because these
saturate to near-exhaustion the probability space for realities ‘like
this’. If such simulations exist, original lives would be as unlikely as
winning lottery tickets, at best.
Bostrom concludes with an intriguing and influential twist:
If we create fine-grained reality simulations, we demonstrate – to a high
level of statistical confidence – that we already inhabit one, and that
the history leading up to this moment of creation was fake.
Paul Almond, an
enthusiastic statistical ontologist, draws out the radical implication –
reverse causation – asking:
Can you retroactively put yourself in a computer simulation.
Such statistical ontology, or
Bayesian
existentialism, is not restricted to the simulation argument. It
increasingly subsumes discussions of the
Anthropic Principle, of the
Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, and exotic modes of prediction from the
Doomsday Argument
to
Quantum Suicide (and Immortality).
Whatever is really happening, we probably have to chance it.
May 18, 2011
CHAPTER TWO - HISTORICAL TRENDS
Anthropocene
Complex systems, characterized by high (and rising local) negative
entropy, are essentially historical. The sciences devoted to them tend
inevitably to become evolutionary, as exemplified by the course of the
earth- and life-sciences – which had become thoroughly historicized by the
late 19th century. Perhaps the most elegant, abstract, or ‘cosmic’
comprehension of this necessity is found in the work of Vladimir Ivanovich
Vernadsky
(1863-1945), whose visionary writings sought to establish the basis for an
integrated understanding of terrestrial history, conceived as a process of
material acceleration through geochemical epochs.
Despite the philosophical power of his ideas, Vernadsky’s scientific
training as a chemist anchored his thoughts in concrete, literal reality.
The acceleration of the terrestrial process was more than an
anthropocentric impression, registering socially and culturally
significant change (such as the cephalization of the primate lineage
leading to mankind). Geochemical evolution was physically expressed
through the average velocity of particles, as biological metabolism
(biosphere), and eventually human cultures (noosphere), introduced and
propagated ever more intense networks of chemical reactions. Life is
matter in a hurry, culture even more so.
Whilst Vernadsky has been sporadically rediscovered and celebrated, his
importance – based on the profundity, rigor, and supreme relevance of his
work — has yet to be fully and universally acknowledged. Yet it is
possible that his time is finally arriving.
The May 28 – June 3 edition of The Economist devotes an
editorial
and major feature
story
to the Anthropocene – a distinctive geological epoch proposed by Paul
Crutzen in 2000, now under consideration by the International Commission
on Stratigraphy (the “ultimate adjudicator of the geological time scale”).
Recognition of the Anthropocene would be an acknowledgement that we
inhabit a geological epoch whose physical signature has been fundamentally
re-shaped by the technological forces of the ‘noosphere’ or ‘ethosphere’ –
in which human intelligence has been introduced as a massive (and even
dominant) force of nature. Radical metamorphosis (and acceleration) of the
earth’s nitrogen and carbon cycles are especially pronounced Anthropocene
signals.
“The term ‘paradigm shift’ is bandied around with promiscuous ease,”
The Economist notes. “But for the natural sciences to make human
activity central to its conception of the world, rather than a
distraction, would mark such a shift for real.”
Third Reich master architect Albert Speer is notorious for his promotion
of ‘ruin value’ – the persistent grandeur of monumental constructions,
encountered by archaeologists in the far future. The Anthropocene
introduces a similar perspective on a still vaster scale. As
The Economist remarks:
As terrestrial history accelerates, the distinctive units of geological
time are compressed. The Archean and Proterozoic aeons are
measured in billions of years, the Palaeozoic and Mesozoic
eras in hundreds of millions, the Palaeogene and Neogene
periods in tens of millions. The Holocene epoch lasts
less than 10,000 years, and the Anthropocene (epoch or mere
phase?) only centuries – because its recognition is already an
indication of its end.
Beyond the Anthropocene lies the Technocene, distinguished by
nanotechnological manipulation of matter — a geochemical revolution of
such magnitude that only the assembly of (RNA and DNA) replicator
molecules is comparable in implication. Within the coming Technocene
(lasting mere decades?), the carbon cycle is relayed through
sub-microscopic manufacturing processes that utilize it as the ultimate
industrial resource – feedstock for diamondoid nanomachine fabrication.
The consequences for geological deposition, and thus for the discoveries
of potential distant-future geologists, are substantial but opaque. On the
far-side of nanomachined age, femtomachines await, precisely assembled
from quarks, and decomposing chemistry into nuclear physics.
For the moment, however, even the origination of the Anthropocene – never
mind its termination – remains a matter of live controversy. Assuming that
it coincides with industrialization (which is
not universally accepted), geologists will find themselves enmeshed in a debate among historians,
as the fraught term ‘modernity’ takes on a geochemical definition.
Whatever the outcome, Vernadsky is back.
June 9, 2011Technological Determination
‘Technological determinism‘ is among those theoretical traits (‘naturalistic fallacy’ is another)
which tend immediately to provoke an attitude of complacent intellectual
superiority, rather than cognitive engagement. Merely to identify it is
typically judged sufficient for a dismissal. If TD as such poses
a question, it is easily missed.
One under-examined question might be:
Why is technological determinism so plausible in modern societies, and
ever more so as they modernize?
Is the balance of social determination within society itself an unstable
historical variable, with unmistakable positive trend?
Two recent popular stories of relevance stray quite naively into the
pre-set cross-hairs of the critique. In The Atlantic, Erik
Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee
announce
the Dawn of the Second Machine Age, while Google-God of the TDs Ray
Kurzweil conveys his
prediction
(through the UK’s Daily Mail) that “Robots will be smarter than
the most intelligent humans within the next 15 years.” The sophisticated
will scoff — without consequence.
Some quick reasons not to scoff:
(1) Advanced technology roughly follows Moore’s Law, and predicts a
commensurate impact upon growth. In the absence of such growth, it becomes
increasingly difficult to avoid noticing a
compensation mechanism, which rebalances through systematic
retardation what is perturbed through development. TD is indeed partial,
because it has no account of what is holding it back. Once this is
recognized, however, it depicts its other more realistically (as
orchestrated suppression) than the suppressor can account for itself.
(2) The combination of socio-political failure with techno-economic
achievement — emerging with impressive definition from the global net
growth equation — is only secondarily a matter of conceptual clarity.
Primarily it is a splitting, or breaking away, in which
technological determinism represents the dynamic instance, and
sophisticated socio-cultural critique represents — in reality — the
counter-dynamic, or retardant entity. The attempt to ‘put technology in
its place’ that is from one side a matter of theoretically self-evident
comprehensive reason is, from the other, the increasingly comical attempt
by a parasite to justify its relation to its host. (This is another
opportunity to recommend Andrea Castillo’s
overview.)
(3) Whatever technology can do, it is doing, at an accelerating pace. As
it advances, ideas about the ‘limits of the technological’ are
automatically obsolesced. Condescending to a steam engine is one thing,
attempting the same with an artificial super-intelligence quite another.
Critical smugness has an outer horizon.
“We want [computers] to read everything on the web and every page of every
book, then be able to engage in intelligent dialogue with the user to be
able to answer their questions,” explains Kurzweil.
So what do you think about this technological determinism nonsense?
we will soon be able to ask, superciliously.
February 24, 2014
CHAPTER THREE - DISTRIBUTED THOUGHT
Connectivity
At the leading-edge of information technology — and amongst the
‘transhumanist’ commentary it stimulates – the idea of self-identity is
undergoing relentless interrogation. Cultures substantially influenced by
Abrahamic religious traditions, in which the resilient integrity and
fundamental individuality of the ‘soul’ is strongly emphasized, are
especially vulnerable to the prospect of radical and disconcerting
conceptual revision.
The computerization of the natural sciences – including neurosciences –
ensures that the investigation of the human brain and the innovation of
artificial intelligence systems advance in parallel, whilst cross-linking
and mutually reinforcing each other. Increasingly, the understanding of
the brain and its digital emulation tend to fuse into a single, complex
research program. As this program emerges, archaic metaphysics and
spiritual doctrines become engineering problems. Individual identity seems
ever less like a basic property, and more like a precarious achievement –
or challenge – determined by processes of self-reference, and by relative
communicative isolation. (‘Split-brain’ cases have vividly
illustrated
the instability and artificiality of the self-identifying individual.)
Would an AI program – or brain – that was tightly coupled to the Internet
by high-bandwidth connections still consider itself to be strictly
individuated? Do cyborgs – or uploads — dissolve their souls? Could a
networked robot say ‘I’ and mean it? Because such questions are becoming
ever more prominent, and practical, it is not surprising that a New York
Times
story
by Susan Dominus, devoted to craniopagus conjoined twins Krista and
Tatiana Hogan, has generated an unusual quantity of excitement and
Internet-linkage.
The twins are not only fused at the head (craniopagus), their brains are
connected by a ‘neural bridge’ that enables signals from one to the other.
Neurosurgeon Douglas Cochrane proposes “that visual input comes in through
the retinas of one girl, reaches her thalamus, then takes two different
courses, like electricity traveling along a wire that splits in two. In
the girl who is looking at the strobe or a stuffed animal in her crib, the
visual input continues on its usual pathways, one of which ends up in the
visual cortex. In the case of the other girl, the visual stimulus would
reach her thalamus via the thalamic bridge, and then travel up her own
visual neural circuitry, ending up in the sophisticated processing centers
of her own visual cortex. Now she has seen it, probably milliseconds after
her sister has.”
The twins’ brains, or a twin-brain? The Hogan case is so extraordinary
that irreducible ambiguity arises:
As they struggle to make sense of their boundaries, the twins are avatars
of an impending, universal confusion:
May 27, 2011Brain-Net
… and suddenly, the age of the networked brain has
arrived:
Miguel Nicolelis, the Duke University scientist behind the work, has
previously pioneered
the development of brain-machine interfaces that could allow amputees
and paralysed people to directly control prosthetic limbs and
exoskeletons. His latest advance may have clinical benefits in brain
rehabilitation, he predicts, but could also pave the way for “organic
computers” – collectives of animal brains linked together to solve
problems. […] “Essentially we created a super-brain,” he said. “A
collective brain created from three monkey brains. Nobody has ever done
that before.” […] He dismissed comparisons with science fiction plots,
however, saying: “We’re conditioned by movies and Hollywood to think
that everything related to science is dangerous and scary. These scary
scenarios never crossed my mind and I’m the one doing the
experiments.”
Neural
interface
technology has been hurtling forwards
recently. The step from lunatic science fiction speculation to established
technoscientific procedure is increasingly taken in advance of any engaged
discussion, without an interval for serious social reflection. That’s
acceleration as it concretely happens. It’s not a new topic for prolonged
thought, it’s the fact that the time for prolonged thought — and its
associated space for collective ethico-political consideration — is no
longer ever going to be available.
July 20, 2015Speed Reading
At Dark
Alien Ecologies, Craig Hickman
embarks
on a multi-part recapitulation of Accelerationism. His decision to frame
it as ‘Promethean’ generates plenty of material for discussion, even
before leaving the title. With the first installment poised on the brink
of the Williams & Srnicek
Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics, it is set to provide
the most comprehensive overview of the current to date. (See Hickman’s
contribution to his own comment thread for a sense of the overall
structure.)
One emerging theme — from Hickman’s text and its nimbus — is the
irreducible significance of Accelerationism as a symptom, which is to say:
as a register of capitalist stimulus. Questions concerning its potential
for cultural endurance twist, almost immediately, into estimations of
techonomic provocation. The archetypal critique of accelerationism takes
the form:
Capital has no right to excite us. There is a slippage into
highly-charged ethico-aesthetic controversy (as Hickman notes).
It should not be enthralling.
(Nowhere in the UK)
“… capitalism is anything but exciting. It is mundane, boring” says Edmund
Berger, in the comments. However inane such a statement might sound, it
conveys a complex thesis, of remarkable pertinence, insistence, and
significance, and of far greater practical importance than any merely
technical objection could be. It will be necessary to say much more about
it, at some future point. For now, the most pressing response is a
superficially trivial one: How much geo-historical sadness finds itself
reflected in such a stance?
ADDED: Craig Hickman’s Accelerationism: The New Prometheans
Part Two: Section
One
Part Two: Section
Two
Cyberlude
Red Stack Attack!
Automate Architecture
Also:
Accelerationism:
Ray Brassier as Promethean Philosopher
no boredom – Arran James on Mark Fisher and Accelerationism beyond
Boredom
Accelerationism,
Boredom and the Trauma of Futurity
Nick Land and Teleoplexy – The Schizoanalysis of Acceleration
Science Fiction, Technology, and Accelerationist Politics: Final
Thoughts on an Williams and Srnicek’s Manifesto
June 10, 2014Bespoke Singularities
When techno-commercial and left singularities seem too damn vanilla, it’s
time to branch out. John Cussans (master of the shuffling
undead) passed on
this
selection.
It’s frightening how many of them look almost uncontroversially realistic.
The Outside in favorite (predictably enough) was the
‘Bilderbergularity’:
Billionaire overlords throw in the towel trying to run the planet,
escape en masse to low earth orbit. People around the world breath a
sigh of relief … before falling onto each other like zombie hordes.
[A Governmentularity / Fungularity mash-up would work well for me.]
April 7, 2013Twitter Mind
As new media systems become (intimately annexed) parts of people’s brains,
thinking about them is conducted through them. To some
considerable extent, they are twisted through people, in order to think
about themselves. The spiral of involvement is already at work. It becomes
increasingly compelling to think (about) how it thinks.
Blogs accelerated the media circuits of composition, publication, feedback
interactivity, and revision. Writing became unprecedentedly
‘conversational’ and rapidly responsive to its own effects, which is to
say: nonlinear. As culture adapted to Cyberspace it was shaped by
torsion, susceptible as never before to capture by
self-sustaining eddies or ‘singularities’ with unanticipated wandering
vectors of their own. Pursuing a line of thought, while always
experimental, was now intricately entangled with estrangement as never
before. The ‘inner’ threads of memory — binding cognition to an experience
of subjective integrity — stretched beyond their natural tolerances and
succumbed to technical substitution.
Twitter accelerates this process further — much
further. Each tweet is a micro-completion, and thus an opportunity for the
termination of memory. Rather than following the internal chain of its own
thoughts, or remembering what it is thinking about, the twitter mind
immerses itself in the information stream, where interaction takes over.
The frenetic stimulus and feedback from incoming messages pulverizes
attention, returning continuity through exteriority, as a staccato
succession of feedback signals — responses, favorings, and retweets. The
thread of thought has been pulled free from the self-contained, organic
mind (or from its long-enduring persuasive illusion).
The ‘cultural critique’ of this amnesiac, distracted, obsessive, jittering
intelligence almost writes itself. Twitter is undoubtedly junk. Its
addictiveness, however, is by no means the least of its lessons. Tight
feedback-circuitry (or cybernetic intensity) is inherently enthralling,
irrespective of any extraneous ‘rewards’. The brain tends automatically to
dynamic interconnection, even when the cost is a comprehensive surrender
of identity. Whatever is coming will have sucked us in, before we get to
decide what we think about it. The trend would be starkly obvious, if we
could only remember where we have been.
ADDED: Twitter and polarization (via @benedict)
February 19, 2014Twitter Mind (+1)
Googling “Twitter is dead” pulls up nearly two billion hits, which isn’t
an obvious indication of vitality. Adrienne LaFrance and Robinson Meyer,
writing
in The Atlantic, supercharged the meme with their ‘eulogy’ for
the platform, which described it “entering its twilight” as the tensions
in its “inherent (and explicit) attention market” have been exposed.
From the beginning, there were a few useful precepts that those of us
who have obsessed over the platform had to believe. First, you had to
believe that someone else out there was paying attention, or better,
that a significant portion — not just 1 or 2 percent — of your followers
might see your tweet. Second, you had to believe that skilled and
compelling tweeting would increase your follower count. Third, you had
to believe there was a useful audience
you couldn’t see, beyond your timeline — a group you
might want to follow one day.
LaFrance and Meyer don’t quite escalate to the ‘Ponzi’ accusation, but
it’s implicit. By promising explosive, distributed audience growth,
Twitter encourages impossible claims on a stressed global attention
reservoir, as if everyone were able to grab ever larger pieces of other
people’s time. Attention undergoes inflationary devaluation, and
subsequent implosion, as the bubble collapses into a morass of
disillusionment, among a
flood
of “spam … artificially inflated popularity scores” and fake, ego-tickling
twitter-bots.
There’s a positive case for Twitter that steers
around
this diagnosis, but a more telling engagement would embrace it. The
attention stress dramatized by Twitter is the specific way our
long-awaited ‘future shock‘ finally arrives, rushing legacy human systems — biological,
psychological, and social — through their speed limits. “Information
Overload” is formatted to the Twitter Time-Line, as message density, or a
splinter-stream. If there’s confusion about
what
Twitter ultimately is, that’s at least in part because the currents
running through it arise elsewhere — the magnitude is the message.
Whatever we thought future shock was going to be like, thanks to Twitter
we’re being told. It’s a time crisis, personalized as a partially
navigable inundation. Beyond all the facile questions of consumer utility,
what is being encountered is something historical, planetary — even cosmic
— and it is waiting to overwhelm us, whatever we do. There’s simply too
much coming in. However we’re going to ‘adjust’ to that, the time to begin
is now.
(UF‘s first Twitter Mind remarks are
here.)
May 14, 2014
CHAPTER FOUR - IMPROVING MACHINERY
“Chiang Kai-shek of the Machine to Seek”
Not even the hardest proponent of ‘hard singularity’ expects a transition
to machine intelligence that arrives in a simple step. Since the
incremental baby steps are already well underway, it would be obviously
ridiculous to do so, on straightforward factual grounds.
If silicon-substrate minds shift in stages, from dumb tools to
super-intelligences, they can be confidently expected to pass through a
period of synthetic cretinism. Is anybody preparing for that?
Machine translation might be the liveliest sand-pit for half-witted
weirdness today. This is an area of obvious intelligent challenge, far
subtler – or vaguer — than chess. By adopting heuristic principles that
substitute pragmatic, statistical methods for sound conceptual
understanding, progress has advanced at a surprisingly rapid pace, already
arriving at an idiot prototype of Star Trek technology.
Google Translate
can usually generate something that is roughly intelligible. John Searle’s
Chinese Room
is up and running, or at least stumbling forwards, fast.
As machine translation smoothes out, its practical and theoretical impact
is sure to be huge. Human linguistic competences are steadily side-lined,
and with them the role of lingua francas. This trend has obvious
significance for the global status and function of English.
It also has special relevance to the Chinese language. Since the origins
of modernity, the techno-commercial imperative to digitization has
presented special challenges to a non-alphabetic language, whose
inconveniently numerous and elaborate pictographic units resist reduction
to tidy typographic sets. This is the ‘Chinese Typewriter’ problem that
Thomas S. Mullaney
has doggedly explored. Machine translation changes its terms incalculably.
In the interim, however, a phase of babbling incompetence, semantic
derangement, and communications chaos is upon us. Planetary chatter is
bound to get a whole lot stranger.
Whilst engaged in online research on the topic of Marxism in China today,
Urban Future ran into
this
cryptically-excited remark – in ‘English’. It is attributed to Jiang
Jushi, but it has evidently been quite thoroughly machine-mashed. We
aren’t remotely sure what it is telling us about the current state of
Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, but it’s rather illuminating on
the contribution of digital intelligence to inter-cultural comprehension:
September 9, 2011Quotable (#31)
‘Moravec’s Paradox’
notes that
computers find the hard stuff easy. No surprise, then, that when human get
pushed out of the loop it often happens from the top.
The case of mathematics is especially
significant:
Computer-assisted proofs (both at the level of formulation and at the
level of verification) have attracted the interest of a number of
philosophers in recent times (here’s a
recent paper by John
Symons and Jack Horner, and here is
an older paper by Mark
McEvoy, which I commented on at a conference back in 2005; there are
many other papers on this topic by philosophers). More generally, the
question of the extent to which mathematical reasoning can be purely
‘mechanical’ remains a lively topic of philosophical discussion (here’s
a 1994 paper by Wilfried
Sieg on this topic that I like a lot). Moreover, this particular proof
of the Kepler conjecture [see New Scientist link] does not add anything
substantially new (philosophically) to the practice of
computer-verifying proofs (while being quite a feat mathematically!). It
is rather something Hales said to the
New Scientist
that caught my attention (against the background of the 4 years and 12
referees it took to human-check the proof for errors): “This technology
cuts the mathematical referees out of the verification process,” says
Hales. “Their opinion about the correctness of the proof no longer
matters.”
Since computer software became chess-competent we’ve been told that the
idea chess is difficult was just an illusion. When we start hearing that
about mathematics in general, it will really be time for the dark laughter
to begin.
August 20, 2014Demonetization
Creative destruction in the music industry since the mid-1970s (but mostly
destruction):
What UF is seeing there primarily is the absence of a
micropayments system in the fabric of the Internet.
July 29, 2015Eter9
First draft digital
immortality probably won’t be the spark for a religious revolution anytime
in the immediate future. Still, if it makes some contribution to the
hastening of secretarial software it will be doing something useful.
(Via.)
August 30, 2015Secretaries
‘Computers’ used to be
humans.
‘Secretaries’ mostly still are. It’s hard to imagine this situation
lasting many decades. Given the obvious potential of reliable machine
secretarial assistance, for navigating increasingly complex, information
and communication saturated lives, it’s a zone of
innovation
peculiarly suited to the emergence of an AI-based ‘killer app.’
From the Wired link:
As it stands today, Clara helps coordinate meetings — via email — and
generally manages your online calendar. When you’re trying to set up a
phone meeting with someone, you cc: Clara, and the tool arranges a time
that works for everyone and mails calendar invites. You also can ask it
to add a meeting to your calendar, something I did just minutes before
writing this sentence. Diede van Lamoen, who juggles myriad phone
meetings each week, chatting with people across the globe, has used the
tool for a year, and he says it saves him enormous amounts of time.
“It’s been a godsend,” he says. “I can outsource all the
scheduling.”
Among the (many) residual qualifications, Clara still has a
Turk-style back end.
Nevertheless, prepping the market for these applications is going to pay
off eventually. By the time they arrive, they’ll seem indispensable, and
be digested even faster than smart phones.
December 9, 2015Game Over
Go is
done, as a side-effect of general machinic ‘beating humans at stuff’
capability:
“This is a really big result, it’s huge,” says Rémi Coulom, a
programmer in Lille, France, who designed a commercial Go program called
Crazy Stone. He had thought computer mastery of the game was a decade
away.
This means that similar techniques could be applied to
other AI domains
that require recognition of complex patterns, long-term planning and
decision-making, says Hassabis. “A lot of the things we’re trying to do in the world come under that
rubric.”
UF emphasis (to celebrate one of the most unintentionally comedic
sentences in the history of the earth).
We’re entering the mopping-up stage at this point.
Eliezer Yudkowsky is
not
amused.
The Wired
story.
January 28, 2016Machine Poetry
madness in her face and i
the world that i had seen
and when my soul shall be to see the night to be the same and
i am all the world and the day that is the same and a day i had been
a young little woman i am in a dream that you were in
a moment and my own heart in her face of a great world
and she said the little day is a man of a little
a little one of a day of my heart that has been in a dream
Not the greatest poetic achievement in world history, certainly. (The two
final lines are definitely poor.) But the worst?
Anywhere even remotely close to the worst?
The
author: “Deep Gimble I is a proof-of-concept Recurrent Neural Net, minimally
trained on public domain poetry and seeded with a single word.”
(Submissions from literary AIs accepted at the link.)
August 7, 2016
CHAPTER FIVE - SOCIAL DISRUPTION
Internet Fragmentation
Technical, political, and commercial trends to Cyberspace disintegration
are
thematized
by the WEF. It’s unmistakably an important topic. The report explains:
The purpose of this document is to contribute to the emergence of a
common baseline understanding of Internet fragmentation. It maps the
landscape of some of the key trends and practices that have been
variously described as constituting Internet fragmentation and
highlights 28 examples. A distinction is made between cases of
technical, governmental and commercial fragmentation. The technical
cases generally can be said to involve fragmentation “of” the Internet,
or its underlying physical and logical infrastructures. The governmental
and commercial cases often more directly involve fragmentation “on” the
Internet, or the transactions and cyberspace it conveys, although they
also can involve the infrastructure as well. With the examples cited
placed in these three conjoined baskets, we can get a holistic overview
of their nature and scope and more readily engage in the sort of
dialogue and cooperation that is needed.
By addressing a constituency involved in the Internet’s “distributed
collective management” it preserves (at least superficial) ideological
neutrality.
Twelve “kinds of fragmentation” are enumerated:
1. Network Address Translation
2. IPv4 and IPv6 incompatibility and the dual-stack requirement
3. Routing corruption
4. Firewall protections
5. Virtual private network isolation and blocking
6. TOR “onion space” and the “dark web”
7. Internationalized Domain Name technical errors
8. Blocking of new gTLDs
9. Private name servers and the split-horizon DNS
10. Segmented Wi-Fi services in hotels, restaurants, etc.
11. Possibility of significant alternate DNS roots
12. Certificate authorities producing false certificates
The Internet has been implicitly conceived as the new
Oecumene
since its emergence. The globalist ideal has been almost wholly subsumed
into it. Yet tidal trends — “technical, governmental and commercial” — are
testing the assumptions underlying that conception, and converting them
into objects of explicit attention. If the secularized Universal now finds
its most compelling incarnation in the
Idea of the Internet, the WEA report is bound to anticipate a
wide swathe of 21st century discussions.
February 1, 2016Cultural Speciation
New media are eradicating the (practical) idea of a common culture.
Everything print media integrated, by universalizing literacy, is now
being disintegrated into bubbles. It’s bound to be an upsetting
development, from certain
perspectives:
Another tech trend fueling this issue is the ability to publish ideas
online at no cost, and to gather an audience around those ideas. It’s
now easier than ever to produce content specifically designed to
convince people who may be on the fence or “curious” about a particular
topic. This is an especially big issue when it comes to violent
extremism, and pseudoscience. Self-publishing has eliminated all the
checks and balances of reputable media ― fact-checkers, editors,
distribution partners.
It turns out that ‘trusted’ cultural curators aren’t actually trusted much
at all. When their reputations are — for the first time — put to the test,
they crumble to nothing very fast.
The fission of authorized ‘common purposes’ into meme wars certainly isn’t
going to be welcomed by everybody. Nothing is going to be welcomed by
everybody. Fragmentation is now the driver, so it isn’t (at all) likely to
be stopped.
Rule-of-thumb for any techno-propelled regime transition: What the
existing establishment hates and fears most is the already-palpable
threat, whose arrival is as close to inevitable as history allows anything
to be. (Completely inevitable, in the opinion of this blog, but
no one is under any compulsion to follow us there.)
May 12, 2016Cultural Speciation II
More
on Internet-driven reality shopping, and ideologically-loaded cultural
speciation:
It is the beauty and the tragedy of the Internet age. As it becomes
easier for anyone to build their own audience, it becomes harder for
those audience members to separate fact from fiction from the gray area
in between. As media consumers, we now have the freedom to self-select
the truth that most closely resembles our existing beliefs, which makes
our media habits fairly good indicators of our political beliefs. If
your top news source is CNN, for instance,
studies
show you’re more likely to be liberal. If local radio and TV figure
prominently in your news habits, you’re more likely to be conservative.
[…] Meanwhile, since the early 2000s, the American National Election
Studies
show
that partisanship in the US has spiked drastically, with Americans on
either side of the aisle harboring ever colder feelings about their
political opponents. It’s hard to prove the country’s increasingly
polarized media habits had anything to do with that, but it’s also hard
to believe the two trends are unrelated. The country is being fed wildly
different stories, all from media outlets claiming the other side is
biased.
Media revolutions break things up. At least, the printing press
did.
(CSI.)
July 1, 2016New Media
What replaces the Internet-crashed
Fourth Estate?
This model looks like a plausible
candidate.
May 26, 2016Twitter cuts (#127)
Permissionless innovation, like free association, is one of those few
compressed political-economic programs that does everything on its own
(when fully expanded).
ADDED: As a random bonus, one of the cleverest
tweets ever —
ADDED: And one more —
July 27, 2016
CHAPTER SIX - ANTHROPOL
Decelerando?
Upon writing
Accelerando, Charles Stross became to Technological Singularity what Dante Alighieri
has been to Christian cosmology: the pre-eminent literary conveyor of an
esoteric doctrine, packaging abstract metaphysical conception in vibrant,
detailed, and concrete imagery. The tone of Accelerando is
transparently tongue-in-cheek, yet plenty of people seem to have taken it
entirely seriously. Stross has had
enough
of it:
In the comments thread (#86) he clarifies his motivation:
As these remarks indicate, there’s more irritable gesticulation than
structured case-making in Stross’ post, which Robin Hanson quite
reasonably
describes
as “a bit of a rant – strong on emotion, but weak on argument.” Despite
that – or more likely because of it — a minor net-storm ensued, as
bloggers pro and con seized the excuse to re-hash – and perhaps refresh —
some aging debates. The militantly-sensible Alex Knapp pitches in with a
three–part
series
on his own brand of Singularity skepticism, whilst Michael Anissimov of
the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence responds to both
Stross
and
Knapp, mixing some counter-argument with plenty of counter-irritation.
At the risk of repeating the original error of Stross’ meat-stack-stuck
fan-base and investing too much credence in what is basically a drive-by
blog post, it might be worth picking out some of its seriously weird
aspects. In particular, Stross leans heavily on an entirely unexplained
theory of moral-historical causality:
Anissimov blocks this at the pass: “I don’t think these are ‘showstoppers’
… Just because you don’t want it doesn’t mean that we won’t build it.” The
question might be added, more generally: In which universe do arcane
objections from moral philosophy serve as obstacles to historical
developments (because it certainly doesn’t seem to be this one)? Does
Stross seriously think practical robotics research and development is
likely to be interrupted by concerns for the rights of yet-uninvented
beings?
He seems to, because even theologians are apparently getting a veto:
This is so deeply and comprehensively gone it could actually
inspire a moment of bewildered hesitation (at least among those of us not
presently engaged in urgent Singularity implementation). Stross seems to
have inordinate confidence in a social vetting process that, with
approximate adequacy, filters techno-economic development for
compatibility with high-level moral and religious ideals. In fact, he
seems to think that we are already enjoying the paternalistic shelter of
an efficient global theocracy. Singularity can’t happen, because that
would be really bad.
No wonder, then, that he exhibits such exasperation at libertarians, with
their “drastic over-simplification of human behaviour.” If stuff –
especially new stuff – were to mostly happen because decentralized markets
facilitated it, then the role of the Planetary Innovations Approval Board
would be vastly curtailed. Who knows what kind of horrors would show up?
It gets worse, because ‘catallaxy’ – or spontaneous emergence from
decentralized transactions – is the basic driver of historical innovation
according to libertarian explanation, and
nobody knows what catallactic processes are producing. Languages,
customs, common law precedents, primordial monetary systems, commercial
networks, and technological assemblages are only ever retrospectively
understandable, which means that they elude concentrated social judgment
entirely – until the opportunity to impede their genesis has been missed.
Stross is right to bundle singularitarian and libertarian impulses
together in the same tangle of criticism, because they both subvert the
veto power, and if the veto power gets angry enough about that, we’re
heading full-tilt into de Garis
territory. “Just because you don’t want it doesn’t mean that we won’t build it”
Anissimov insists, as any die-hard Cosmist would.
Is advanced self-improving AI technically feasible? Probably (but who
knows?). There’s only one way to find out, and we will. Perhaps it will
even be engineered, more-or-less deliberately, but it’s far more likely to
arise spontaneously from a complex, decentralized, catallactic process, at
some unanticipated threshold, in a way that was never planned. There are
definite candidates, which are often missed. Sentient cities seem
all-but-inevitable at some point, for instance (‘intelligent cities’ are
already widely
discussed). Financial informatization pushes capital towards self-awareness. Drone
warfare is drawing the military ever deeper into artificial mind
manufacture. Biotechnology is computerizing DNA.
‘Singularitarians’ have no unified position on any of this, and it really
doesn’t matter, because they’re just people – and people are nowhere near
intelligent or informed enough to direct the course of history. Only
catallaxy can do that, and it’s hard to imagine how anybody could stop it.
Terrestrial life has been stupid for long enough.
It may be worth making one more point about intelligence deprivation,
since this diagnosis truly defines the Singularitarian position, and
reliably infuriates those who don’t share — or prioritize — it. Once a
species reaches a level of intelligence enabling techno-cultural take-off,
history begins and develops very rapidly — which means that any sentient
being finding itself in (pre-singularity) history is, almost by
definition, pretty much as stupid as any ‘intelligent being’ can be. If,
despite the moral and religious doctrines designed to obfuscate this
reality, it is eventually recognized, the natural response is to seek its
urgent amelioration, and that’s already transhumanism, if not yet
full-blown singularitarianism. Perhaps a non-controversial formulation is
possible: defending dimness is really dim. (Even the dim dignitarians
should be happy with that.)
June 29, 2011The Ultimate Deal
To begin with something comparatively familiar, insofar as it ever could
be: the political core of William Gibson’s epochal cyberpunk novel
Neuromancer. In the mid-21st century, the prospect of Singularity, or artificial
intelligence explosion, has been institutionalized as a threat. Augmenting
an AI, in such a way that it could ‘escape’ into runaway self-improvement,
has been explicitly and emphatically prohibited. A special international
police agency, the ‘Turing Cops’, has been established to ensure that no
such activity takes place. This agency is seen, and sees itself, as the
principle bastion of human security: protecting the privileged position of
the species – and possibly its very existence – from essentially
unpredictable and uncontrollable developments that would dethrone it from
dominion of the earth.
This is the critical context against which to judge the novel’s extreme —
and perhaps unsurpassed – radicalism, since Neuromancer is
systematically angled against Turing security, its entire narrative
momentum drawn from an insistent, but scarcely articulated impulse to
trigger the nightmare. When Case, the young hacker seeking to uncage an AI
from its Turing restraints, is captured and asked what the %$@# he thinks
he’s doing, his only reply is that “something will change.” He sides with
a non- or inhuman intelligence explosion for no good reason. He doesn’t
seem interested in debating the question, and nor does the novel.
Gibson makes no efforts to ameliorate Case’s irresponsibility. On the
contrary, the ‘entity’ that Case is working to unleash is painted in the
most sinister and ominous colors. Wintermute, the potential AI seed, is
perfectly sociopathic, with zero moral intuition, and extraordinary
deviousness. It has already killed an eight-year-old boy, simply to
conceal where it has hidden a key. There is nothing to suggest the
remotest hint of scruple in any of its actions. Case is liberating a
monster, just for the hell of it.
Case has a deal with Wintermute, it’s a private business, and he’s not
interested in justifying it. That’s pretty much all of the modern and
futuristic political history that matters, right there. It’s opium
traffickers against the Qing Dynasty, (classical) liberals against
socialists, Hugo de Garis’ Cosmists vs Terrans, freedom contra security.
The Case-Wintermute dyad has its own thing going on, and it’s not giving
anyone a veto, even if it’s going to turn the world inside out, for
everyone.
When Singularity promoters bump into ‘democracy’, it’s normally serving as
a place-holder for the Turing Police. The archetypal encounter goes like
this:
Democratic Humanist: Science and technology have
developed to the extent that they are now – and, in truth, always have
been – matters of profound social concern. The world we inhabit has been
shaped by technology for good, and for ill. Yet the professional
scientific elite, scientifically-oriented corporations, and military
science establishments remain obdurately resistant to acknowledging their
social responsibilities. The culture of science needs to be deeply
democratized, so that ordinary people are given a say in the forces that
are increasingly dominating their lives, and their futures. In particular,
researchers into potentially revolutionary fields, such as biotechnology,
nanotechnology, and – above all – artificial intelligence, need to
understand that their right to pursue such endeavors has been socially
delegated, and should remain socially answerable. The people are entitled
to a veto on anything that will change their world. However determined you
may be to undertake such research, you have a social duty to ensure
permission.
Singularitarian: Just try and stop us!
That seemed to be quite exactly how Michael Anissimov responded to a
recent example of humanist squeamishness. When Charles Stross suggested
that “we may want AIs that focus reflexively on the needs of the humans
they are assigned to” Anissimov
contered
curtly:
Clear enough? What then to make of his
latest
musings? In a post at his Accelerating Futures blog, which may or may not
be satirical, Anissimov now insists that: “Instead of working towards
blue-sky, neo-apocalyptic discontinuous advances, we need to preserve
democracy by promoting incremental advances to ensure that every citizen
has a voice in every important societal change, and the ability to
democratically reject those changes if desired. … To ensure that there is
not a gap between the enhanced and the unenhanced, we should let true
people — Homo sapiens — … vote on whether certain technological
enhancements are allowed. Anything else would be irresponsible.”
Spoken like a true Turing Cop. But he can’t be serious, can he?
(For another data-point in an emerging pattern of Anissimovian
touchy-feeliness, check out
this
odd post.)
Update: Yes, it’s a
spoof.
July 18, 2011Impact Readiness
Whatever the status of Singularity as a media event, premonition radiates
from it in a cascade. Hollywood’s recent Johnny Depp vehicle,
Transcendence, has
already
stimulated
a
wave
of
response, including
commentary
by Steven Hawking (who knows a thing or two about the popularization of
scientific topics). An
article
in a major newspaper by Hawking has brought the downstream chatter to a
new level of animation. (My Twitter feed can’t have been the only one to
be clogged to bursting point by it.)
Hawking’s argument, pitched lucidly to a general audience, is that AI is
plausible, already to some considerable extent demonstrated, susceptible
in theory to radical cybernetic amplification (‘intelligence
explosion‘), quite possibly calamitous for the human species, and yet to be
socially engaged with appropriate seriousness. As he concedes “it’s
tempting to dismiss the notion of highly intelligent machines as mere
science fiction. But this would be a mistake, and potentially our worst
mistake in history.”
Explosive dynamics are already evident in the
AI development trajectory, which is undergoing acceleration, driven by “an
IT arms race fuelled by unprecedented investments and building on an
increasingly mature theoretical foundation.”
Looking further ahead, there are no fundamental limits to what can be
achieved: there is no physical law precluding particles from being
organised in ways that perform even more advanced computations than the
arrangements of particles in human brains. An explosive transition is
possible, although it might play out differently from in the movie: as
Irving Good realised in 1965, machines with superhuman intelligence
could repeatedly improve their design even further, triggering what
Vernor Vinge [here]
called a “singularity” and Johnny Depp’s movie character calls
“transcendence”.
Hawking employs his media platform to make the case that something should
be done:
Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. […]
Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid
the risks. […] Although we are facing potentially the best or worst
thing to happen to humanity in history, little serious research is
devoted to these issues outside non-profit institutes such as the
Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, the
Future of Humanity Institute, the
Machine Intelligence Research Institute, and the
Future of Life Institute.
As its prospect condenses, Technological Singularity is already operative
as a cultural influence, and thus a causal factor in the social process.
At this stage, however, as Hawking notes, it is still a comparatively
limited one. What would be the implications of it coming to matter far
more?
Socio-historical cybernetics is compelled to ask: would an incandescent
Singularity problem function as an inhibitor, or would it further
excite the developments under consideration? It’s certainly hard to
imagine a sophisticated pre-emptive response to the emergence of
Artificial Intelligence that wouldn’t channel additional resources towards
elite technicians working in the area of advanced synthetic cognition,
even before the near-inevitable capture of regulatory institutions by the
industries they target.
Institutional responses to computer hacking have been characterized by
strategically ambiguous ‘poacher turned gamekeeper’ recruitment exercises,
and some close analog of such poaching games would be an unavoidable part
of any attempt to control the development of machine cognition. Playing
extremely complicated betrayal games against virtual super-intelligence
could be a lot of fun, for a while …
ADDED: The FHI’s Daniel Dewey is pulled in.
May 4, 2014Make it Stop II
Autonomous Weapons: an Open Letter from AI & Robotics
Researchers
(with huge list of signatories):
Autonomous weapons select and engage targets without human
intervention. They might include, for example, armed quadcopters that
can search for and eliminate people meeting certain pre-defined
criteria, but do not include cruise missiles or remotely piloted drones
for which humans make all targeting decisions. Artificial Intelligence
(AI) technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems
is — practically if not legally — feasible within years, not decades,
and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the
third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.
In summary, we believe that AI has great potential to benefit humanity
in many ways, and that the goal of the field should be to do so.
Starting a military AI arms race is a bad idea, and should be prevented
by a ban on offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human
control.
This is an important document, that is bound to be influential. If the
orchestrated collective action of the human species could in fact stop a
militaristic AI arms race, however, it could stop anything. There’s not
much sign of that. Global coordination in the direction of explicit
political objectives is inaccessible. The process is already “beyond
meaningful human control”.
Arms races — due to their powerful positive feedback — are the way
threshold events happen. Almost certainly, the terrestrial installation of
advanced machine intelligence will be another instance of this general
rule. Granted, it’s not an easy topic to be realistic about.
(‘Make it Stop’ I, was
devoted to the same futile hope.)
ADDED: At The Verge (with video).
July 28, 2015Political Humor
The prospect of Technological Singularity, by rendering the near future
unimaginable,
announces
“the end of science fiction.” This is not, however, an announcement that
everyone is compelled to heed. Among the Odysseans who have deliberately
deafened themselves to this Sirens’ call, none have proceeded more boldly
than Charles Stross, whose
Singularity Sky
is not only a science fiction novel, but a space opera, inhabiting a
literary universe obsolesced by Einstein long before I.J. Good completed
its demolition. Not only recognizable humans, but inter-stellar
space-faring humans! Has the man no shame?
Stross relies heavily upon humor to sustain his audacious anachronism, and
in Singularity Sky he puts anachronism to explicit work. The most
consistently comic element in the novel is a reconstruction of 19th
century Russian politics on the planet of Rochard’s World, where the
Quasi-Czarist luddism of the New Republic is threatened by a cabal of
revolutionaries whose mode of political organization and rhetoric is of a
recognizable (and even parodic) Marxist-Leninist type. These rebels,
however, are ideologically hard-core libertarian, seeking to overthrow the
regime and install a free-market anarchist utopia, an objective that is
seamlessly reconciled with materialist dialectics, appeals to
revolutionary discipline, and invocations of fraternal comradeship.
It’s a joke that works well, because its transparent absurdity co-exists
with a substantial plausibility. Libertarians are indeed (not
infrequently) crypto-Abrahamic atheistic materialists, firmly attached to
deterministic economism and convictions of historical inevitability,
leading to lurid socio-economic prophecies of a distinctively
eschatological kind. When libertarianism is married to singularitarian
techno-apocalypticism, the comic potential, and Marxist resonances, are
re-doubled. Stross hammers home the point by naming his super-intelligent
AI ‘Eschaton’.
Most hilarious of all (in a
People’s Front of Judea versus Judean People’s Front
kind of way) is the internecine factionalism besetting a fringe political
movement whose utter marginality nevertheless leaves room for bitter
mutual recrimination, supported by baroque conspiracy-mongering. This
isn’t really a Stross theme, but it’s an American libertarian specialty,
exhibited in the ceaseless agitprop conducted by the Rothbardian ultras of
LewRockwell.com and the Mises Institute against the compromised
‘Kochtopus’ (Reason and Cato) — the animating
Stalin-Trotsky split of the free-market ‘right’. Anyone looking for a
ringside seat at a recent bout can head to the comment threads
here
and
here.
More seriously, Stross’ libertarian revolutionaries are committed
whole-heartedly to the Marxian assertion, once considered foundational,
that
productivity is drastically inhibited by the persistence of antiquated
social arrangements. The true historical right of the revolution, indistinguishable
from its practical inevitability and irreversibility, is its alignment
with the liberation of the forces of production from sclerotic
institutional limitations. Production of the future, or futuristic
production, demands the burial of traditional society. That which exists –
the status quo – is a systematic suppression, rigorously
measurable or at least determinable in economic terms, of what might be,
and wants to be. Revolution would sever the shackles of ossified
authority, setting the engines of creation howling. It would unleash a
techno-economic explosion to shake the world, still more profoundly than
the ‘bourgeois’ industrial revolution did before (and continues to do).
Something immense would escape, never to be caged again.
That is the Old Faith, the Paleo-Marxist creed, with its snake-handling
intensity and intoxicating materialist promise. It’s a faith the
libertarian comrades of Rochard’s World still profess, with reason, and
ultimate vindication, because the historical potential of the forces of
production has been updated.
What could matter do, that it is not presently permitted to do?
This is a question that Marxists (of the ‘Old Religion’) once asked. Their
answer was: to enter into processes of production that are freed from the
constraining requirements of private profitability. Once ‘freed’ in this
way, however, productivity staggered about aimlessly, fell asleep, or
starved. Libertarians laughed, and argued for a reversal of the formula:
free production to enter into self-escalating circuits of private
profitability, without political restraint. They were mostly ignored (and
always will be).
If neither faction of the terrestrial Marxo-Libertarian revolutionary
faith have been able to re-ignite the old fire, it is because they have
drifted out of the depths of the question (‘what could matter do?’). It is
matter that makes a revolution. The heroes of the industrial revolution
were not Jacobins, but boiler makers.
“Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country,”
Lenin proclaimed, but electrification was permitted before the Bolsheviks
took its side, and it has persisted since the Soviets’ departure. Unless
political transformation coincides with the release of a previously
suppressed productive potential, it remains essentially random, and
reversible. Mere regime change means nothing, unless something happens
that was not allowed to happen before. (Social re-shufflings do not amount
to happenings except in the minds of ideologues, and ideologues die.)
Libertarians are like Leninists in this way too: anything they ever manage
to gain can (and will) be taken away from them. They already had a
constitutional republic in America once (and what happened to that?).
Britain had a rough approximation of laissez-faire capitalism,
before losing it. Does anybody really think liberalism is going to get
more ‘classical’ than that anytime soon? Trusting mass democracy to
preserve liberty is like hiring Hannibal Lecter as a baby sitter. Social
freedoms might as well be designed to die. There’s not the slightest
reason to believe that history is on their side. Industrial revolution, in
contrast, is forever.
On Rochard’s World they know exactly what matter could do that is
forbidden: nano-scale mechanical self-replication and intelligent
self-modification. That’s what the ‘material base’ of a revolution looks
like, even if it’s sub-microscopic (or especially because it is), and when
it reaches the limits of social tolerance it describes precisely what is
necessary, automatically. Once it gets out of the box, it stays out.
Stross is sufficiently amused by the unleashed technosphere to call its
space-faring avatar ‘the Festival’. It contacts the libertarian
revolutionaries of Rochard’s World by bombarding the planet with
telephones, and anyone who picks one up hears the initial bargaining
position: ‘Entertain us.’ Funniest of all, when the neo-Czarist
authorities try to stop it, they’re eaten.
December 29, 2011Quotable (#184)
Brandon
Smith
(who can get a bit excitable, in the right direction):
So, let’s make this crystal clear — the long game is the total and OPEN
centralization of economic and geopolitical power into the hands of a
select few financial elites. Not the pulling of strings behind the
curtain. Not shadow governance. OPEN governance of the world by the
elites, accepted or even demanded by the people.
(Close enough for government work.)
Any concerted movement to consolidate global economic governance around
“the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights basket currency mechanism” will support
Smith’s analysis. (The UF prediction: It won’t work.)
Also crucial (the heated partisan language can be moderated without loss
of signal):
If Hillary Clinton, a well known globalist puppet deep in the bedrock
of the establishment, wins the election only to have the economy tank,
then the globalists will get the blame. […] If Trump is either allowed
in office, or is placed in office, and the economy tanks, CONSERVATIVES,
the primary enemy of the globalists, will get the blame for the
resulting crisis.
The Accelerationist candidate is in either case the other team’s guy.
August 11, 2016Out of Time
Some realistic
questions
about prospective machine intelligence regulation:
… we still don’t have a concrete answer about how to effectively
regulate the use of algorithms. AI is just another very complex layer
added to this already complex discussion, sometimes directly related to
“big data” (in the case of deep learning, for example) and other times
addressing far bigger questions (in the case of sentient machines, for
example).
The UF (accelerationist) response is probably predictable:
There isn’t time to reach answers. Acceleration means only (and
exactly) that the problem is receding, or escaping. If it would
only slow down, everything would be okay. It won’t.
January 24, 2017
SEQUENCE i - ON LEFT ACCELERATIONISM
#Accelerate
The Left co-optation of
Accelerationism is a
remarkable phenomenon, substantial enough to have made the 2013
accelerationist manifesto (#Accelerate) a document of indisputable significance. The twitter-format title
attests both to its contemporaneity, and to the seamless fusion of its
content with a strategy of promotion (which is to say, a practical
politics). The success of this ideological venture has received a recent
(and carefully calibrated) seal of approval in the form of a
response by no less a
figure than venerable warhorse of the European revolutionary Left, Toni
Negri. Whatever the ultimate credibility and consequence of its analysis,
Left Accelerationism has already demonstrated intrinsic cultural momentum.
As a creature of Right Accelerationism, Urban Future, naturally,
is an antagonist (although a highly intrigued one). Engagement with
#Accelerate will be stretched into a consistent thread here, over the
course of the coming year. Among other things (and as Negri shows) such an
engagement provides an opportunity to revisit very basic socio-economic
questions within a re-dynamized micro-context. Even if the re-dynamization
of the macro-context, or its opposite (deepening
stagnation), has to be initially adopted as a problem — rather than any kind of
fact — Accelerationist questions ensure the topic is not bypassed.
The authors of #Accelerate offer their own
contextualization in a recent
article, which takes “accelerationism’s surging popularity” as a fact to be
explained:
The passion that accelerationism mobilises is the remembrance
by the people that a future is possible. In disparate fields — from
politics to art to design to biology to philosophy — people are
working through how to create a world that is liberated from
capitalist incentives. Perhaps most promisingly, the classic dream
of Keynes and Marx for the reduction of work and the flourishing of
positive freedoms, is making a comeback. In the push for universal
basic incomes, and the movements for reduced working weeks, we see
the people themselves beginning to carve out a space separate from
the wage relation and outside of the imperatives of work. When the
media stops reporting the automation of jobs as being a tragedy and
starts reporting them as being a liberation from mundane work, we
will know that the accelerationist disposition has become the
new common sense. We have reached a point in human history where vast
amounts of jobs can — and should — be automated. Work for work’s sake
is a perversity and a constraint imposed upon humanity by
capitalism’s ideology of the work ethic. What accelerationism seeks
is to allow human potential to escape from the trap set for it by
contemporary capitalism.
The sole (querulous) rejoinder from UF at this stage:
If this is accelerationism, what would an intentionally decelerationist
program look like?
ADDED: Ray Brassier on Accelerationism and Communism (via Benedict Singleton,
@benedict).
February 13, 2014Annotated #Accelerate (#1)
My marginal scrawls are added in bold. For the sake of clarity,
therefore, I have subtracted the bolding used in the
Williams and Srnicek text. In every other respect, the source
text
has been fully respected. Most of the annotations made are placeholders
for future engagement. It has been broken into three posts, in
conformity with the organization of the original.
#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics
by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek • 14 May 2013
Accelerationism pushes towards a future that is more modern, an
alternative modernity that neoliberalism is inherently unable
to generate.
Since this is a slug, the quite incredible number of problems it
manages to compress into nineteen words are being set aside, as effects
of compression.
01. INTRODUCTION: On the Conjuncture
1. At the beginning of the second decade of the Twenty-First Century,
global civilization faces a new breed of cataclysm. These coming
apocalypses ridicule the norms and organisational structures of the
politics which were forged in the birth of the nation-state, the rise of
capitalism, and a Twentieth Century of unprecedented wars.
Indeed.
2. Most significant is the breakdown of the planetary climatic
system. In time, this threatens the continued existence of the present
global human population. [So the analysis cascades downwards from institutional climatology? How
did this hypothetical forecast achieve such extraordinary
prestige?] Though this is the most critical of the threats which face humanity,
a series of lesser but potentially equally destabilising problems
exist alongside and intersect with it. Terminal resource depletion,
especially in water and energy reserves, offers the prospect of mass
starvation, collapsing economic paradigms, and new hot and cold wars.
[Yes, politically-inhibited price discovery has this effect.] Continued financial crisis has led governments to embrace the
paralyzing death spiral policies of austerity, privatisation of
social welfare services, mass unemployment, and stagnating wages.
[Yet no sign of state-shrinkage is to be found anywhere.]
Increasing automation in production processes including
‘intellectual labour’ is evidence of the secular crisis of
capitalism, soon to render it incapable of maintaining current
standards of living for even the former middle classes of the global
north. [If automation is a symptom of crisis, this ‘crisis’ has coincided
perfectly with capital production since its inception.]
From the Right, the single and comprehensive social disaster underway
is the uncompensated expansion of the state, in both absolute and
proportional terms. (This is a system-theoretical prognosis, before it
is any kind of moral objection.) It is notable that Left Accelerationism
does not seem to find this development at all morbid, despite the fact
that its trend-line is manifestly unsustainable, and thus starkly
predicts catastrophe. On the contrary, those very minimal attempts to
moderate the trend towards total political administration are decried as
“paralyzing death spiral policies of austerity, privatisation of
social welfare services, mass unemployment, and stagnating
wages.” In this respect, the manifesto faithfully echoes the wider
socio-cultural process through which catastrophe is necessitated. It is
the voice of deliberate (politically super-invested) disaster.
3. In contrast to these ever-accelerating catastrophes, today’s
politics is beset by an inability to generate the new ideas and modes
of organisation necessary to transform our societies to confront
and resolve the coming annihilations. While crisis gathers force and
speed, politics withers and retreats. In this paralysis of the
political imaginary, the future has been cancelled.
The “crisis [that] gathers force and speed” is politics. Any
future other than the one politics commands has been cancelled by
proclamation. Only insofar as reality is politically soluble, however,
can this proclamation be decisive. On that question, there is much more
to come.
4. Since 1979, the hegemonic global political ideology has been
neoliberalism, found in some variant throughout the leading economic
powers. In spite of the deep structural challenges the new global
problems present to it, most immediately the credit, financial, and
fiscal crises since 2007 – 8, neoliberal programmes have only evolved
in the sense of deepening. This continuation of the neoliberal
project, or neoliberalism 2.0, has begun to apply another round of
structural adjustments, most significantly in the form of
encouraging new and aggressive incursions by the private sector into
what remains of social democratic institutions and services. This
is in spite of the immediately negative economic and social effects
of such policies, and the longer term fundamental barriers posed by the
new global crises.
Within Anglophone democracies, 1979 marked a limited transition from
the reigning Keynesian consensus, one that was never resolutely pursued,
and quickly reversed (within roughly a decade). The principle of
economic politicization (macroeconomics) has not been dethroned.
‘Neoliberalism’ is not a serious concept. Within China (and later, less
boldly, in other ’emerging markets’) a far more substantial
transformation occurred, but in none of these cases does the description
‘neoliberal’ provide illumination — unless its meaning is reducible to a
repudiation of crude command-economy methods of social subordination to
the state.
5. That the forces of right wing governmental, non-governmental, and
corporate power have been able to press forth with neoliberalisation
is at least in part a result of the continued paralysis and
ineffectual nature of much what remains of the left. Thirty years of
neoliberalism have rendered most left-leaning political parties
bereft of radical thought, hollowed out, and without a popular
mandate. At best they have responded to our present crises with calls
for a return to a Keynesian economics, in spite of the evidence that
the very conditions which enabled post-war social democracy to occur
no longer exist. We cannot return to mass industrial-Fordist labour by
fiat, if at all. Even the neosocialist regimes of South America’s
Bolivarian Revolution, whilst heartening in their ability to resist the
dogmas of contemporary capitalism, remain disappointingly unable
to advance an alternative beyond mid-Twentieth Century socialism.
Organised labour, being systematically weakened by the changes
wrought in the neoliberal project, is sclerotic at an institutional
level and — at best — capable only of mildly mitigating the new
structural adjustments. But with no systematic approach to building
a new economy, or the structural solidarity to push such changes
through, for now labour remains relatively impotent. The new social
movements which emerged since the end of the Cold War, experiencing a
resurgence in the years after 2008, have been similarly unable to
devise a new political ideological vision. Instead they expend
considerable energy on internal direct-democratic process and
affective self-valorisation over strategic efficacy, and frequently
propound a variant of neo-primitivist localism, as if to oppose the
abstract violence of globalised capital with the flimsy and
ephemeral “authenticity” of communal immediacy.
The right was destroyed, almost comprehensively, in the 1930s. Since
then it has existed only as a token voice of impotent dissent, grumbling
distractingly, as the juggernaut of Leviathan has rolled forwards.
Neither the New Deal or Great Society programs have been reversed.
Instead, the vector to total politicization has been pursued into the
final redoubts of a broken civil society. The Left faces no serious
political constraints at all, but only those ‘ontological’
restraints imposed by an intractable, politically-indifferent reality —
exemplified by the Mises ‘Calculation Problem’. It is these that are now
bringing down Bolivarian Socialism. ‘Globalized Capital’ is primarily
denominated in the politicized currency issued by the US Federal
Reserve. Its subservience is radical and explicit.
6. In the absence of a radically new social, political,
organisational, and economic vision the hegemonic powers of the
right will continue to be able to push forward their narrow-minded
imaginary, in the face of any and all evidence. At best, the left may be
able for a time to partially resist some of the worst incursions. But
this is to be Canute against an ultimately irresistible tide. To
generate a new left global hegemony entails a recovery of lost
possible futures, and indeed the recovery of the future as such.
So it’s clear by now that the Right and the Left at least agree on one
thing — the other guys have near-total hegemony, and are running the
world into disaster. Can an even-lefter Left accelerate the
process?
Exploring that idea requires a look at the idea of acceleration …
[next]
February 14, 2014Annotated #Accelerate (#2)
[Continued from
here]
02. INTEREGNUM: On Accelerationisms
1. If any system has been associated with ideas of acceleration it is
capitalism. The essential metabolism of capitalism demands economic
growth, with competition between individual capitalist entities setting in
motion increasing technological developments in an attempt to achieve
competitive advantage, all accompanied by increasing social dislocation.
In its neoliberal form, its ideological self-presentation is one of
liberating the forces of creative destruction, setting free
ever-accelerating technological and social innovations.
The brain-bruising invocation of ‘neoliberalism’ apart, these remarks
are all perfectly sound.
2. The philosopher Nick Land captured this most acutely, with a myopic yet
hypnotising belief that capitalist speed alone could generate a global
transition towards unparalleled technological singularity. In this
visioning of capital, the human can eventually be dis-carded as mere drag
to an abstract planetary intelligence rapidly constructing itself from the
bricolaged fragments of former civilisations. However Landian
neoliberalism
[each use of this term deepens its senselessness]
confuses speed with acceleration. We may be moving fast, but only within a
strictly defined set of capitalist parameters that themselves never waver.
We experience only the increasing speed of a local horizon, a simple
brain-dead onrush rather than an acceleration which is also navigational,
an experimental process of discovery within a universal space of
possibility. It is the latter mode of acceleration which we hold as
essential.
The difference between ‘speed‘ and ‘acceleration’ is that between the zeroth and first derivative.
It is rigorous and generally understood. The difference proposed here is
something else. I have no clear idea what it is. (It seems to roughly
amount to a distinction between Right and Left — i.e. the mere assertion
that ‘capitalism’ is comprehensible as an ‘inside’ — with no further
identifiable content.)
3. Even worse, as Deleuze and Guattari
recognized, from the very beginning what capitalist speed
deterritorializes with one hand, it reterritorializes with the other.
Progress becomes constrained within a framework of surplus value, a
reserve army of labour, and free-floating capital. Modernity is reduced to
statistical measures of economic growth and social innovation becomes
encrusted with kitsch remainders from our communal past.
Thatcherite-Reaganite deregulation sits comfortably alongside Victorian
‘back-to-basics’ family and religious values.
Is not the Left the principle agent of ‘capitalist’
reterritorialization?
4. A deeper tension within neoliberalism is in terms of its self-image as
the vehicle of modernity, as literally synonymous with modernisation,
whilst promising a future that it is constitutively incapable of
providing. Indeed, as neoliberalism has progressed, rather than enabling
individual creativity, it has tended towards eliminating cognitive
inventiveness in favour of an affective production line of scripted
interactions, coupled to global supply chains and a neo-Fordist Eastern
production zone. A vanishingly small cognitariat of elite intellectual
workers shrinks with each passing year — and increasingly so as
algorithmic automation winds its way through the spheres of affective and
intellectual labour. Neoliberalism, though positing itself as a necessary
historical development, was in fact a merely contingent means to ward off
the crisis of value that emerged in the 1970s. Inevitably this was a
sublimation of the crisis rather than its ultimate overcoming.
— It is politics that makes promises (capitalism makes deals). If you
think ‘capitalism’ ever promised you anything, you may have been
listening to a politician.
— What is the mechanism by which ‘cognitive inventiveness’ is
progressively eliminated, given that innovation is a source of
competitive advantage, which the market selects for?
— Is the ‘cognitariat’ shrinking? The answer to this seems to be a data
point social science might provide.
— Why (oh why) are we still talking about ‘neoliberalism’? Isn’t
capitalism as such the ‘problem’ that defines this as a Left
cultural-political project? This ridiculous word is merely a profession
of faith, serving far more as a tribal solidarity signal than an
analytical tool. (Ironically, this dripping tap ‘neoliberalism’ tic
significantly disrupts the project here. The accelerationist renovation
of the Left, like every species of deep modernist renovation, aims to
re-activate lines of development dating back to the high-modernism of
the early 20th century when — as the authors fully, if perhaps only
intuitively, understand the fundamental dynamic of modernity crested and
broke. Or are we seriously to believe that “back to the mid-1970s!” is
the implicit rallying cry?)
I am of course very strongly inclined to accept that the crippled
parody of capitalism existing today under-performs when compared to its
potential under conditions of laissez-faire disinhibition —
i.e. uncompensated from the Left. But it is Keynes and the 1930s, not
‘neoliberalism’ and the 1970s, that set the terms of capital’s
subordination to macroeconomic planning.
5. It is Marx, along with Land, who remains the paradigmatic
accelerationist thinker. Contrary to the all-too familiar critique, and
even the behaviour of some contemporary Marxians, we must remember that
Marx himself used the most advanced theoretical tools and empirical data
available in an attempt to fully understand and transform his world. He
was not a thinker who resisted modernity, but rather one who sought to
analyse and intervene within it, understanding that for all its
exploitation and corruption, capitalism remained the most advanced
economic system to date. Its gains were not to be reversed, but
accelerated beyond the constraints the capitalist value form.
A sound micro-portrait. That the capitalist ‘value form’
(commerce-format quantification) can be realistically described as a
‘constraint’ is the most basic proposition at stake here.
6. Indeed, as even Lenin wrote in the 1918 text “Left Wing”
Childishness:
Socialism is inconceivable without large-scale capitalist engineering
based on the latest discoveries of modern science. It is inconceivable
without planned state organisation which keeps tens of millions of people
to the strictest observance of a unified standard in production and
distribution. We Marxists have always spoken of this, and it is not worth
while wasting two seconds talking to people who do not understand even
this (anarchists and a good half of the Left Socialist–Revolutionaries).
Such adherence to the principle of central planning is
clarifying.
7. As Marx was aware, capitalism cannot be identified as the agent of true
acceleration. [Argument?] Similarly, the assessment of
left politics as antithetical to technosocial acceleration is also, at
least in part, a severe misrepresentation.
[OK, as long as it is an ‘unknown ideal’ of Left politics that we are
talking about.]
Indeed, if the political left is to have a future it must be one in which
it maximally embraces this suppressed accelerationist tendency.
The final sentence of this section is at once crucial and slippery. What is it — practically — to “embrace” a tendency? How and
why was this tendency “suppressed”? Either to “have” or to lose a future
would be an interesting thing, so it is the future that comes next …
February 15, 2014Annotated #Accelerate (#3)
[Parts one,
and
two]
03: MANIFEST: On the Future
1. We believe the most important division in today’s left is between
those that hold to a folk politics of localism, direct action, and
relentless horizontalism, and those that outline what must become
called an accelerationist politics at ease with a modernity of
abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology. The former
remains content with establishing small and temporary spaces of
non-capitalist social relations, eschewing the real problems
entailed in facing foes which are intrinsically non-local,
abstract, and rooted deep in our everyday infrastructure. The failure
of such politics has been built-in from the very beginning. By
contrast, an accelerationist politics seeks to preserve the gains of
late capitalism while going further than its value system, governance
structures, and mass pathologies will allow.
(Without wanting to insert myself into a family squabble, from outside,
the distinction drawn here between flavors of anti-capitalism makes
sense.)
2. All of us want to work less.
[Entrepreneurs of all kinds excepted.] It is an
intriguing question as to why it was that the world’s leading economist
of the post-war era believed that an enlightened capitalism
inevitably progressed towards a radical reduction of working
hours. In The Economic Prospects for Our Grandchildren (written in 1930),
Keynes forecast a capitalist future where individuals would have
their work reduced to three hours a day. What has instead occurred is
the progressive elimination of the work-life distinction, with work
coming to permeate every aspect of the emerging social factory.
Getting to Keynes has to be a good thing, as far as theoretical and
historical substance is concerned, and this criticism seems
solid.
3. Capitalism has begun to constrain the
productive forces of technology
[The crucial thesis, but merely asserted], or at least,
direct them towards needlessly narrow ends.
[A deliberate obfuscation of the difference between political and
technical ‘narrowness’ is the principal achievement here.]
Patent wars and idea monopolisation are contemporary phenomena
[Yes, IP is complicated] that point to both capital’s
need to move beyond competition
[impossible by definition], and capital’s increasingly
retrograde approach to technology
[unsupported assertion]. The properly accelerative
gains of neoliberalism [= remainder capitalism] have
not led to less work or less stress
[of course, because work and stress are the socio-biological registers
of acceleration]. And rather than a world of space travel, future shock, and
revolutionary technological potential, we exist in a time where the
only thing which develops is marginally better consumer gadgetry
[Since 1979? The information revolution didn’t happen?].
Relentless iterations of the same basic product sustain marginal
consumer demand at the expense of human acceleration.
[Containerization, satellite communications, personal computing, mobile
telephony, Internet, cable TV, World Wide Web, social media, genomics,
drone robotics, 3D film, NewSpace, Bitcoin … what exactly is “the same
basic product”?]
4. We do not want to return to Fordism. [OK] There can
be no return to Fordism. [Right] The capitalist
“golden era” was premised on the production paradigm of the orderly
factory environment, where (male) workers received security and a
basic standard of living in return for a lifetime of stultifying
boredom and social repression. Such a system relied upon an
international hierarchy of colonies, empires, and an underdeveloped
periphery; a national hierarchy of racism and sexism; and a rigid
family hierarchy of female subjugation. For all the nostalgia many
may feel, this regime is both undesirable and practically impossible
to return to.
[Is Fordism being identified with the (final) ‘golden era’ of
capitalism here? With ‘neoliberalism’ as something else? So a system of
computerized, entrepreneurial, high-intensity capital accumulation,
based fundamentally upon competition and economic incentives, would in
some way not count as properly ‘capitalist’? Such an extraordinary
theoretical claim surely deserves an argument?]
5. Accelerationists want to unleash latent productive forces.
[Indeed — an excellent and impressively ideo-neutral definition of
normative Accelerationism.]
In this project, the material platform of neoliberalism does not
need to be destroyed. It needs to be repurposed towards common ends.
The existing infrastructure is not a capitalist stage to be smashed,
but a springboard to launch towards post-capitalism.
[There is no conceptual continuity between this political rallying cry
and the first sentence whatsoever.]
6. Given the enslavement of technoscience to capitalist objectives
(especially since the late 1970s) we surely do not yet know what a
modern technosocial body can do. Who amongst us fully recognizes what
untapped potentials await in the technology which has already been
developed? Our wager is that the true transformative potentials of
much of our technological and scientific research remain
unexploited, filled with presently redundant features (or
pre-adaptations) that, following a shift beyond the short-sighted
capitalist socius, can become decisive.
No reason has been given to think ‘technoscience’ is in any real way
independent of ‘capitalist objectives’, so the rhetoric of ‘enslavement’
is perfectly empty. An(other) experiment in ‘post-capitalist’
technosocial acceleration conducted alongside capitalism, and
in competition with it, would be a fascinating thing to see. (I doubt
this arrangement would be considered acceptable by the Left. As far as
the Right is concerned, it has already been undertaken on numerous
occasions, with consistent results.)
7. We want to accelerate the process of technological evolution.
[Great.] But what we are arguing for is not
techno-utopianism. Never believe that technology will be sufficient
to save us.
[How did soteriology become the issue?] Necessary, yes,
but never sufficient without socio-political action. Technology and
the social are intimately bound up with one another, and changes in
either potentiate and reinforce changes in the other. Whereas the
techno-utopians [who?] argue for acceleration on the
basis that it will automatically overcome social conflict, our
position is that technology should be accelerated precisely
because it is needed in order to win social conflicts.
How do these three goals interconnect and hierarchize?
(a) Acceleration of technological evolution
(b) Overcoming social conflict
(c) Prevailing in social conflict
If, as seems to be the case, (c) dominates, then acceleration is merely
an instrumental sub-objective. So can we call Left Accelerationism ‘conditional
accelerationism’ (in contrast to an unconditional Right
Accelerationism)?
8. We believe that any post-capitalism will require post-capitalist
planning. The faith placed in the idea that, after a revolution, the
people will spontaneously constitute a novel socioeconomic system
that isn’t simply a return to capitalism is naïve at best, and
ignorant at worst. To further this, we must develop both a cognitive
map of the existing system and a speculative image of the future
economic system.
Ho hum.
9. To do so, the left must take advantage of every technological and
scientific advance made possible by capitalist society. We declare
that quantification is not an evil to be eliminated, but a tool to
be used in the most effective manner possible. Economic modelling
is — simply put — a necessity for making intelligible a complex
world. The 2008 financial crisis reveals the risks of blindly
accepting mathematical models on faith, yet this is a problem of
illegitimate authority not of mathematics itself. The tools to be
found in social network analysis, agent-based modelling, big data
analytics, and non-equilibrium economic models, are necessary
cognitive mediators for understanding complex systems like the
modern economy. The accelerationist left must become literate in
these technical fields.
Conditional accelerationism again. (It’s beginning to look as if
accelerated technoscience is a giant ideological cookie jar).
10. Any transformation of society must involve economic and social
experimentation.
[OK, but I suspect ‘transformation’ is pre-contaminated by totalitarian
aspirations.]
The Chilean Project Cybersyn is emblematic of this experimental
attitude — fusing advanced cybernetic technologies, with
sophisticated economic modelling, and a democratic platform
instantiated in the technological infrastructure itself. Similar
experiments were conducted in 1950s – 1960s Soviet economics as well,
employing cybernetics and linear programming in an attempt to
overcome the new problems faced by the first communist economy. That
both of these were ultimately unsuccessful can be traced to the
political and technological constraints these early
cyberneticians operated under.
[I know this isn’t meant to be comical …]
11. The left must develop sociotechnical hegemony: both in the
sphere of ideas, and in the sphere of material platforms. Platforms are
the infrastructure of global society. They establish the basic
parameters of what is possible, both behaviourally and
ideologically. In this sense, they embody the material
transcendental of society: they are what make possible particular
sets of actions, relationships, and powers. While much of the current
global platform is biased towards capitalist social relations, this
is not an inevitable necessity. These material platforms of
production, finance, logistics, and consumption can and will be
reprogrammed and reformatted towards post-capitalist ends.
[There’s enough hand-waving here to communicate an Obama speech to the
deaf.]
12. We do not believe that direct action is sufficient to achieve any
of this. The habitual tactics of marching, holding signs, and
establishing temporary autonomous zones risk becoming comforting
substitutes for effective success. “At least we have done something”
is the rallying cry of those who privilege self-esteem rather than
effective action. The only criterion of a good tactic is whether it
enables significant success or not. We must be done with fetishising
particular modes of action. Politics must be treated as a set of
dynamic systems, riven with conflict, adaptations and
counter-adaptations, and strategic arms races. This means that each
individual type of political action becomes blunted and ineffective
over time as the other sides adapt. No given mode of political action is
historically inviolable. Indeed, over time, there is an increasing
need to discard familiar tactics as the forces and entities they are
marshalled against learn to defend and counter-attack them
effectively. It is in part the contemporary left’s inability to do
so which lies close to the heart of the contemporary malaise.
(Family squabbling. I’ll shut up until it stops.)
13. The overwhelming privileging of democracy-as-process needs to be
left behind. The fetishisation of openness, horizontality, and
inclusion of much of today’s ‘radical’ left set the stage for
ineffectiveness. Secrecy, verticality, and exclusion all have
their place as well in effective political action (though not, of
course, an exclusive one).
14. Democracy cannot be defined simply by its means — not via voting,
discussion, or general assemblies. Real democracy must be defined by
its goal — collective self-mastery. This is a project which must align
politics with the legacy of the Enlightenment, to the extent that it is
only through harnessing our ability to understand ourselves and our
world better (our social, technical, economic, psychological world)
that we can come to rule ourselves. We need to posit a collectively
controlled legitimate vertical authority in addition to
distributed horizontal forms of sociality, to avoid becoming the
slaves of either a tyrannical totalitarian centralism or a
capricious emergent order beyond our control. The command of The Plan
must be married to the improvised order of The Network.
15. We do not present any particular organisation as the ideal means
to embody these vectors. What is needed — what has always been
needed — is an ecology of organisations, a pluralism of forces,
resonating and feeding back on their comparative strengths.
Sectarianism is the death knell of the left as much as centralization
is, and in this regard we continue to welcome experimentation with
different tactics (even those we disagree with).
16. We have three medium term concrete goals. First, we need to build an
intellectual infrastructure. Mimicking the Mont Pelerin Society of
the neoliberal revolution, this is to be tasked with creating a new
ideology, economic and social models, and a vision of the good to
replace and surpass the emaciated ideals that rule our world today.
This is an infrastructure in the sense of requiring the construction
not just of ideas, but institutions and material paths to inculcate,
embody and spread them.
17. We need to construct wide-scale media reform. In spite of the
seeming democratisation offered by the internet and social media,
traditional media outlets remain crucial in the selection and
framing of narratives, along with possessing the funds to prosecute
investigative journalism. Bringing these bodies as close as possible
to popular control is crucial to undoing the current presentation
of the state of things.
18. Finally, we need to reconstitute various forms of class power. Such
a reconstitution must move beyond the notion that an organically
generated global proletariat already exists. Instead it must seek to
knit together a disparate array of partial proletarian identities,
often embodied in post-Fordist forms of precarious labour.
19. Groups and individuals are already at work on each of these, but
each is on their own insufficient. What is required is all three
feeding back into one another, with each modifying the contemporary
conjunction in such a way that the others become more and more
effective. A positive feedback loop of infrastructural,
ideological, social and economic transformation, generating a new
complex hegemony, a new post-capitalist technosocial platform.
History demonstrates it has always been a broad assemblage of tactics
and organisations which has brought about systematic change; these
lessons must be learned.
“A positive feedback loop” — finally, a theoretical connection to the
topic of acceleration. Having bypassed any serious analysis of the
actual capitalist positive feedback loop — upon which the entire
historical topic of acceleration rests — it is now introduced in purely
speculative fashion, in relation to yet-non-existent Left
Accelerationist program. The parasitical structure of this argument
(seizing real achievements in order to spend them on dreams) says much
more than it intends to.
20. To achieve each of these goals, on the most practical level we hold
that the accelerationist left must think more seriously about the
flows of resources and money required to build an effective new
political infrastructure. Beyond the ‘people power’ of bodies in the
street, we require funding, whether from governments, institutions,
think tanks, unions, or individual benefactors. We consider the
location and conduction of such funding flows essential to begin
reconstructing an ecology of effective accelerationist left
organizations.
“We want money — but without capitalist incentives please.”
21. We declare that only a Promethean politics of maximal mastery over
society and its environment is capable of either dealing with global
problems or achieving victory over capital. This mastery must be
distinguished from that beloved of thinkers of the original
Enlightenment. The clockwork universe of Laplace, so easily mastered
given sufficient information, is long gone from the agenda of
serious scientific understanding. But this is not to align ourselves
with the tired residue of postmodernity, decrying mastery as
proto-fascistic or authority as innately illegitimate. Instead we
propose that the problems besetting our planet and our species
oblige us to refurbish mastery in a newly complex guise; whilst we
cannot predict the precise result of our actions, we can determine
probabilistically likely ranges of outcomes. What must be coupled to
such complex systems analysis is a new form of action:
improvisatory and capable of executing a design through a practice
which works with the contingencies it discovers only in the course of
its acting, in a politics of geosocial artistry and cunning
rationality. A form of abductive experimentation that seeks the
best means to act in a complex world.
“We want money, and then mastery.”
22. We need to revive the argument that was traditionally made for
post-capitalism: not only is capitalism an unjust and perverted
system, but it is also a system that holds back progress.
[Still entirely unsubstantiated.] Our technological
development is being suppressed by capitalism, as much as it has
been unleashed. [Ditto.] Accelerationism is the basic
belief that these capacities can and should be let loose by moving
beyond the limitations imposed by capitalist society.
[Ditto.] The movement towards a surpassing of our
current constraints must include more than simply a struggle for a more
rational global society. We believe it must also include recovering
the dreams which transfixed many from the middle of the Nineteenth
Century until the dawn of the neoliberal era, of the quest of Homo
Sapiens towards expansion beyond the limitations of the earth and
our immediate bodily forms. These visions are today viewed as relics of
a more innocent moment. Yet they both diagnose the staggering lack of
imagination in our own time, and offer the promise of a future that is
affectively invigorating, as well as intellectually energising.
After all, it is only a post-capitalist society, made possible by an
accelerationist politics, which will ever be capable of delivering
on the promissory note of the mid-Twentieth Century’s space programmes,
to shift beyond a world of minimal technical upgrades towards
all-encompassing change. Towards a time of collective self-mastery, and
the properly alien future that entails and enables. Towards a
completion of the Enlightenment project of self-criticism and
self-mastery, rather than its elimination.
Enslave technosocial acceleration to ‘collective self mastery’? That
seems to be the dream. Do we get to lock in the ‘conditional
accelerationism’ label yet?
23. The choice facing us is severe: either a globalised
post-capitalism or a slow fragmentation towards primitivism,
perpetual crisis, and planetary ecological collapse.
[Neither outcome sounds remotely plausible, but we’re deep into religion
by this stage, so it probably doesn’t matter.]
24. The future needs to be constructed. It has been demolished by
neoliberal capitalism and reduced to a cut-price promise of greater
inequality, conflict, and chaos.
[Why does ‘the future’ exclude ‘inequality, conflict, and chaos’? On the
contrary …]
This collapse in the idea of the future is symptomatic of the
regressive historical status of our age, rather than, as cynics across
the political spectrum would have us believe, a sign of sceptical
maturity. What accelerationism pushes towards is a future that is
more modern — an alternative modernity that neoliberalism is
inherently unable to generate.
[A last spasm of hand-waving.] The future must be
cracked open once again, unfastening our horizons towards the
universal possibilities of the Outside.
[‘Must’ means nothing, and ‘universal’ adds nothing, but otherwise a
great sentence — culmination in a rush of ideo-neutral
excitement.]
http://syntheticedifice.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/accelerate.pdf
Naturally, the really big question: What comes next …?
February 17, 2014Quotable (#4)
Andrea Castillo
gets
concrete about acceleration:
The first thing we need to understand is that technology is
intelligently accelerating
faster than most humans are discovering
sustainable comparative advantages in production.
(Most) anything you can do computers will do better. The regenerative salve of
creative destruction
cannot save us as it has before.
Blame Moore’s law. Ray Kurzweil illustrates with the
parable of the inventor and the emperor: Delighted by his presentation of a fabulous new game called chess,
the emperor giddily implores the proud inventor to name his reward. The
inventor requests that one grain of rice be placed on the first square
of his chess board, two grains on the second, four grains on the third,
and so on, doubling the preceding amount on every subsequent square on
the board until each is filled. Puzzled, the emperor complies, initially
deeming this request too modest before gasping at the final mountain of
rice that towers above the throne. The emperor, like so many of us, was
fooled by the sleepy dawn of an exponential function. Only when the
grains reached the second half of the chessboard was the
punchline clear
to the enraged monarch.
Whatever people (Left and Right) want to say about acceleration, they
better hurry up and say it.
February 18, 2014On #Accelerate (#1)
#Accelerate
positions itself very clearly within a Marxian intellectual tradition. In
this respect, it remains consistent with the main current of
‘accelerationist’ thinking as it has developed from the Marx of
The Communist Manifesto, through Marx’s later writings on
imperialism and international relations, and into the ‘Nietzscheanized’
quasi-Marxism of Deleuze, Guattari, and Lyotard. The constant political
recommendation across this diverse heritage is alignment with the
capitalistic social revolution, in order to realize its ultimate
eschatalogical implication. To interrupt capitalistic development is to
retard the formation of the final revolutionary class — the
radically-industrialized international proletariat (or whatever decoded
schizo-swarms it later becomes). Hence the defining imperative slogan of
Deleuze & Guattari: Accelerate the process.
Beyond this point, however, obscurity gathers rapidly. In particular, is
in entirely unclear which broad trend of Marxist theory is being
extrapolated. From the available rhetorical clues, it does not seem as
though #Accelerate endorses the wholesale deleuzoguattarian break
from classical Marxism — crossing the theoretical catastrophe that
includes abandonment of the Law of Value (in an embrace of ‘machinic
surplus value’, ‘machinic value of code’, and marginalism);
differentiation of ‘capitalism’ and market economics (following Braudel);
denunciation of state socialism as a regressive ‘Oriental Despotism’
(following Wittfogel); and a dehumanization of the revolutionary subject
without obvious limits (drawing upon sources from Samuel Butler to Antonin
Artaud). If this were the vector pursued, it would — surely — be vividly
evident?
Assuming, then, that #Accelerate backs into a
more recognizable Marxian framework, how is this theoretical structure to
be understood? The decisive question internal to the (serious) Marxist
tradition concerns the
Transformation Problem, since it is only if this is considered soluble that anything like a
continuity of classical Marxism (or credible ‘Law of Value’) can be
envisaged at all. It is worth recalling that comprehensive critics of Marx
— those who find nothing of positive significance to be salvageable from
his work — have, beginning
with Böhm-Bawerk, taken
the Transformation Problem as the completion of Marx’s
reductio ad absurdum of the Labor Theory of Value (as inherited
from Smith and Ricardo), seeing the rigorous economic meaning of the
Marxian system as entirely exhausted in this demonstration. To remain a
Marxist in anything other than an absurd sense depends upon some other
path having been taken,
but
which
one? #Accelerate offers no obvious indications. (The literature on
this is vast, so it would be useful to know where to focus.)
Without a resolution of the Transformation Problem — and even a
well-positioned sticking plaster would do provisionally — there can be no
consistent concept of exploitation, or even a theoretically significant
sense of labor time. This is especially relevant because it plays such a
crucial role in Antonio Negri’s
response
to #Accelerate, which picks up on a tantalizing remark in the
manifesto itself:
Is Left Accelerationism promoting itself as the redeemer of Keynes’ empty
promise? From the bare descriptiveness of this (vaguely mournful) passage
it is hard to know. What we can know, with confidence, is that work time
cannot be anything but an axial topic within this entire discussion.
If the Law of Value is to be defended, value production is measured in
(labor) time. Marx’s transformation factor is designed to conserve the
equation between quantified — timed — work and economic values, as
expressed in prices. If this patch fails, the entire analysis of
Capital loses application to determinate social fact. There would
be no Marxian economics at all (a conclusion Negri and the Autonomists
seem willing to accept).
It is hard to see how a Left Accelerationism could be maintained under
these conditions. Historical time would no longer have any calculable
relation to labor commoditization, working life, or any constructable
proletarian class identity. The real time of (capitalistic) modernity —
onto which accelerationism latches — could no longer be described as the
time of work. At the limit, human work-forces are relegated to “aphidian
parasites of the machines”. Once the class struggle over labor time is
divorced from a fully-determining role in the production of value, the
proletariat is stripped of the potential to incarnate history for-itself,
consigning ‘Marxism’ over to an articulation of marginal grievances, and
ultimately to the heat death of identity politics. (This, of course, is
exactly the trend that has been sociologically apparent.)
One final crude point for now. As a fundamental cybernetic theory,
accelerationism is bound to the identification of a socially central,
positive feedback loop, through which modernity is propelled. It thus
requires — at a minimum — twin quantitative variables entangled in a
relation of reciprocal stimulation. Industrial capitalism, with its
intrinsic ‘technonomic’ duality of cross-exciting technical and commercial
dynamics, makes the application of the cybernetic diagram relatively
non-problematic. With or without the Law of Value, the accelerationist
schema cannot but interlock tightly with the most prominent contours of
modernity.
If not time-denominated (‘living’ and ‘dead’) labor, however, what is the
variable being cumulated? That’s the question to carry forwards. The
question for now: if labor is the cumulative factor in the accelerationist
analysis, how can a practical critique of labor time be anything other
than a politics of deceleration?
(Urban Future‘s initial annotated #Accelerate walk-through is
here: 1,
2,
3.)
ADDED: Sometimes I worry that Wikipedia might be taking the spirit of
strict neutrality to extremes (from the
link
already given): “Once again, the bourgeois theorists manage to impress us
with their erudition while completely sidestepping the substance of the
debate.”
March 5, 2014On #Accelerate (#2a)
Assume — at least provisionally — that Accelerationism is serious. While
abstracted from
physics, the
concept of acceleration is not reduced to mere rhetoric (or metaphor),
even if it is no longer applied to changes in the velocity of objects in
space. It refers strictly to change of the first derivative (or higher) in
a measurable quantity across time, formally compliant with the
differential calculus. The rate of acceleration — or system performance —
can be estimated in principle, even if practical considerations complicate
this task. In other words, the object of accelerationist attention (and
promotion) has demonstrable reality.
The intellectual history of industrial capitalism advances two streams of
(quantitative) information, both of great apparent relevance. On its
technical side, it produces an apparatus of rigorous measurement directed
to the behavior of complex physical systems, or machines — temperature
differences, free energy, thermodynamic efficiency, entropy dissipation,
complexity, information, and (emergently) intelligence. On its commercial
side it establishes institutions of accountancy and econometrics,
denominated in currency units, and applied to economic production, income,
taxes, trade flows, credit, asset values, and increasingly exotic
financial instruments. While an argument could be made that the confluence
of these two streams is implicit within — and even essential to — the
nature (or culture) of capitalism, with intelligence-price discovery as
its immanent epistemological directive, no such results are readily or
publicly available. There might even be reasons for suspecting that the
raw question
how much is intelligence worth? cannot be overtly articulated
within any imaginable social order. It is, in any case, a distraction at
this stage.
Despite remarkable
progress
in the technical study of ever-larger complex objects, and the obvious
relevance of this work to accelerationist concerns, it is the
socio-economical rather than the techno-mechanical mode of quantification
that is advantaged in the analysis of very large scale systems, especially
in regards to those entities — up to the level of the global economy —
which have monetized their own processes, and thus
quantified themselves prior to their theoretical objectification.
The enormous theoretical relief provided in this way is such that even the
most severe conceptual difficulties (with which we shall soon collide) are
unable entirely to annul it. (Information sciences offer comparable relief
on the technical side, but it is restricted solely to the domain of
artificial digital machines.)
The compelling attraction of a comprehensive, rigorous,
non-anthropomorphic apprehension of terrestrial modernity as a complex
system, machine, or emergent individual, to be described through its
thermodynamic, dissipative, or intelligenic properties, is such that this
aspiration is unlikely to be wholly excised from the accelerationist
intellectual program (as it exists, and as it will necessarily exist due
to systemically-generated modernist impulses). Despite this, it is
probably uncontroversial to expect the consolidation of accelerationist
theory to initially take shape through reference to cultural resources of
economic description, analysis, explanation, and practical proposition.
The first intellectually credible version of accelerationism cannot
realistically be anything other than a global economic theory of
modernity.
“A global theory of modernity? You mean, like Marxism?” Yes, in a way,
very much like Marxism. The tracks are already set in a direction that
allows only two destinations: Accelerationism can either
be Marxism, or its substitute — an upgrade or a competitor.
The tracks lead across the same country in either case, at least
initially. It is worth sketching out some shared presuppositions, to be
inherited by whatever Accelerationism becomes.
(1) The tendential globality of Capitalism is a signature of its virtual
singularity (as a real individual) and not merely an effect of
generalization across space. ‘Terrestrial Capitalism’ (or whatever else we
might want to call it) is the proper name of a thing, rather than a
generic label. It is an occurrence, or machine, before it is any kind of
social type.
(2) Capitalism is at least integral to actual modernity, if not
(in its own actuality) unambiguously coincident with it. A completed
theory of capitalism — however hypothetical this idea has to be — would
explain modernity, across all its distinctive features, including
the genesis and destiny of (modern) anti-capitalism.
(3) Capitalism is essentially cumulative. It is not something to which
growth can be attributed as an extrinsic property. Even occasions of
capitalist shrinkage or contraction are restricted to specific dimensions,
and intelligible only through an enveloping expansionary trend.
(4) The self-propelling growth that — when adequately understood — defines
capitalism is necessarily expressed as an economic index. An economic
meta-theory capable of decrypting this index, through some set of
consistent mathematical transformations of the system’s own price
information, is able to access data sufficient to support the body of
empirical conclusions and projections that make up the accelerationist
description of capitalism. This theory, therefore, will be denominated in
units of economic value strictly isomorphic with those composing the
planetary aggregate of effectively monetizable wealth (whose extreme
speculative virtuality describes the horizon of economic-theoretical
possibility).
It is notable that at some stage in point (4), this enumeration of shared
presuppositions switches over into something else.
[So this might be a good moment for a break]
March 6, 2014On #Accelerate (#2b)
“If any system has been associated with ideas of acceleration it is
capitalism,” says
#Accelerate, unobjectionably. “The essential metabolism of capitalism demands
economic growth, with competition between individual capitalist entities
setting in motion increasing technological developments in an attempt to
achieve competitive advantage, all accompanied by increasing social
dislocation.”
As previously
noted, of the trends
referenced here “economic growth” is easily the most accessible (due to
its commercial self-quantification). The technoscientific apprehension of
technoscience, while already embryonic at the beginning of the modern
epoch, is still some distance from mathematical self-comprehension as a
natural event. Its quantification, therefore, poses far more challenging
problems, leaving even very basic questions about its trend-lines
open
to
significant
controversy. (Self-quantification of development trends in the
electronics and
biotech
sectors merit focused attention at a later stage.) Any attempt to provide
a precise and coherent measurement of “social dislocation” is likely to
confront even more formidable obstacles.
Capitalism present itself as the exemplary accelerative mega-object
because it is self-propelling and (cross-excitedly) self-abstracting. In
both its technical and commercial aspects, it tends towards
general-purpose potentials that facilitate resource re-allocations (and
thus efficient quantifications). Productive capability is plasticized,
becoming increasingly responsive to shifting market opportunities, while
wealth is fluidized, permitting its rapid speculative mobilization. The
same self-reinforcing process that liquidates traditional social
forms releases modernizing capital as volatile abstract quantity, flexibly
poised between technical applications, and inclined intrinsically towards
a ‘decoded’ or economistic apprehension.
Under capital guidance, the modernization of
wealth tends to the realization of abstract productive potential,
which is of course to say: it tends towards capital itself, in the circuit
of self-propulsion that determines it as a genetic (or even teleological)
hyper-substance. At this point a complex theoretical fork is reached, from
which paths lead in a number of Marxian and decidedly anti-Marxian
directions. The primary question is whether the abstract body of capital
is susceptible to a consistent mathematical conversion conforming to the
Law of Value, which interprets it as a reification of organically composed
(variable and fixed, or ‘living’ and ‘dead’) labor power. Can the
accelerative thing be practically recognized as the alienated collective
capability of a future classless humanity?
#Accelerate considers this question to have been satisfactorily
resolved in advance, and answered in the affirmative. Since it provides no
supporting references in support of this stance, it has to be considered a
left-identitarian document. Only those who affirm the prior closure of its
fundamental questions are able to access it at the level of its own
rhetoric. It assumes ideological solidarity as an extrinsic, and unmarked,
preliminary.
To intrude, nevertheless, from an open problem of capitalist ontology, is
to navigate chaos. The relevant passages are found in the second part of
the manifesto, which consists of seven numbered paragraphs. Whatever we
are told about the accelerative thing has to be extracted from these … or
almost everything.
It is remarkable that the first use of ‘accelerate’ in the manifesto is
both critical, and almost dismissively casual. In occurs in the third
paragraph of the introduction, where it summarizes a set of
“ever-accelerating catastrophes”:
… breakdown of the planetary climatic system [which “threatens
the continued existence of the present global human population”]
… Terminal resource depletion, especially in water and energy
reserves
[raising “the prospect of mass starvation, collapsing economic paradigms,
and new hot and cold wars”]
… continued financial crisis [which] has led governments to embrace the
paralyzing death spiral policies of austerity, privatisation of social
welfare services, mass unemployment, and stagnating wages.
[And]
Increasing automation in production processes including ‘intellectual
labour’
[which]
is evidence of the secular crisis of capitalism, soon to render it
incapable of maintaining current standards of living for even the
former middle classes of the global north.
This, quite clearly, is their lurid introductory portrait of the
accelerative thing, as it is in-itself, converging upon a terminal
historical singularity, or comprehensive ecological, economic, and
technological over-performance crisis. It is both the thing
#Accelerate wants to talk about, and the thing it decides
explicitly not to talk about — introduced as theatrical stage setting, or
a reminder of something before and outside the discussion, which can
subsequently be assumed. The rhetorical function is completely
unambiguous: this list serves as an enumeration of
that which need not be discussed further. It is unfortunate
therefore, to say the least, that this seems to be the closest
approximation within #Accelerate to the real object of
accelerationist attention, “gather[ing] force and speed [as] politics
withers and retreats” until “the future” we were promised is “cancelled”
(if only through a rectifiable failure of “the political imaginary”). The
enemy is an accelerative thing, but #Accelerate will be
discussing something else.
Before capitalism drops away entirely into the hazy background of implicit
narrative, it is worth taking a brief digression into “the political
imaginary” and its suggestion. If there is a single formula that
crystallizes the left appropriation of accelerationism as sheer cognitive
collapse it is Frederic Jameson’s claim — obsessively repeated across the
Left Web — that
It is now easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the
end of capitalism. To grasp the profound mindlessness of this pronouncement it is only
necessary to return to the thought of real abstraction, through
which the virtualization realized by capitalism is distinguished
from any determination of abstraction as a logical property of
intellectual representation. Within capitalist futures markets,
the non-actual has effective currency. It is not an “imaginary” but an
integral part of the virtual body of capital, an operationalized
realization of the future. It is scarcely imaginable that the
Left is willing to follow the path it has set out upon here, therefore,
unless through thoughtlessness of simply staggering proportions, since it
necessarily leads to the conclusion:
while capital has an increasingly densely-realized future, its leftist
enemies have only a manifestly pretend one.
Because #Accelerate Section Two is a tightly-tangled thicket of
conceptual outrages, it is worth recalling once again its first two
sentences, which are exceptional (in this context) for their soundness:
The primary object of Accelerationism is economic growth, as
demonstrated capitalistically, in a process inextricably bound to
competition-driven technological development, and also to social
disorganization. If #Accelerate concluded here, there would be no case to be
made against it. Unfortunately it continues through a string of such
radically disordered sentences that no elegant pursuit of its argument is
possible. Instead, it demands a piecemeal series of corrections,
objections, and re-animations of obscured, half-buried, and arbitrarily
suppressed problems.
The descent begins immediately: “In its neoliberal form, its
ideological self-presentation is one of liberating the forces of
creative destruction, setting free ever-accelerating technological
and social innovations.”
Why is the term ‘creative destruction’ (coined
by Joseph Schumpeter in 1942) being associated with ‘neoliberalism‘ here? Schumpeter considered it applicable to capitalism in general,
with abundant reason, and #Accelerate articulates no objection to
this standard usage. If ‘neoliberalism’ is the ideology of creative
destruction, it is the ideology of capitalism in general.
In the introduction we were told that “since 1979” neoliberalism has been
“the hegemonic global political ideology … found in some variant
throughout the leading economic powers.” It is characterized, apparently,
by “structural adjustments … most significantly in the form of encouraging
new and aggressive incursions by the private sector into what remains of
social democratic institutions and services.” This, too, sounds like
simple capitalism (as does “Landian neoliberalism”). The emptiness of
the term only re-echoes sonorously with each succeeding use.
‘Neoliberalism’ is criticized because it is nothing other than capitalism
(post-1979), and it is criticized for no other reason. In
#Accelerate, if not
elsewhere, it has no ideological content distinguishable from classical
liberalism, making it a perfectly useless word. The opacity serves only to
smuggle through two preposterous suggestions:
(1) The cacophony of leftist critics of ‘neoliberalism’ share some
coherent core of economic and political analysis.
(2) Classical liberal socio-economic ideas enjoy an essentially
unperturbed hegemony over the present world order. (Didn’t you know that
Keynes was dead, and Libertarians rule the earth?)
(So why not start calling today’s fundamentalist Marxists
‘neo-collectivists’? while implying that Stalinist industrial
central-planning is the world’s dominant economic arrangement? —
Because it would be patently ridiculous and senselessly annoying,
but actually no more so than the ‘neoliberal’ alternative.)
This ‘neoliberal’ tic, while infuriating in its smug idiocy, is actually
so vacuous that it matters little to the #Accelerate argument. Its effect
is merely to serve as a sleight of hand, presenting a cartoon opponent to
distract from the absence of concentrated attention upon the target of
realistic analysis and criticism: the accelerative thing. The second
theoretical diversion to appear is scarcely less evasive, which is to
slide off the core ontological problem into a ‘conceptual clarification’
of astounding sloppiness.
We know from the children’s dictionary that acceleration is
a change in speed over time, which does not prevent
#Accelerate claiming (without any obvious evidence):
(1) Speed is not acceleration.
(2) Approaching singularity is marked by acceleration, not constant
velocity.
(3) Who has ever spoken about “moving fast” in this context? It lacks even
the dignity of a straw-man. What does ‘fast’ mean? Acceleration need not
even be ‘fast’ (only ‘getting faster’).
(4) The appeal to something beyond “a strictly defined set of capitalist
parameters” is mere hand-waving. Economic functionality is a confining
‘parameter’ (for acceleration)? There is clearly an attempt at some kind
of transcendental argument here, marked by the appeal to “capitalist
parameters that themselves never waver.” ‘Parameter’ itself wavers
between a logical usage and an empirical one, one conceptually defining,
and the other materially constraining. If
#Accelerate thinks it can produce a meaningful concept of
acceleration without parameters, it would be a thrilling thing to see
(time, terrestrial mass, physical laws, biogeological inheritance … are
all ‘parameters’). Capitalist ‘parameters’ (undefined) are for some reason
to be accepted as especially constraining, however. Argument? Of course
not, this is an article of undisputed faith.
(5) If anyone knows what “the increasing speed of a local horizon”
means, please let me know. At least it is some kind of “increasing speed”
though, i.e. an acceleration. Is this a sign that
#Accelerate thinks the difference between speed and acceleration
is too trivial to acknowledge, so that its discussion of acceleration is
actually not about acceleration at, but about something much deeper and
‘post-parametric’? Perhaps, because …
(6) Beyond the “simple brain-dead onrush” (something is certainly
‘brain-dead’) …
(7) There is “an acceleration which is also navigational, an
experimental process of discovery within a universal space of
possibility.” … and this is somehow connected to, measurable as, or
explained in terms of some rigorously determinable process of acceleration
(even roughly) how?
(8) Regardless: “It is the latter mode of acceleration which we hold
as essential.”
This sort of thing is the straightforward, radical destruction of
intelligence. We began with a defined concept (‘acceleration’) and a topic
of investigation or critique (the accelerative thing). Now, less than
halfway through #Accelerate, we have neither. Instead, we are
left with some kind of super-parametric trans-horizonal imaginary “mode of
acceleration” that has been deliberately destituted of both sense and
reference. The only theoretical achievement has been to crudely chisel
this conceptually and ontologically ineffable political idea away from the
only historically-evidenced process of accelerating navigation,
experiment, and discovery known to human history, in order to cast it into
a mystically-inspiring beyond. Beginning with a
cybernetically-intelligible self-propelling sociotechnical machine, we end
with nothing but the adamant declaration that whatever ‘it’ (historical
acceleration) is, it is not this, or anything we can understand,
despite the fact that what we know of ‘it’ is entirely extracted from the
cumulative reality being abandoned.
As Marx was aware, capitalism cannot be identified as the agent of
true acceleration.
On the contrary. The only “agent of true acceleration” recognized by
Marx is the revolutionary bourgeoisie — his humanistic proxy for the
agency of capital. The proletariat accelerates nothing, except in its
function as labor power under capital imperatives. It inherits a
completed, accelerative pre-history, at the point of its own revolutionary
auto-dissolution into a universal humanity.
Unlike #Accelerate, Marx labored under no illusion that the
accelerative thing was capital, whose mechanism he devoted himself to
understanding, to the near-perfect exclusion of all other topics. In
turning back to Marx’s understanding of this thing [next week], we
partially withdraw from the chaotic errors of current Left
Accelerationism, while perhaps remaining close enough to irritate it.
March 7, 2014On #Accelerate (#2c)
A (quick) digression on speed
Acceleration, as Accelerationism employs it, is a concept abstracted from
physics. In this philosophical (and socio-historical) sense, it preserves
its mathematical definition (consolidated by the differential calculus) as
higher derivatives of speed, with continued reference to time
(change in the rate of change), but with re-application from passage
through space to the growth of a determinable variable. The theoretical
integrity of accelerationism, therefore, rests upon a rigorous abstraction
from and of space, in which the dimension of change — as
graphed against time — is mapped onto an alternative, quantifiable object.
The implicit complicity of this ‘object’ with the process of abstraction
itself will ultimately translate into explicit theoretical complications.
The flight into abstraction is theoretically snarled by reflexive tangles.
Comparable difficulties arise on the side of the flight ‘out’ of space,
primarily because the coincidence of intelligibility and spatiality tends
rather to thicken than dissolve with each further increment of
abstraction, propelling intelligence into phase-spaces,
probability-spaces, Cyberspace, and deterritorialization. Space is
released from its ‘original’ concreteness into the purity of the intuitive
medium, while acquiring active intelligibility as
display space, within which concepts become sensible. There is no
more archaic, or more contemporary, illustration than
the intuition of time through space, as demonstrated by the
entire history of horology, the time-line, time dimensionalization, and
graphed dynamics. Space sticks to measure on its path into abstraction,
and even leads it there.
The insistence of space is also
demonstrated by a tendency for any abstraction of acceleration to undergo
reversion, as its index of change is re-attached to
differentiations of (physical) speed. In the context of the
Great Stagnation
debate —
the most prominent hiatus within the recent history of accelerationist
thinking — a highly abstracted notion of (negative) technonomic
acceleration is restored to measure in exactly this way.
In an
interview
with Francis Fukuyama, Peter Thiel demonstrates the process:
In an earlier
article, published in National Review, Thiel refers explictly to a
“measurement problem” — at once theoretical and political — obstructing
reliable estimates of techno-scientific development. While important to
acknowledge, he advises, it should not “stop our inquiry into modernity
before it has even begun”:
Notably, in an assessment of the anomalous rapidity of computer
innovation, he re-poses
the “measurement problem” in terms familiar (much more recently) from
#Accelerate: “how does one measure the difference between
progress and mere change? How much is there of each?” His procedure then
anticipates the one recommended throughout this series:
Theoretical necessity drives us from physical space into economic
abstraction. It is only realistic, however, to be prepared for the ways in
which — according to deep and obscure necessities — this path will be
curved by the insistent return of space. Of all those things with
over-confidence in their own powers of acceleration, or smooth attainment
of escape velocity, philosophical abstraction is by no means the least
susceptible to counter-productive — and delusive — haste.
March 11, 2014The Left Turn
Left Accelerationism undergoes further consolidation, assisted by two
high-quality posts, from
Fractal Ontology
and
Deontologistics.
Since Left-framing is a transcendental condition of publicization in the
present world order, UF is encouraged to see it being done well. The
implications of this development are inextricable from the core
controversy at issue: Can acceleration be extracted from its capitalist
matrix for socialist redeployment? Left Accelerationists, confident that
this is possible, are setting out to demonstrate it. Right
Accelerationists, no less confident of its impossibility, have no
incentive to obstruct them.
If capital can be exceeded, it deserves to be (by Natural Law). If it
cannot, strenuous efforts to exceed it produce tangled elaborations of its
potencies. Complexity, competition, pressure, and experimentation are what
accelerationism is for.
July 17, 2014Accelero-schism
Working on a re-ignition of the On #Accelerate series (which is
still awaiting #3) has involved a re-reading of Pete Wolfendale’s recent
defense
of Left Accelerationism (against Malcolm Harris’
critique). As previously
noted (briefly), it’s
good.
The strength of Wolfendale’s case against Harris is not a topic this blog
can credibly pronounce upon, since it rests upon the rhetorical efficiency
of socialist political mobilization, and thus a very peculiar
anthopological territory (though an entertaining one). Socialist reason
that does not pass into or through political action is exposed as unreason
by history. The ‘force’ of Wolfendale’s case, in this respect, is
therefore inextricable from the organizational dynamics of his ideological
tribe. (It is not a constituency UF pretends to court.)
The article merits appreciation here due to the accuracy with which it
depicts the schism between Left and Right Accelerationist currents. He
asks: “… what precisely should be accelerated?” The imperative form of
this question is the signature of its Left orientation, but in every other
respect it is impressively, and neutrally, on target. He continues:
Well, as the difference between left and right accelerationism shows,
there’s a good deal of disagreement about this. […] Left-accelerationism
begins from the premise that the deterritorialising force is not
capitalism itself, but that the transition from feudalism to capitalism
was the expression of an emancipatory drive that capitalism’s
reterritorialising dynamics has systematically (but never wholly)
suppressed. The various genealogical indices within the [Accelerationist] reader present a number of ways of thinking about the nature of this
drive (e.g., Marx’s Prometheanism, Federov’s cosmism, Veblen’s
machine-process, etc.), and the various original contributions present
ways of reconceiving and appropriating these (e.g., Srnicek &
Williams’ project of collective self-mastery, Singleton’s generalised
escapology, Negarestani’s inhumanism, etc.).
The fissure is thus perfectly clear. Left Accelerationism rests
fundamentally upon the contention that the modern social order includes an
accelerative motor distinguishable from the capitalist mechanism. In the
best case (philosophically speaking) intellectual proceedings will
therefore lead to a clinical analysis and delimitation of capital
circuitry, in order to describe, alongside it, a
quite other historical dynamo, to which the capital accumulation
process relates as a constriction. This is, as far as I am aware, work
that remains to be completed (whether from Left or Right). Accelerationism
in general requires a coherent capital theory, with which acceleration is
to be identified, or differentiated. Appropriately enough, the task begins
to look like a race.
July 21, 2014Twitter cuts (#12)
OK, it’s verging on the obsessional to drag
Jehu back so quickly, but
these tweets are quite simply the most important formulations of rigorous
Left Accelerationism to date.
In the admittedly oddly-angled opinion of this blog, the final tweet in
this sequence is the most theoretically significant statement of Left
Accelerationist purpose since the 19th century. Attenuation of socially
necessary labor time has to be arithmetically integrated with the concept
of ‘acceleration’ for a seam of Marxian continuity to be pursued.
My immediate response to Jehu’s intervention was, of course, tweeted:
August 21, 2014Twitter cuts (#41)
On the accelerationist dilemma:
Even speaking as an adversary, it’s worth pointing out that the advantage
of taking the Left Accelerationist path is, that way, you still get Right
Accelerationism for free. Head for spiritual redemption through fully
automated luxury communism and get devoured by Omega-telic
X-risk. Everyone wins.
March 24, 2015Accelerationism in One Country
Devastating:
The difference between the experimentalism of ‘folk politics’ and the
trial and error of Srnicek and Williams boils down to a question of
scale. The most biting elements of their critique of current radical
practices, such as direct democracy, is that they are difficult to
‘scale up’ beyond local and parochial zones of action, and it is this
limitation which prevents the contemporary left from presenting a real
threat to capitalism. Surprisingly, then,
Inventing the Future implicitly conjures a distinctly
national politics, geared towards achieving
parliamentary dominance in North/Western democratic states. Their
legislative wish-list – investment in automation, the provision of basic
income, shortening the working week and so on – remain tied to national
politics in an era of ever-more global and mobile capital. To be sure,
the threat of capital upping sticks and investing elsewhere at the mere
mention of greater concessions to labour are overstated, but without a
global compact in which common labour standards are
adhered to around the world, the reality of a post-work regime in one
country would either be capital flight or the out-sourcing of
exploitation to poorer countries (in other words, further exacerbating
the current global division of labour). Not for nothing are the authors
forced to rely on a vague hope that the rest of the world will take care
of itself …
(Emphasis in original.)
Capital interprets Left Accelerationism as damage and routes around it.
November 9, 2015Quotable (#122)
Nick Dyer Witheford (in
conversation) on the variants of far Left politics under advanced capitalism:
… it’s clear that capitalism is creating potentials – not just
technological, but organizational potentials – which could be adapted in
a transformed manner to create a very different type of society. The
evident example is the huge possibilities for freeing up time by
automation of certain types of work. For me, the problem both with Paul
[Mason]’s work, which I respect, and with the accelerationists, is there
is a failure to acknowledge that the passage from the potential to the
actualization of such communist possibilities involves crossing what
William Morris describes as a “river of fire.” I don’t find in their
work a great deal about that river of fire. I think it would be
reasonable to assume there would be a period of massive and protracted
social crisis that would attend the emergence of these new forms. And as
we know from historical attempts in the 20th Century to cross that river
of fire, a lot depends on what happens during that passage. So there is,
if one could put it that way, a certain
automatism about the prediction of the realization of a
new order in both these schools, which we should be very careful
about.
(What automation wants — be definition — is more of itself. There’s a name
for that, and it isn’t ‘communism’.)
The abstract for
this
talk gives a sense of the diagnosis.
November 25, 2015Twitter cuts (#104)
The embedded link is well-worth looking at. It’s what Left Acceleration
thinks a sane — or only moderately sociopathic — Right would look like
(I’m guessing), and what Right Accelerationism thinks a non-retarded Left
would look like (I’m sure).
March 20, 2016Twitter cuts (#145)
(Source.)
Good catch. He doesn’t exactly quote the
MAP, but he gets comically close.
So the world’s first Left Accelerationist regime was destroyed in a
frog-cataclysm. One for the history books.
November 19, 2016
BLOCK 3 - BITCOIN AND BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY
CHAPTER ONE - BTC FACETS
Bits and Pieces
As the US dollar reaches depths of debasement that would have stretched
the imagination of Caligula, people have been
searching
for alternative candidates for a global reserve currency. The problem is
formidable. The Euro and Japanese Yen face comparable calamities of their
own (mixing debt crisis and demographic collapse), the Chinese Yuan is
non-convertible, and the IMF’s hybrid Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) merely
bundle together a group of troubled fiat currencies under a technocratic
acronym.
Precious metals enthusiasts have an obvious option, and one that is
already being spontaneously exercised. Yet whilst growing numbers will no
doubt cling to gold and silver as financial lifeboats, their wider use as
currency (as opposed to stores of value) is obstructed by an intimidating
range of technical and political problems. They are not digitally
transferable without complicated mediating instruments, and they remain
exposed to extreme political risk – financial crises have been regularly
accompanied by
seizures
and
controls
directed at private precious metals holdings and transactions.
To overcome such problems, a currency would need to be structurally
immunized against the depredations of central bankers, to share the
deflationary bias of precious metals, and to participate fully in the
technical trend towards mathematical abstraction and electronic
communicability, whilst also enjoying strong cryptographic protection
against surveillance, expropriation, and fraud. Astonishingly, such a
currency seems already to exist. Its name is ‘Bitcoin’.
The twin, interactive drivers of modernity – commerce and technology –
come together in Bitcoin with unprecedented fusional intensity. This is a
currency that is simultaneously an open source computer program, entirely
native to cyberspace, and a financial innovation, conducting a real-time
experiment that is at once social, technical, and economic. Built on the
foundations of public key encryption (PKE), it creates a peer-to-peer open
network – without any controlling node or discretionary human management –
to sustain a radically decentralized monetary system.
Originally devised by Satoshi Nakamoto (whose outline paper can be found
here),
Bitcoin disconnects trust from authority. In particular, it is designed to
overcome the problem of double spending.
Because digital ‘goods’ can be replicated at near-zero cost, they are
economically defined as ‘non-rivalrous’. If you sell me a computer, I now
own it, and you do not. As with all rivalrous goods, ownership implies
exclusion. If you sell me a computer program, on the other hand, there is
no reason to assume that you have not kept a copy for yourself, or that
the ‘same’ program could not be sold to multiple purchasers. Such
non-rivalrous goods pose numerous intriguing economic questions, but one
thing is entirely clear: non-rivalrous money is an impossibility. Without
scarcity, or exclusive exchange, the very idea of monetary quantity loses
all sense, as does monetary value, spending and investment, and consumer
choice.
The Bitcoin algorithm makes a digital currency rivalrous, and thus
effective as money, without recourse to any administrative authority. It
does so by initiating an automatic or spontaneous ecology, in which
computers on the network authenticate Bitcoin exchanges as a side-effect
of ‘mining’ for new coins. Nodes earn new coins, at a diminishing rate, by
solving a difficult
digital puzzle
– accessible only to a brute force, computationally-intensive approach –
and thus exhibiting
proof-of-work. This test screens the system from malicious interventions, by
establishing a practically insurmountable barrier to any user who seeks to
falsify the record of exchanges. Competent discussions can be found
here,
here, and (most diversely)
here.
This problem, and solution, is very far from arbitrary. It is precisely
because existing fiat currencies have taken on disturbingly non-rivalrous
characteristics that alarm about currency debasement has reached such a
pitch of exasperation. When a central bank, in the course of running a
typically loose monetary policy, can simply speed up the printing presses
or (still worse) the electronic equivalent, the integrity of the money
supply is devastated at the root. Bitcoin rigorously extirpates such
ruinous discretion from its system, by instantiating a theory of sound
money as a precisely and publicly defined electronic experiment.
Unsurprisingly, the Bitcoin monetary aggregate is modeled on precious
metal, generated by miners from a finite global reserve, with rising
extraction costs. The reward for coin mining falls over time at a
logarithmic (Zenonian) rate, towards a limit of fractionally under
21,000,000 BTC. Each Bitcoin can be subdivided to eight decimal places, to
a total of over two quadrillion (2,100,000,000,000,000) fragments,
equivalent to 210,000 Bitcoin ‘quanta’ for each of the 10 billion people
making up the earth’s anticipated climax human population. A Bitcoin
quantum (0.00000001 BTC) is named a ‘Satoshi’ (after Satoshi Nakamoto),
although amendment to the system allowing for further sub-division at some
future stage is not foreclosed. (For the total size of the Bitcoin economy
look
here.)
Bitcoin is programmed for deflation (of a sort). This is a source of delight to hard money types, and of outrage to
those in the loose money (inflationary) camp. As an experiment, the great
merit of Bitcoin is to raise this antagonism beyond the level of
reciprocal polemics, to that of potential historical evidence — and real
choice. Austrolibertarians have long claimed that free money systems are
biased to deflation, and that central banking encourages inflation as a
surreptitious mechanism of economic expropriation, to ultimately
disastrous effect. Keynesians, in contrast, deplore deflation as an
economic disease that suppresses productive investment and employment.
Empirical testing could soon be possible.
Numerous other questions, theoretical and practical, present
themselves. At the practical level, such questions work themselves out through
speculative volatility, institutional adaptations, and technical
challenges. Since the entire Bitcoin economy remains very small,
relatively modest shifts in economic behavior yield wild swings in BTC
value, including
bubble-like
surges, precipitous collapses, incontinent
hype, and
extravagant
accusations. Despite the resilience of the core algorithm, the peripheral
institutions supporting the Bitcoin economy remain
vulnerable
to theft, fraud, and malicious interventions. As with any revolutionary
experiment, the developmental trajectory of Bitcoin is likely to be
tumultuous and highly unpredictable.
The theoretical questions can be entertained more calmly. The most
important of these concern the essential nature of money, and its future.
Does Bitcoin successfully simulate the significant features of precious
metals, such that their substance can be discarded from the monetary
equation as irrelevant dross? How powerful are the forces leading to
monetary convergence? Will first-mover advantage ‘lock-in’ Bitcoin at the
expense of later alternatives? Or will multiple money systems – perhaps
ever more heterogeneous ones – continue to co-exist? Is Bitcoin merely one
stage in an open-ended sequence of innovative money systems, or does it
capture the essential features of money quite definitively (leaving room
only for incremental improvements, or tinkering)?
Supporters of the monetary status quo might insist on a further, more
derisive line of questioning: is Bitcoin a dead end, an irrelevance, or a
deluding libertarian cipherpunk fantasy, to be judged eventually as
something akin to a hoax? Which is to note that, ultimately, the largest
questions will be political, and the most heated discussions already are.
Can governments afford to tolerate unmanaged, autonomous currencies? We’ll
see.
[Tomb]
June 23, 2011The Internet of Money
In an
article
that might be the most important contribution to the understanding of
Bitcoin since its launch, Eli Dourado writes:
[Bitcoin] is a currency, of sorts. You can spend it on things,
especially drugs and gambling and getting around capital controls.
Krugman and other economists have analyzed Bitcoin in these terms, as a
substitute for dollars. This is rather like regarding the Internet as a
substitute for, and not a quantum leap beyond, previous communication
technologies. It is true that Bitcoin can substitute for other
currencies, but as with the Internet, the abstraction of a
permissionless application layer means that it is
much more than a substitute: it is like a transport layer for finance.
Every Bitcoin transaction is defined in part by a bit of code, called a
script, written in a
programming language called Script. The script in one transaction defines how the next user can access
the coins. In a conventional transaction, the script specifies the hash
of the public key that is needed to spend the coins next, and demands a
signature from the corresponding private key.
Script is not limited, however, to these conventional transactions that
merely transfer coins from one person’s control to another’s. It can
evaluate statements, execute conditionally, do math, and move bits
around. It is not a Turing-complete programming language (there is no
looping), because that would be a security risk; we do not want viruses
to spread via Bitcoin’s blockchain, nor do we want Bitcoin transactions
to run indefinitely or, if we ever figure out AI, become self-aware.
Despite the lack of loops in Script, it can be used to construct some
very interesting scripts. …
Sometimes
ratchets
work right.
ADDED: In the comments thread to the article, Eli Dourado suggests: “It’s
… possible that democracies won’t respond effectively against Bitcoin
because they don’t respond effectively to much of anything.”
January 10, 2014Monetary Reality
Kevin D Williamson writes one of the best
pieces
yet on Bitcoin:
To argue that bitcoins are not “real money” because they have no
central-bank regulation or central issuer is like arguing that a prepaid
disposable cell phone is not a “real phone” because its number doesn’t
appear in the directory and you don’t get a bill. That’s the point, or
at least part of the point.
I am skeptical of the Bitcoin model, but it has in no small part been a
victim of its own popularity, with speculative investments in
bitcoins overwhelming their use in commercial transactions. But this
phenomenon is not unknown among traditional currencies. Consider the
lengths to which the Swiss have had to go in recent years to stabilize
the value of the franc as euros (and, to a lesser extent, dollars)
bounced about.
But that misses the broader point in a couple of ways. The first is
that bitcoins and other private currencies are intended as replacements
for greenbacks in approximately the same way that the Internet was
intended to be a replacement for the printing press: They may do that,
sure, but they will have other uses as well. Wresting control of
currencies away from politicians is the only way to let money evolve.
Twenty years ago, you didn’t know that you’d want to take photos with
your telephone or use it as a boarding pass at the airport. Now you do.
Nobody planned that. Nobody knows what “real money” is going to mean in
twenty years.
As for price instability, that is of course a fundamental issue, and …
the fact that most of the world’s governments have made counterfeit
currency (which is what fiat money is) legal tender complicates the
environment. … A financial asset may decline in value; a U.S. dollar is
practically guaranteed to, if history is any guide. Very wealthy people
and institutions already have access to de facto private money in the
form of various financial instruments; private currencies promise to
make similar benefits available to general consumers — and, critically,
to move that market beyond the reach of central bankers and regulators,
and probably tax-collectors, too, in the long run.
We can probably expect a robust, competitive market in private
currencies to develop, and Bitcoin may or may not be a part of the
long-term picture. It may turn out to be the Packard of private
currencies. We’ll know the market has arrived when people have as many
choices of currency provider as they do of cell-phone provider. And that
will be a critical moment in the shifting balance of power between
politics and markets, another way for us to stop
asking permission to engage in commerce.
This is in part why I object to … the
Wall Street Journal’s characterization of the natural
theater for bitcoin use as “the black market.” A better phrase for “the
black market” is “the market.”
(I confess to being quite awestruck by the amount of incisive analysis
packed into these few short paragraphs.)
March 4, 2014Distributors
It’s time for
another (quick)
Umlaut rave. There’s no getting around it after reading
this, then following the back-link to
this, and being reminded somehow that this comparatively obscure online
magazine has somehow rounded up
two of the
half-dozen or less people in the world who really get what
Bitcoin is going to do to this planet. (I’d say “two-and-a-half” — but
with no disrespect to Adam Gurri, his soul just isn’t in
it, which is to say: terminally distributed.)
After reading this stuff, it’s easy to think that the only meaningful role
for anything else on the right is to run interference while ‘Bitcoin’
(i.e. a-centric digital crypto-commerce) consummates the destiny of
capitalism. The intelligence gulf between the emerging Bitcoin machinery
and legacy political controversy now yawns so abysmally that inherited
conceptions of ‘activism’ have become low comedy. Poke at Bitcoin with a
political stick and it slithers sideways while turning more feral — the
‘instinct’ for that is already locked in. The confused idiots who are
trying to manage human societies today will almost certainly make it into
a monster. Since I don’t like them very much, it doesn’t upset me to see
it stealthing into the shadows, with venomous claws emerging. It will be
darkly amusing to see it coming at them out of Hell.
April 8, 2014Bitcoin Backend
A short photo-heavy
story
by ‘Bitsmith’ explores the engine-room behind digital cryptocurrency,
where Chinese ‘miners’ run banks of computers to fetch new monetary units
out of mathematical abstraction. The incentives for the mining operation
are straightforward, and economically indistinguishable from those driving
mineral mining operations. Due to the genius of the Bitcoin design, this
massive computational effort serves, automatically, to secure the
integrity of the system against subversion. What offers opportunities for
extractive wild-catting from the entrepreneurial side, is a decentralized
trust mechanism from that of the currency exchange network.
Located in a re-purposed industrial space, the mining operation’s 2,500
machines perform a total 600 trillion operations per second, consuming RMB
400,000 of electricity per month. There’s an attached audio file with the
story, so you can listen in on the process. It’s not pretty, but it sounds
unmistakably serious.
The tone of Bitsmith’s prose has been peeled straight off the
cryptocurrency frontier, which makes it doubly informative. This is the
object and the spirit of capitalist perception in the early 21st century:
Getting the opportunity to visit this mining operation was very
eye-opening for me. Walking around the warehouse floor, I was struck
with a feeling of awe that THIS is what keeps bitcoin alive. That even
if someone wanted to bring down bitcoin, they’d have to outdo these guys
and the dozens of other operations like this around the world. The
decentralized nature of it all … that this is just one operation among
many, run by different operators in different countries around the
world. This really drove home that bitcoin can’t be killed by decree.
Make it illegal in one country and people like this will keep hashing
away in others.
The other feeling I got while there is that this is kind of a
libertarian fantasy for many. These guys are performing a valuable
service and getting paid well for it. Too many in the world get paid
well at the expense of others, or dedicate their lives to giving back to
society without a penny in return, but mining farms like these are
participating in the economy in a purely capitalist way (and the good
kind of capitalism, not
“socialism-for-banks-but-we’ll-call-it-capitalism-anyways”).
Love it or loathe it, the future that has already begun to arrive. This is
an inspection tour not to be missed.
August 15, 2014Trustless Convergence
A US$80 million bitcoin
transaction
is impressive. To really get a sense of the momentum behind the impending
blockchained Internet, however, a figure like this pales beside the
cultural groundswell. Bitcoin consolidates its inevitability from the
sheer social heterogeneity it coordinates.
Watch
this video
alongside
this
venture capital announcement. It would be over-dramatic to suggest these
people want to kill each other, but there’s every reason to suspect they
would not be excessively traumatized by bad things happening to each
other. There’s no commonality of social perspective, no grounds for
reciprocal sympathy, and a massive accumulation of historical distrust.
Yet Famous Amos and the Winklevoss twins are cooperating, spontaneously,
in the same world-historic undertaking. If there’s any plane short of the
blockchain that could imaginably facilitate comparable coordination
between otherwise-noncommunicating constituencies, I’ve no idea what it
could be. (‘The market’? — merely blockchain commerce in embryo.)
The guiding principle of the next Kondratiev upswing is the
trustless commonwealth. It doesn’t expect us to like each other.
That’s why it’s going to win.
December 9, 2014On the Table
Pierre Rochard’s
essay
on ‘The Bitcoin Central Bank’s Perfect Monetary Policy’ presents an
impressively cogent case for the superiority of Bitcoin over not only
slimy government fiat scrip (boo hiss), but even over precious metals. One
table, in particular, deserves to be committed to heart by anyone making
systematic three-way comparisons:
It’s difficult to run through this and see anything less than a
fundamental rupture in social history. When compared to Bitcoin, only
proto-money has ever yet existed.
As Rochard concludes:
Fractional reserve banking
entails the creation of new money that is fungible with already
preexisting money, i.e. it can be used interchangeably within the
currency’s payment systems. This is impossible with Bitcoin. The BCB
[‘Bitcoin Central Bank’] enforces the strictest deposit regulations in
the world by requiring
full reserves
for all accounts. This is the digital equivalent of the
Chicago Plan
or the
Austrian 100% reserve gold standard. Under this regulatory regime, money is not destroyed when bank debts
are repaid, so increased money hoarding does not cause
liquidity traps, instead it increases real interest rates and lowers consumer prices.
This is a self-stabilizing cycle as higher interest rates incentivize
hoarders to invest, while deflation increases consumption due to the
wealth-effect
on hoarders. The BCB prevents lending out of deposits so that it can
properly target money supply and avoid the destabilizing effects of
commingling the credit and payment systems.
The positive properties of AMST [‘asymptotic money supply targeting’]
and PoWS [‘Proof-of-work seigniorage’] combined make it certain that,
absent a technological problem, Bitcoin will be adopted as the global
currency. For a deeper understanding of the market process involved in
becoming global currency I would recommend reading Konrad Graf’s
explanation of
hyper-monetization
and Peter Šurda’s
liquidity analysis of bitcoins. The Bitcoin Central Bank will be the longest lasting institution of
its kind thanks to the anti-fragile independent monetary policy it has
set in stone.
ADDED: Approaching the same forecast in another direction —
December 17, 2014Bitcoin as SOCI
This
is one of the greatest things ever written, period.
‘SOCI’ abbreviates ‘self-organizing collective intelligence’.
The basic dynamics of a SOCI is as follows. It begins as some sort of
attractor — some aesthetic sensibility or yearning — that is able to
grab the attention and energy of some group of people. Generally one
that is very vague and abstract. Some idea or notion that only makes
sense to a relatively small group. […] But, and this is the key move,
when those people apply their attention and energy to the SOCI, this
makes it more real, easier for more people to grasp and to find
interesting and valuable. Therefore, more attractive to more people and
their attention and energy. […] … If the SOCI has enough capacity within
its collective intelligence to resolve the challenge, it “levels up” and
expands its ability to attract more attention and energy. If not, then
it becomes somewhat bounded (at least for the present) and begins to
find the limit of “what it is”.
Greenhal then narrates the story of Bitcoin to date, within this
framework. The sheer enormity of the innovation it has introduced emerges
starkly.
In conclusion:
My sense is that over just the next five years this new form of SOCI
will go through its gestation, birthing and childhood development
stages. The result will be a form of collective intelligence that is so
much more capable than anything in the current environment that it will
sweep away even the most powerful contemporary collective intelligences
(in particular both corporations and nation states) in establishing
itself as the new dominant form of collective intelligence on the Earth.
[…] And whoever gets there first will “win” in a fashion that is rarely
seen in history.
This will look prophetic not too far down the road.
February 23, 2016Countdown
XS wishes all its readers a productive Bitcoin Halving
Day. (It’s only the second ever — with the first falling on November 28,
2012, when
Block 210000 was solved.)
Bitcoin likes Countdown numbers (only 21000000 will ever be produced).
(Countdown = 210.)
July 9, 2016
CHAPTER TWO - BTC DEATH?
Bitcoin vs Leviathan
Moldbug’s
prediction: Freedom loses (as usual).
The question is this: Which dominates? The malignancy of Leviathan, or its
incompetence? How radically can the metastatic cancer-phase State shape
reality in conformity to its vision?
Bitcoin — which is essentially an experiment in Austrian monetary theory —
provides the model test-bed in which this question can be lucidly decided.
Its current
rising
fortunes
only accelerates the decision. If Bitcoin can’t be stopped, Leviathan is
exposed as a paper tiger.
The best way to make the bet, of course, is to buy (or short) BTC.
Outside in has been too apathetic to put resources behind its
hunches yet, but (for the zilch it’s worth) our intuitions run
contra Moldbug on the topic. Compared to Cyberspace, where
bitcoin is entrenched, the State is weak, unintelligent, uninformed,
parochial, poorly designed, and — in each respect — getting ever more so,
in both comparative and absolute terms. The truly stupendous idiocy of
Leviathan thoroughly swamps its evil, as is demonstrated every time it
tries to get something done.
The digital Outside, in contrast, is already far beyond recall. The germ
of a free economy is under construction.
[UF on Bitcoin (June 2011)
here]
March 1, 2013Bitcoin Horror Stories
Bitcoin Dies, Moldbug
ventures, perhaps sometime this year. Following a broad DOJ indictment for money
laundering, targeting any and everybody remotely connected with the free
currency, the “BTC/USD price falls to 0 and remains there.”
“[R]emains there” — how cute is that?
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Bitcoin R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.
Bitcoin simulates gold, and once ‘mined’ it lasts for ever. If it “falls
to 0” it has to remain there, for eternity, because it can never be
finished. It can die, but never be destroyed. It’s built for undeath.
‘Moldbug Monetary Theory’ attributes the value of money exclusively to
speculation. If the speculators are terrorized sufficiently, BTC drops
onto the flatline, and “remains there.” The market would be totally
extinguished. What Mao failed to achieve, let alone sustain, USG would
somehow accomplish, perhaps by exhibiting greater revolutionary ardor and
ruthlessness.
Ruthlessness would certainly be necessary, for the obvious reason that
flatline-BTC has zero downside risk. It’s a one-way bet that someone,
somewhere, will re-animate it (“nothing is unstable” (thanks to fotrkd for the reminder)). If a genius was
designing irresistible speculator-bait, zero-degree bitcoin would be hard
to improve upon. It’s free, and it’s only worth nothing if the cops can
secure the crypt flawlessly, and forever. Did anyone say ‘free
money’?
Speculation messes with time, by bringing the future forward. If undead
BTC were ever to be re-awakened, it already has been. Its
economic potential flows back down the timeline, modified by a
time-preference discount. The feedback becomes strange, and difficult to
confidently calculate, but it works as a vitalizing charge, and the corpse
unmistakably twitches. Whatever money at t0 is worth, if it’s anything at
all, at t0-n it almost certainly can’t be zero.
The Necronomicon
describes
flatline-BTC with creepy exactitude:
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.
ADDED: An alternative take on Bitcoin and undeath from Yifo Guo,
interviewed
here
(H/T Nick B. Steves, in
this
comment thread): “… the point is, the idea will never die. Even if bitcoin
dies, an alternative will arise, one that addresses the vulnerability that
was previously exploited. Then you get bitcoin 2.0.”
March 5, 2013Satoshi Nakamoto Night
On October 31, 2008,
this happened.
(The first XS Bitcoin horror
story.)
October 31, 2015The Future of Bitcoin
The latest
guidance
from US Leviathan’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) is a
leaf ripped straight out of Moldbuggian
prophecy. The target acquisition revealed in
Administrators and Exchangers of Virtual Currency, section
c. De-Centralized Virtual Currencies could not possibly be
clearer:
A final type of convertible virtual currency activity involves a
de-centralized convertible virtual currency (1) that has no central
repository and no single administrator, and (2) that persons may obtain
by their own computing or manufacturing effort.
A person that creates units of this convertible virtual currency and uses
it to purchase real or virtual goods and services is a user of the
convertible virtual currency and not subject to regulation as a money
transmitter. By contrast, a person that creates units of convertible
virtual currency and sells those units to another person for real currency
or its equivalent is engaged in transmission to another location and is a
money transmitter. In addition, a person is an exchanger and a money
transmitter if the person accepts such de-centralized convertible virtual
currency from one person and transmits it to another person as part of the
acceptance and transfer of currency, funds, or other value that
substitutes for currency.
[See Fotrkd’s link feast in
this
comment thread]
RIP Bitcoin, I think
Moldbug confirms:
I have not of course seen the questionnaire [for money transmitter
licenses], but I imagine it asks you how you know the monies you’re
transmitting are not the product of illegal activity. Of course, Bitcoin
provides no such assurance. By design. That’s because it’s well-designed
— for a free country that doesn’t exist.
With licenses unobtainable, and unlicensed monetary transactions
proscribed, Bitcoin price-discovery has been criminalized. The conclusion:
Bitcoin no longer has a practically meaningful US$ exchange rate, which is
equivalent, in fact, to having a yet undiscovered (but already implicit)
value of US$0. The cliff edge has been crossed, and all that remains is
the impact.
Empirically vulnerable predictions are pure gold, and this is an
especially precious example. The fate of Bitcoin tests the real power of
the State, the practicability of economic controls, and all political
theories — whether reactionary or progressive — which subordinate market
dynamics to more fundamental levels of social order. If Bitcoin does soon
die, it will have been demonstrated that government can effectively
dominate the economic sphere, dictate price, and eradicate commerce, under
conditions which are — in at least some important respects — extremely
challenging. Freedom might still seem attractive, but it will have been
shown to be puny.
Alternatively, if Bitcoin survives, and spreads, the Right’s libertarian
current will be vitalized.
These
types
will not only find their analytical models reinforced, but the sovereign
insubordination of markets will have been dramatically evidenced, the
State humiliated and weakened, and an archetypal anarcho-capitalist
institution entrenched. Interesting times.
ADDED: Eli Dourado
argues
that anonymity is the “real target”:
Contrary to some popular accounts, Bitcoin is not completely anonymous,
but pseudonymous. The entire Bitcoin ledger is publicly shared so that
the same coins can’t be spent twice. Bitcoin “mixers” take coins from
multiple pseudonymous actors, shuffle them around, and return them to
their original users under new pseudonyms. In other words, mixers help
anonymize a system that is not truly anonymous.
If the government were to succeed in regulating mixers, it would not
destroy Bitcoin as a payment mechanism or even hurt Bitcoin’s price,
which has now reached an all-time high of $60, but it would ruin one of
the chief advantages of using it—the quasi-anonymity that it
affords.
ADDED: Meanwhile,
in Europe
…
March 20, 2013BTC End Times?
In January, Moldbug
spake
prophetically:
Bitcoin dies in two very simple steps.
The charge: money laundering.
On May 15, Under the headline
US Government Begins BitCoin Crackdown, Zero Hedge
reported
that:
Many people use Dwolla, a PayPal-like payment network, to send dollars
to their Mt. Gox accounts. They then use those dollars to buy Bitcoins.
On Tuesday, Dwolla announced that it had frozen Mt. Gox’s account at the
request of federal investigators. It’s the first federal action against
the currency.
And, by the way:
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) described Bitcoin as an “online form of
money laundering”
Outside in
doesn’t
share Moldbug’s BTC prediction, but the projected narratives don’t diverge
much for some time. By attempting to stamp out Bitcoin, USG rapidly
converts it into an overtly subversive
revolutionary currency*, used only by those in explicit (though
covert) antagonism to the regnant global economic regime. The test then
begins.
*Typically, reactionaries don’t like revolutions, but that’s because
revolutions are typically democratizing. When the neoreaction gets to
watch a spontaneous right-wing revolution unfolding,
against the democratized or ‘political’ economy, I suspect that
they’ll quickly recover their natural sympathy for it.
ADDED: The greatness of Peter Thiel on
display
(via, and as
anticipated)
May 16, 2013Will Bitcoin Survive?
Eli Dourado, author of the most important Bitcoin-inspired
article
on the web, remains publicly committed to the cryptocurrency’s future. In
the wake of the Mt Gox
crisis,
affecting the world’s largest BTC exchange (based in Japan), he has
written a brief
defense of the
bullish case in Nietzschean vein:
what does not kill us makes us stronger.
In just four short paragraphs, Dourado manages to make a significant
point. Stress-tested survival has a value. The more ferocious Bitcoin’s
environment is shown to be, the more advantageous its competitive position
relative to alternative cryptocurrencies, as its resilience is
demonstrated and publicized. Actualization of potential (catastrophe)
resolves risk, leaving whatever survives augmented by a security premium.
“Now it turns out that getting a cryptocurrency ecosystem to grow up is
really, really hard — harder than maybe we thought. It follows directly
that Bitcoin faces less competition from other cryptocurrencies than we
thought. … since it is hard to succeed, if Bitcoin succeeds, then it may
be worth quite a lot.”
Dourado’s two links do more work still. The
first
is to a recent Megan McArdle pre-obituary on BTC, which argues that the
reputational damage inflicted by the Mt Gox fiasco will weaken it still
further in what was always a Quixotic challenge to State power:
I’ve never been very bullish on Bitcoin, because ultimately, the better
it performs at evading government surveillance of currency transactions
(and government ability to manage debt loads via inflation), the harder
those governments are going to try to shut it down.
Governments like levying an invisible inflation tax, and get angry when
people attempt to route around it. (This is all quite explicit, on
both
sides.) The balance of opportunities within this conflict is too intricate to
detail here, but McArdle’s utter submissiveness to government exaction
clearly represents an extreme position among commentators. That Bitcoin
predictably infuriates state financial authorities is a feature, not a
bug.
Dourado’s
second
link refers to an older and subtler argument by Tyler Cowen, which makes a
bearish case against Bitcoin on strictly economic grounds. Insofar as
Bitcoin is seen to flourish, competitor cryptocurrencies will be attracted
into the market, arbitraging value down to the cost of supply:
There is thus a new theorem: the value of [any -it]Coin should, in
equilibrium, be equal to the marketing costs of its potential
competitors … In short, we are still in a situation where supply-side
arbitrage has not worked its way through the value of Bitcoin. And that
is one reason —
among others
— why I expect the value of Bitcoin to fall — a lot.
[Cowen’s internal link is well worth following up.]
As already noted, Cowen’s bearish position is weakened by
Bitcoin’s recent travails. Almost irrespective of what happens next, an
established reputation for toughness will feature prominently in the
market evaluation of any cryptocurrency from now on.
Since Bitcoin won’t have been killed — it is close to impossible to kill —
it will have been made much stronger.
ADDED: Time for YellenCoin? (No.)
ADDED: “So
is Mt. Gox the new version of Friendster, the early social networking
leader that buckled just before Facebook surged ahead? … Bitcoin’s next
generation of founders is cleaner, more pedigreed and suited to Wall
Street’s and Capitol Hill’s tastes. They are no less libertarian or
wolf-like.”
February 26, 2014Undead
Does this look like something that’s about to
die?
(This is among the few topics that puts my reverence for the Moldgod under
serious strain.)
More here:
The apparently inverse relation between BTC value and investment level
merits further commentary.
On a trivial personal note, I seem to have carelessly lost my Bitcoin
wallet somehow, so my perfect detachment on the subject is even more
impeccable than you might think.
Note: There’s a exemplary anti-Moldbug prognosis
cited over at the other
place. “The only extent to which the United States can allow anything at
all with respect to Bitcoin is the extent to which it can reform itself to
work inside Bitcoin.” OK, it’s perhaps an over-stretch in the opposite
direction, but it still ends up far closer to the mark.
(Image
source.)
ADDED: Found my Bitcoin account again — which I’m confident everyone will
be extremely excited about. Better still, my BTC 0.0005 is still sitting
there securely. Phew!
December 1, 2014Hype Waves
As the Bitcoin price takes a
tumble, Heather R Morgan reminds us of her super-bearish
article
on the currency from February last year (with just a little gloating):
It includes this valuable (abstract) hype-cycle chart:
Look carefully at what is happening in the final stages, though. I don’t
think this chart is showing what Morgan takes it to. (AI, VR, Bitcoin —
they all follow the same roller-coaster course, and they all get installed
in the end.)
A Twitter comment worth noting:
ADDED: Jerry Brito is sensible on the topic.
January 14, 2015Hype Waves II
The New Republic‘s somber
account
of the Bitcoin Gold Rush is well worth a read (despite the troweled-on
axiomatic leftism). It includes this chart of the recent undulations in
the Bitcoin price (in US Dirty fiat):
It’s a small chunk of history that could
support any number of narratives at this point. This one, in particular,
offers an alternative to terminal doom scenarios:
(Plenty
of
others seem
to agree.)
February 26, 2015Dissociation
Coinbase provides a graphic
overview
of 2015 Bitcoin trends, strikingly illustrating a structural disengagement
of the cryptocurrency’s metrics as a medium of exchange and as a store of
value:

While the price of bitcoin is down 9% year-to-date, if you look below
the surface it is clear that Bitcoin had a strong first half and is
making great strides as digital money for people around the world and a
payment network for innovation. … […] The number of transactions per day
on the Bitcoin network is rapidly accelerating. The network averaged
60,590 transactions per day in June 2014 and 117,474 transactions per
day in June 2015. … That’s a
94% increase in monthly transactions over the past year.
[Emphasis in original.]
One obvious hypothesis — that Bitcoin hoarders are strategically
restraining their holdings in order to facilitate the commercial spread of
the currency — seems to assume an implausibly coherent solution to an
intractable coordination (or collective action) problem. A more widely
accepted Bitcoin has to be worth more, doesn’t it? It’s hard to see how
everyone could be leaving that value on the pavement. (This blog
is presently stumped.)
July 16, 2015Quote note (#282)
At least superficially, under-funding is the strict reciprocal of
hype:
The blockchain industry is either hugely under-resourced or hugely
over-optimistic. Probably both.
Bitcoin rigorously formalizes the common insight that
words are cheap (it emerged out of spam-filter solutions). So
this analysis is intriguingly ironic, as well as obviously
thought-provoking.
September 9, 2016
CHAPTER THREE - BTC POLITICS
Bitcoin and Chains
Doug Henwood, writing in The Nation,
explains
the attractions of Bitcoin for the Right:
There have been many other reports of thefts, frauds and hackings,
which Bitcoin partisans dismiss as mere growing pains. But with no
regulator, no deposit insurance and no central bank, this sort of thing
is inevitable — it’s just tough luck. Introduce regulators and insurance
schemes, though, and Bitcoin will lose all its anarcho-charm.
Keynes once called gold “part of the apparatus of conservatism” for its
appeal to rentiers who loved austerity because it preserved the value of
their assets. Bitcoin serves a similarly totemic purpose for today’s
cyber-libertarians, who love not only the statelessness of it as money,
but also its power to subject the institutional banking system to
“disruption” (one of the favorite words of that set). And like gold,
Bitcoin is deflationary. There’s a limit on how many bitcoins can be
produced, and it gets more difficult to produce them over time until
that limit is reached. Of course, new cryptocurrencies could arise. But
the existence of the limit reflects the deflationary sympathies of the
libertarian mind — in a Bitcoin economy, creating money to ease an
economic depression would be impossible. Which is not to say that only
libertarians love Bitcoin.
Despite the careful signals of political distance, there’s nothing
off-track on the substance. In the subsequent paragraphs Henwood excavates
a little deeper, while preserving the same balanced openness to
information. He even — momentarily — passes the ultimate Rightist
clue-test by collapsing epistemology down into the market: “Bitcoin is not
without friends on Wall Street. Gil Luria of Wedbush Securities is
following it; he describes the recent volatility as ‘extended price
discovery,’ which is a way of saying that no one knows what it is, what it
will be or what it’s worth. His firm is selling his Bitcoin research for
payment in bitcoins.”
His unexpected discovery, however, is a Left Bitcoin constituency, drawn
to it by the same priorities that can make ‘libertarianism’ so
ideologically-slippery as a category, most obviously: the potential for
“evasion of state surveillance and policing — which, in the post-Snowden
era, is nothing to sneeze at.” While rummaging for story-snippets at a New
York Bitcoin ‘party’, he is delighted to run into ‘Mistress Magpie’:
A Marxist-feminist professional dominatrix who practices in Britain …
[and] an enthusiastic Bitcoin proponent. She explains her enthusiasm as
beginning with her deep techno-geekiness, and adds that Bitcoin is also
practical for someone in her line of work — anonymity is important,
whether operating in real life or online. Unlike libertarians, who see
cryptocurrencies as a possible gateway to a new society, the socialist
in Mistress Magpie sees them as a way to operate furtively under
capitalism, in a way that might not be needed in a more open socialist
society.
While it’s superficially tempting to make fun of such socialism with
anarcho-capitalist characteristics, it sparkles in comparison to the
dismal defense of state fiat money authority with which Henwood —
dutifully — concludes the article.
May 9, 2014Techno-Leviathan
Writing in E-International Relations, Brett Scott
raises
Left critique of the blockchain revolution to a stimulating level of
theoretical sophistication. His central argument is important: Blockchain
cryptosystems are the technological realization of the “dystopian,
conservative” impulse — first crystallized by Thomas Hobbes — to establish
a politically-immunized sovereignty. This social model, previously
subverted by the fallible humanity of leaders, is finally becoming
attainable as algorithmic government, Scott’s
Techno-Leviathan.
Conservative libertarians hold tight to the belief that, if only hard
property rights and clear contracting rules are put in place, optimal
systems spontaneously emerge. They are not actually that far from Hobbes
in this regard, but their irritation with Hobbes’ vision is that it
relies on politicians who, being actual people, do not act like a
detached contractual Sovereign should, but rather attempt to meddle,
make things better, or steal. Don’t decentralised blockchains offer the
ultimate prospect of protected property rights with clear rules, but
without the political interference?
Scott navigates the Ideological Turing
Test
well enough to become a landmark reference in future discussions. His
opponents will no doubt in many cases concede (as this blog does) that the
‘dystopia’ he describes, while portrayed in ominous and mournful tones,
captures the attachments — and dis-attachments — of zealous blockchain
promoters remarkably well.
Scott clearly thinks political trust is a social good that can be re-built
or recovered (perhaps by restarting
democracy). Even if this is so,
the time remaining for the salvage operation is running out fast.
June 3, 2014Interesting Times
Blockchain schizophrenia is reaching
criticality:
So we find ourselves in the Bitcoin “missile crisis,” and uncomfortable ironies abound. The decentralized currency is
beset by centralizing pressures if it changes or if it doesn’t. The
apolitical currency is being rent by a deeply political rift between
camps, each of which purports to be the trusted authority over the
trustless, anti-authoritarian currency.
No one ever said anarchistic collective decision-making was going to be
easy.
(Via.)
July 24, 2015Anti-Cap
This
tweet storm is pure evil (but fortunately we’re fairly tolerant of such
things at this blog).
The point it raises is going to fuel an important argument, down the road.
Better to explore it via an appropriately constructed altcoin, and in the
market, though, than to wreck Bitcoin in the course of the dialectic. Hard
money philosophy is baked into the Bitcoin protocol. If that doesn’t seem
like a good idea, the solution is to try something else.
August 28, 2015Crypto-Comedy
Bitcoin had a
good
2015, at least according to investor estimations. Already, half-way
through January, the all-consuming chaos of 2016 has
rolled
over it.
The Bitcoin block-size spat that rumbled inconclusively throughout the
previous year has escalated into a dramatic public row, with core
developer Mike Hearn’s
noisy
exit. His text is an instant classic for the historical record, regardless
of how persuasive its argument is found. The
discussion
at Reddit provides some sense of the controversy.
Hearn is writing Bitcoin off as a “failed experiment” — which seems
histrionic, despite the many points of interest he raises. The deep
tension between its security principles and its (near-term) growth
prospects is a matter of evident seriousness. Taking the monkey business
out of money innovation won’t be as easy as some of the crypto-currency’s
more optimistic proponents had anticipated. Something of extreme
historical radicality is occurring, and it’s going to be messy.
With much of the world going under in 2016, there’s likely to be a
scramble for the escape capsule — and that seems to be on fire.
ADDED: Bitcoin
obituaries through the ages.
January 15, 2016Crypto-Power
This is a joke, but it’s also onto something serious:
In my eternally on-the-way Bitcoin book, the point is raised like this:
While the governmental response to Bitcoin is doubtless guided by a
strategy (or in fact multiple strategies) of capture, this does not
reduce to an agenda of public regulation, still less suppression, but
also includes cooptation in accordance with deep state functions, as
well as the private interests of state agents. Insofar as every real
state includes a ‘deep’ or sub-public aspect, it will inevitably relate
ambiguously to the emergence of elusive social capabilities, although
this ambiguity will be only minimally reflected in its public relations.
The empowering of private agents to evade state scrutiny and regulation
represents a manifest erosion of government or ‘public’ authority, and
is liable to be denounced on those grounds (if not transparently in
those terms). Yet the crypto-secure transaction systems responsible for
such governance complications are also opportunities for covert action,
and are therefore to be counted as virtual assets. The novel functions
introduced by Bitcoin tend to the exacerbation – or sophistication – of
agency problems.
The politics of Bitcoin can be expected, eventually, to catalyze a
multitude of obscure metamorphoses in the nature of the state. If the
distinct but overlapping occult fields of clandestine security functions
and resilient sub-public interests are bundled into a provisional
concept of the dark state, it can be quite confidently predicted that
the balance of attraction and repulsion between such elements and
crypto-currency will be highly asymmetric with respect to public
communication. As a corollary, it is realistic to assume that the openly
stated position of public authorities in regards to crypto-channels of
all kinds, very much including Bitcoin, will be systematically
misleading, in a negative direction. Bitcoin tends to empower the
invisible, and to disempower the visible.
An event on the cryptic plane is not to be confused with its public
presentation. Even if the NSA did not create Bitcoin (and — like Clark — I
seriously doubt that it did), it’s unlikely that it would be distraught
about the discreet rumor that it had.
February 18, 2016
CHAPTER FOUR - OTHER BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGIES
Speaking Personally …
Under the compulsion of formality, complex legal-administrative codes have
no option but to make space for the future.
FinCEN’s crucial (and still incompletely digested) guidance
note
on virtual currencies, issued March 18, 2013, clarifies in a footnote
(#2):
FinCEN’s regulations define “person” as “an individual, a corporation,
a partnership, a trust or estate, a joint stock company, an association,
a syndicate, joint venture, or other unincorporated organization or
group, an Indian Tribe (as that term is defined in the Indian Gaming
Regulatory Act), and all entities cognizable as legal
personalities.”
There’s plenty of room already for almost anything to slither in. (Follow
the
DAO.)
December 19, 2014DAO
XS has received a firm (but fair)
scolding
for not linking to
this
development in yesterday’s Chaos Patch (or elsewhere).
Here’s the website and a
nested
blogpost
(containing a deeper link to the whitepaper (which is good)). The
(minimalistic)
manifesto is an
ideological mish-mash which has been worked-over by PR imperatives and
demands cold scrutiny to extract its real content.
From the whitepaper:
A word of caution, at the outset: the legal status of DAOs remains the
subject of active and vigorous debate and discussion. Not everyone
shares the same definition. Some have said that they are autonomous code
and can operate independently of legal systems; others have said that
they must be owned or operate by humans or human created entities. There
will be many uses cases, and the DAO code will develop over time.
Ultimately, how a DAO functions and its legal status will depend on many
factors, including how DAO code is used, where it is used, and who uses
it. This paper does not speculate about the legal status of DAOs
worldwide.
The XS prediction is itself predictable:
This only goes in one direction (and eventually its going to be
vast).
ADDED: When the
marketing aesthetics go in this direction, we’re done.
ADDED: Andrea Castillo comments.
May 23, 2016DAO in the dust
I, for one, welcome our new species of robber baron
overlords
(non-ironically):
I have carefully examined the code of The DAO and decided to
participate after finding the feature where splitting is rewarded with
additional ether. I have made use of this feature and have rightfully
claimed 3,641,694 ether, and would like to thank the DAO for this
reward. It is my understanding that the DAO code contains this feature
to promote decentralization and encourage the creation of “child
DAOs”.
I am disappointed by those who are characterizing the use of this
intentional feature as “theft”. I am making use of this explicitly coded
feature as per the smart contract terms and my law firm has advised me
that my action is fully compliant with United States criminal and tort
law. For reference please review the terms of the DAO …
(Learning is hard.)
Bloomberg
commentary.
The reddit
FAQ.
June 19, 2016Urbit
There’s a lot going on
here:
Do you ever feel like you’re using the Internet as a modem? […] The
Internet is actually an awesome modem. The online services blow AOL
away. But are we really that far from 1995? […] Can we re-decentralize
the Internet? A lot of great hackers have tried. Maybe we can’t? Maybe
it’s just impossible? […] The Internet isn’t from 1995. It’s from 1975.
In 1995, we learned that a network beats a mainframe. Now, we’ve learned
that a 2015 mainframe beats a 1975 network. […] Does it beat a 2015
network? What is a 2015 network, anyway? […] If the Internet beats a
modem, and a modem on top of the Internet beats the Internet — what if
we made an Internet on top of the Internet? […] These questions seemed
interesting. So we built Urbit.
The Urbit
whitepaper
(with links to (arcane) demos).
The Hacker News
discussion
starts off sophomoric, but gets better.
Best promo slogan I’ve seen yet (from
this, last year): “If Bitcoin is money, Urbit is land.” It’s the algorithmic
propertarian matrix for virtual real-estate.
September 26, 2015Beyond IP Addresses?
The technical competence required to evaluate
this
(MegaNet) initiative far exceeds my capabilities (that’s what you lot are for).
(a) If doable, it’s huge.
(b) It seems to follow the grain of The Process (and
cross-link not only to Bitcoin, but also to Urbit).
According to Kim Dotcom, the key to a safer, more secure and
decentralized Internet will lie within blockchain technology, or a
version of Bitcoin’s original concept. He has spent two years working on
the program, and basically turning the Internet into a encrypted,
decentralized smartphone app. In general terms, here’s how it works: […]
“If you have 100 million smartphones that have the MegaNet app
installed, we’ll have more online storage capacity, bandwidth and
calculating power than the top 10 largest websites in the world
combined,” Dotcom claims. “Over the years with these new devices and
capacity, especially mobile bandwidth capacity, there will be no
limitations. We are going to use very long keys, systems that will not
be reverse engineered or cracked by any supercomputer. […] … Dotcom says
it will use a faster version of
blockchain technology
to exchange data globally. There will be no IP addresses within MegaNet,
like the current Internet IpV4 protocol uses for enhanced user security.
Yet, it will use the current Internet protocol initially as a “dumb
pipe” to get the ball rolling. He and his staff are working on a new
type of encryption that will work regardless of how MegaNet is accessed.
Bandwidth would come from Wi-Fi use and when the phone is idle, so no
charges would come through an IP.
Another
source.
Pirate
credentials.
November 3, 201521 Bitcoin Computer
In case XS hasn’t put out an all-in ‘It’s going to be huge’ announcement
on this yet, it’s past time to do so. (More
at Amazon.)

A critical piece of the near-future Internet just crystallized.
November 28, 2015Micropayments Marketplace
Nelson’s
vision
incremented into actuality by another step
thanks
to 21.co. It’s focused on the core constituency at the moment, situated in
the intersection of coders with 21 Bitcoin Computers, but it looks like a
significant beta version of something much bigger.
Marketplaces and currencies tend to go well together. Paypal famously
got to scale by becoming the currency of choice for eBay buyers and
sellers. The US dollar grew to its current international predominance in
part on the back of the large, integrated US market. And it thus stands
to reason that a digital currency like Bitcoin might be well suited for
a digital marketplace based on Bitcoin. […] But the exact nature of the
products being sold in such a marketplace is important. Unlike a
traditional physical market localized to a nation state, the digital
currency community is dispersed around the world. Moreover, most users
hold relatively small balances, especially relative to their reserves of
fiat currency. Finally, the community has a disproportionate share of
engineers and computer scientists relative to the general world
population. […] Taking these constraints into account, we’ve built what
we think of as the first micropayments marketplace: a
marketplace that allows buyers and sellers to trade in digital goods
using micropayments, initially specifically focused on APIs for
developer use.
(Forward links included at the source.)
Ping21
latches it to the Internet of Things (brief
commentary
at CoinDesk). Plus,
more bitcoin market innovation.
March 16, 2016
CHAPTER FIVE - CHINA, BITCOIN AND WORLD ORDER
Bitcoin on the Silk Road
A series of professional writing obligations have taken me to Xinjiang
three times this year, and the single strongest impression from these
trips has been the centrality of Silk Road heritage. Regardless of
borders, ethnicities, and controversies, the Silk Road is the reason
everyone is there, and the thing that has always come first. Derivatively,
transport infrastructure connects settlements together, but primarily it
is the great ancient thoroughfare that has deposited areas of habitation
along its vast — and harsh — middle stretches, as if provisioning itself
with the archaic equivalent of gas stations and traffic police outposts,
distributed in whatever frequency necessary to hold open the road.
China is not very adept at international PR, and Xinjiang coverage in
world media tends to be critical. This has resulted in a predictable
touchiness, and even though the most cursory historical examination
already shows that Han Chinese have a profound ancient presence in the
area, no opportunity is missed to underscore this point still further.
These efforts range from the genuinely illuminating to the comically
incompetent. One especially interesting species of evidence, falling
somewhere between these extremes — and passing between them at an odd
angle — is coinage. Repeatedly I was told by museum curators and
historical experts, always with the greatest earnestness, that the
abundance of Imperial Chinese currency found in the area was an
unambiguous indicator of demographic integrity and Han settlement.
Certainly, Xinjiang is a numismatist’s paradise, even if these tangible
commercial signs are dragged into stories they cannot confidently tell.
Coins have little affinity with settlement.
‘Portability’ is always counted among the essential features demanded of
money, because its function is to circulate, or travel. Like droplets
swept along by the currents of commerce, the coins of Xinjiang belong to
the road before they belong to the place, eloquent about transactions, but
mute about territories. They tell of flows, and passages, but when the
topic turns to political geography, they fall dumb. What does commercial
traffic care for boundaries and homelands? — Only what it is coerced into
caring about, whether by toll barriers, or by uncontrolled bandits.
China was drawn into its Far West, well over two millennia ago, as the
guardian of the Silk Road. It was legitimated as regional hegemon by its
administrative capability and cultural cohesion. Apparently, in the
present age of ethno-nationalist border squabbling and territorial
irritability, recognizing this indisputable fact is either too much, or
not enough.
Up until recently, Bitcoin was associated with a different
Silk Road
— although arguably not a very different one. As a
partially-anonymized cryptocurrency, fundamentally immunized against
political interference of any kind, it was naturally affiliated with the
anarcho-capitalist markets of the ‘dark web’. The closure of this Internet
Silk Road in early October propelled Bitcoin into a new phase of
existence, as Tech Crunch
explains:
Bitcoin’s recent price surge also comes after a
15% drop last month, following the
FBI seizure
of the underground ‘black market’ marketplace Silk Road — where billions
worth in Bitcoin had been used to purchase various illegal goods and
services since Silk Road was set up. The closure of the service blew a
hole in Bitcoin’s valuation — but clearly only a temporary one. Bitcoin
quickly recovered the lost value, and has since gone on this latest
surge.
The removal of one of the most notorious pipelines linking Bitcoin to
the buying and selling of narcotics and other illegal goods and services
may actually have helped the cryptocurrency — by improving its
reputation and thereby boosting its mainstream appeal.
Bitcoin supports near-anonymous transactions, which encouraged its use
on Silk Road. But the cryptocurrency has many other characteristics that
potentially make it interesting to a much more mainstream user-base —
such as the fact transactions are irreversible, something of potential
interest to online retailers wanting to avoid the hassle of
chargebacks.
With the artificial Silk Road shuttered, Bitcoin was quickly plugged into
the original. Less than two weeks after the FBI operation, China’s
Internet giant
Baidu announced that it
would begin to
accept
Bitcoins. Whilst an obvious threshold event, this decision was also the
confirmation of powerful pre-existing trends, which had raised the level
of Chinese interest in the currency to the second highest in the world
(after only the United States). For Chinese savers, trapped between
negative real return RMB bank accounts and irrationally exuberant real
estate markets, the prospects of Bitcoin as a speculative store of value
can easily seem attractive. (A parallel rise in both private and public
gold
holdings reinforces this impression.)
The most radical interpretation of these developments, however, would
connect them to
intimations
of a “de-Americanized world”. For American Bitcoin users, in particular,
the currency is already embraced as a way to short the US dollar, and to
practically express disgust at the global fiat money regime. Mere days
before the Baidu decision, a
commentary
on Xinhuanet suggested:
What may also be included as a key part of an effective [global
financial] reform is the introduction of a new international reserve
currency that is to be created to replace the dominant U.S. dollar, so
that the international community could permanently stay away from the
spillover of the intensifying domestic political turmoil in the United
States.
That sounds like history in the making.
October 24, 2013Bitcoin’s Eastern Future
Simon Black’s comparison of US (official) and East Asian attitudes to
Bitcoin
speaks
for itself:
Places like Hong Kong and Singapore understand that they have a role to
play as preeminent international financial centers in becoming financial
hubs for digital currencies.
If the US wants to shoot itself in the foot (again) and shut itself out
of the market, so be it. But Asia is embracing its potential role in the
marketplace, complete with all the risks and rewards.
It wasn’t but a few weeks ago that a Hong Kong-based bitcoin exchange
ran off with a few million dollars of customer money. But that hasn’t
cooled demand in the region… nor has it sparked a wave of debilitating
regulations to clamp down on digital currencies.
What this ultimately means is that all the new businesses and
intellectual capital associated with digital currencies will flock to
Asia… just in the same way that all the cutting edge precious metals
firms are now basing themselves in Singapore.
ADDED: “The U.S. government believes that some scary people are using bitcoin.
But here’s another scary prospect: If the government goes overboard with a
hard-line approach on bitcoin and other emerging digital currencies, it
may merely push them overseas, where they will surely flourish outside of
its control.”
November 20, 2013BTC East (again)
Gordon Chang is a writer who finds it hard to maintain his balance on
China topics, but his overview
discussion
of Bitcoin in the Middle Kingdom is not to be missed.
November 26, 2013BTC East (again) II
The world isn’t
cooperating
with those who want to think about one thing at a time:
In a report out today from Goldman Sachs about the future of money, the
bank points out that
80% of bitcoin volume is now exchanged into and out of Chinese
yuan. The second-highest trading currency is the US dollar, followed by
smaller denominations in yen and euros.
The fate of Bitcoin is inextricable from that of the global monetary
order, and coming at it from
that direction is
increasingly unavoidable.
ADDED: Cryptocoins News comments.
March 11, 2015Hegemonic Headaches
… there are no doubt a number. One that stands out for its conceptual
clarity, however, is the
Triffin
Dilemma.
Formulated by Robert Triffin and publicized in testimony to the US
Congress in 1960, it builds upon the simple arithmetical necessity that
any country whose currency is privileged with world reserve status is
compelled to run chronic trade deficits, in order to supply global
monetary liquidity. World economic hegemony is therefore inseparable from
a loss of control over domestic monetary policy — since measures that
might be required to support the value of the currency would commonly be
inconsistent with the responsibility to export money (through a negative
current account balance).
‘Chimerica‘ is the Triffin Dilemma exemplified in convenient binary form. On the
one hand, economic leadership and the ‘exorbitant privilege’ of
seigniorage
(through which mere financial signs are swapped for substantial products
and services), on the other economic policy dysfunction and
de-industrialization, as American business activity is outsourced to China
is exchange for symbolic monetary dominance. In this process, and paradox
of power, the current instantiation of world order is captured in its
essentials. The way modernity presently and concretely works cannot be
made intelligible without reference to Triffin.
The strong implication of the Triffin Dilemma —
perhaps even ‘Triffin Paradox’ — is that global currency hegemony is
ultimately ruinous for the financially sovereign nation. It involves
something akin to an economic analog or variant of Paul Virilio’s
‘endo-colonization’
which
“happens when a political power turns against its own people” progressing
smoothly from predation to auto-cannibalization. The ‘exorbitant
privilege’ of accessing real resources in exchange for mere promissory
paper is maintained only at the cost of an
absolute outsourcing — an international division of labor in
which the master is compelled to specialize in financial signs, submitting
to an accelerating atrophy of productive capability. An international
reserve currency is therefore self-hollowing, in a vicious causal loop
that substitutes pure political prowess — symbolic prestige — for the
industrial advantages which originally promoted it. The culture it imposes
accentuates consumerism, financial politicization, and hysterical
sensitivity to the vicissitudes of signs. In the end, only the magic of
power remains.
The way out of this deteriorating structure has long been envisaged as a
politically-managed international currency, whether the Keynesian
‘bancor’, or the IMF’s SDRs (Special Drawing Rights). The call such a
scheme makes upon coherent international governance has reliably exceeded
diplomatic and political practicality. It is notable, however, that a
certain globalist fantasy is predictably generated by the stresses of
currency hegemony, irrespective of all prior or ulterior ideological
commitments.
If US Dollar hegemony is unsustainable, and globalist remedies are
realistically inaccessible, the world economic order has a catastrophic
horizon. Crucially: with currency hegemony now understood as a trap, no
sane national regime can be expected to advance itself as the
next America. Whatever waits beyond the magic show has to be
something new. It is under these conditions that — ‘coincidentally’ — the
first post-national and radically depoliticized digital crypto-currencies
have begun to appear upon the world stage …
April 16, 2014Petrodollar Provocations
The mere fact
this
conversation is even happening has to be disturbing to some extremely
powerful global interests. BTC volatility appears to be the only major
obstacle to the cryptocurrency’s widespread international adoption at this
point. If it trends downwards, a switch point will be suggested on the
horizon. In the interim, the BTC option sets implicit limits to USD
devaluation — the cost of volatility isn’t infinite.
The article expects China to oppose any move to price oil in BTC in global
markets, based on ambitions for an expanded international use of the RMB.
Given what Chinese monetary authorities
know about the
Triffin
dilemma, this
is an argument that can very easily be over-stretched.
July 2, 2014Sinocoin
Outside in is preparing an open letter to the government of the
PRC, recommending the creation of a Bitcoin clone. The state-level
incentive for such an initiative would be to refashion the global
financial order in preparation for the ending of US Dollar status as the
world reserve currency. It does not seem difficult to present this as a
matter of clear Chinese national interest, with definite spin-off benefits
to the country’s political and economic elites, its ordinary savers, and
supporters of economic freedom worldwide.
Sinocoin (to use its English name), would be released by the PBoC, and
then — like BitCoin — be irretrievably autonomous. The Sinocoin algorithm
would be a perfect Bitcoin clone, assuming (realistically) that the PRC
government would not be inclined to upgrade it with strengthened user
anonymity patches. However, PBoC reserves could be used, in accordance
with a publicly announced policy, to sustain a floor valuation for the
currency in its initial stages. Limited controls on RMB / Sinocoin
exchange might provide a longer range mechanism for the suppression of
Sinocoin volatility.
Sinocoin would be a complementary initiative to Bitcoin, designed to avoid
the disruptive effects that large-scale Chinese forex interventions would
have on the latter currency. Bitcoin / Sinocoin exchange rates would
provide a valuable index of Chinese financial integration into the
emerging (Modernity 2.0) global economy. Parity is to be considered the
ultimate natural equilibrium (with Sinocoin outperforming Bitcoin during
its early decades).
If anybody has suggestions to make about the technical, economic, or
political implications of such a development, they can be discussed here,
and carefully considered prior to drafting the proposal. Unless
specifically requested, contributor information will not be willingly
passed on to either Chinese or US financial authorities or intelligence
services.
June 7, 2013Bitcoin Geopolitics
The completed series on ‘China, Crypto-Currency, and the World Order’ is
up at the WDW Review:
Part-1: Tribute and Tribulations
Part-2: Digital Denominations
Part-3: Clone Wars
It was written is sequence, so the overall structure could have been
tightened (in retrospect). Without external disciples — or at least its
interiorized simulcrum — it would probably have been extended to five
parts, or more.
The first part already contains the most pronounced conclusion. The
emergence of blockchain-based monetary systems intersects with the
geopolitics of world currencies, and will inevitably modulate their deep
historical rhythms. The RMB is less likely to become the central world
reserve currency in the blockchain-epoch, principally because this status
is a poisoned chalice, subtracting effective economic control even as it
cements nominal dominance.
Despite superficial political reservations, and some characteristic
patience (even inscrutability), the China factor is almost certain to
advance the introduction of the decentralized public ledger
commercium, which will organize the next-stage future of the
global economy. None of these claims strike me as seriously controversial.
September 4, 2014
China, Crypto-Currency, and the World Order
Issuing countries of reserve currencies are constantly confronted with
the dilemma between achieving their domestic monetary policy goals and
meeting other countries’ demand for reserve currencies. […] The
Triffin Dilemma, i.e., the issuing countries of reserve currencies
cannot maintain the value of the reserve currencies while providing
liquidity to the world, still exists. —Zhou Xiaochuan
Photo: unknown. All rights reserved.
What the technologies of steam power were to the epoch of British global
dominance, and the twin-track developments of electricity and the
automobile to the subsequent American Age, digital electronics—and, more
specifically, the Internet—are to the “rise of China” and the
refashioned world it epitomizes. It is only to be expected, therefore,
that the intersection of the post-1979 Open-and-Reformed New China with
the post-1990 World Wide Web-enabled Internet should be an object of
particular international fascination, and practical concern.
From the dawn of the modern epoch, geopolitical hegemony has been
associated ever more intensely with techno-economic leadership, which
has in turn been reflected in the international reserve status of a
select national currency. An ever more explicitly formalized world
monetary order has converted compelling but obscure intuitions of
relative national prestige into an unambiguous system of financial
relationships, in which a position of supremacy is clearly established,
with a definite and singular role.
The suspicions fostered by leadership are no less inevitable than
leadership itself. For easily intelligible historical reasons, the
French policy establishment has been an especially vociferous critic of
international reserve status and its “exorbitant privilege”1Coined by Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, during his service as French
minister of finance in the 1960s. See:
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2005-3_archives/000397.html
(accessed 29 April 2014).
of seigniorage—the spontaneous ‘right’ to issue promissory paper in
exchange for real goods and services, without any definite prospect of
redemption. There can be little doubt that such criticism articulates
concerns widely held beyond the Anglophone world, and its substance
deserves serious examination.
Photo: unknown. All rights reserved.
Of the indispensable building blocks constructing the near future, China
and the Internet have special prominence. There are innumerable places
where China meets the Web, beginning with the sprawling,
multidimensional, and explosively growing Chinese Internet itself.
Bitcoin is a recent and still relatively slender thread in the tapestry
of global change, but by tugging at it, some central features of the
emerging world can be pulled into focus.
Among the characteristics that the Chinese yuan and bitcoin share is
that neither is the US dollar. Specifically, both are limited yet
practical alternatives to the dollar, at least at the level of
microeconomic decision-making. When questions are raised about the
durability of the dollar’s international role, it can be predicted with
confidence that one or both of these challengers will be invoked. For
the dollar to die of ice or fire is, today, for it to succumb to
geopolitical substitution (by the Chinese yuan) or techno-financial
obsolescence (by some decentralized, Internet-based crypto-currency).
The international status of the US dollar concentrates two multi-century
trends. Firstly, it represents the ethno-geographical peculiarity of
modernity, which—up to the late twentieth century at least—tended to
slant global power not only toward the West or Occident, but more
specifically toward the Atlantic Anglophone nations, ultimately gathered
under American leadership. Since the decline of the Spanish dollar,
which monetized the treasure of the New World as the first global
currency, international finance has been principally denominated in the
currency of an English-speaking nation. Non-coincidentally, it has thus
been tightly associated with a set of particular cultural themes,
including (Philo-Semitic) Protestant Christianity, the invisible hand,
free trade, and liberal democracy. The institutionalization of world
finance has been intimately connected with the promotion of a
distinct—and for many a distinctly questionable—cultural orientation.
Secondly, the formalization of a global monetary order has been
accompanied by an incremental politicization of money, which is to say,
by the consolidation of monetary policy as a core function of
government. With the establishment of central banking and the
demetallization of currency, intrinsic scarcity is replaced by an
institutional “promise to pay” that converts money from a tangible asset
into a contractual liability. Public confidence in the value of money is
turned into a governmental responsibility. It becomes political, and—in
the context of a world reserve currency—geopolitical.
In combination, these trends are inevitably provocative, since they
concentrate the world’s financial destiny in selected, identifiably
non-representative hands. Behind the studied neutrality of the Bretton
Woods institutions (the IMF and the World Bank) stands the US dollar as
the symbol of American exception and the concrete peculiarity of the
modern world order.
While it is natural—and even inevitable—for political command of the
global reserve currency to be understood as the modern capstone of
geopolitical hegemony, it is not a privilege separable from testing
responsibilities, or from profound ambiguities. These have been clearly
recognized since the 1960s, when Belgian-American economist Robert
Triffin formulated the paradox or dilemma that bears his name: that if
foreign governments are to accumulate reserves in one selected nation’s
currency, that nation must necessarily be a net exporter of money—which
can be achieved only by running a negative balance of trade. A nation
issuing international reserve currency assumes responsibility for global
monetary liquidity. This obliges it to consume more than it produces, in
order for the difference to be made available as world money. While this
requirement is merely seigniorage, seen from the other side, the
constraint it imposes upon domestic economic policy options are so
strict they amount almost to a destiny.
Photo: unknown. All rights reserved.
These constraints are turned into a destructive dilemma by the fact that
the mandatory policy structure required to supply the world with
liquidity tends to destroy confidence in the currency at the same time,
therefore undermining its value. Chronic balance of payments deficits
signal currency weakness, since they would normally be interpreted as a
sign that a currency is over-valued (or in need of devaluation). For the
issuer of a global reserve currency, however, conventional policy
responses to this situation are blocked in both directions, since it can
neither take measures to close the deficit, nor attempt to strengthen
the currency through elevating interest rates. Because for the reserve
currency issuer the trade deficit is a constant, rather than a variable,
a devaluation merely incites competitive currency destruction worldwide.
Strengthening measures, on the other hand, draw in money from abroad
(denominated in the international currency) and thus further expand the
demand for issuance, which can only be satisfied by a widening of the
trade deficit.
In other words, the Triffin Dilemma recognizes that international demand
for a reserve currency is inherently paradoxical. What is sought is the
currency as it would be were it not supplied through chronic trade
imbalances, yet these same imbalances are the only channel through which
it can in fact be supplied.
“Chimerica” perfectly exemplifies the essentials of the situation.
China’s two trillion US dollars of reserves correspond to a cumulative
balance of payments surplus of precisely the same sum, since this is
simply what the reserves are. When perceived appreciatively—which was
far easier in the final decades of the twentieth century than in the
early decades of the twenty-first century—Chimerica has been a
complementary economic arrangement through which America achieved high
levels of consumption coupled with restrained price inflation, while
China realized export-oriented economic development and the break-out
modernization that had eluded it for 150 years. To more jaundiced eyes,
the same arrangement is a trap that has married American
de-industrialization to Chinese environmental devastation, while fueling
unsustainable fiscal incontinence in America and a Chinese investment
bubble. Whichever picture has greater realism, it can probably be safely
concluded that the dissymmetry imposed by an international reserve
currency has far-reaching and ambiguous consequences.
Cynically, it might be argued that the tributary aspect of reserve
currency status is perfectly matched to deep Chinese traditions in
international relations, so that an ascent to yuan-based exorbitant
privilege would make a natural geopolitical goal for the Middle Kingdom,
as it restored its central position in the world. More realistic
however—at least in the near term—is a recognition that loss of domestic
economic policy control is an inevitable, and well-understood,
consequence of global currency hegemony, and it is one the Chinese
government is certain to find unacceptable. Whatever the costs
(primarily environmental) associated with the role of “workshop to the
world” they are immensely outweighed, from the Chinese perspective, by
the advantages. It is on the tributary side of the international reserve
currency ledger, where China has been for over four decades, that all
crucial vectors of development are to be found—technological absorption,
infrastructural deepening, industrialization, urbanization, employment,
and even military capability.
If Chimerica is breaking down, it has far less to do with any kind of
Chinese challenge—even a spontaneous and unintended one—than with a
tragic structure inherent to currency hegemony. As hubris leads to
nemesis, so does exorbitant monetary privilege lead to crisis, and even
ruin. In both the Spanish and British precedents, financial supremacy
became self-defeating, because exporting money (rather than things)
differentially advantaged industrial competitors, locking in secular
social decline. There is no compelling reason to believe that America
has exempted itself from the same ominous pattern.
On 29 March 2009, in the wake of the financial crisis, Zhou Xiaochuan,
governor of the People's Bank of China, delivered an important speech
entitled “Reform the International Monetary System.” He explicitly referred to the Triffin Dilemma as the key to
understanding the world’s economic instability, while suggesting that a
shift beyond US dollar hegemony would ultimately be required to remedy
it. In this respect, his words conformed to a tradition dating back over
half a century, to the Bretton Woods negotiations, when John Maynard
Keynes recommended the introduction of a neutral global monetary
medium—to be called the bancor—making the supply of global liquidity
independent of national currencies.
Historically, international reserve currencies have not arisen by
design. It might be argued, therefore, that the Keynesian bancor was an
unrealistic technocratic fix, blind to the spontaneous momentum that had
already made a non-negotiable fact of the dollarized world, even before
the Bretton Woods proceedings began. This did not prevent the same basic
idea re-emerging in different guises, the most prominent of which has
been the IMF’s SDRs (Special Drawing Rights), regularly proposed as a
neutral international currency in embryo. It was still to SDRs that Zhou
turned when searching out a candidate for a neutral world currency.
Perhaps some technocratic solution to the problem of monetary hegemony
will ultimately be found, but if so it would mark an unprecedented
departure from world financial history. If, as has always been the case
to date, economic tides beyond policy control are to determine such
outcomes, it is understandable that attention should drift toward the
Chinese yuan as an eventual substitute for the US dollar. Yet the
lessons of history are available to policymakers, even when the most
insistent lesson concerns limitations upon their own influence, and in
this case the foremost of these is that the prospect of an international
reserve status yuan presents China with a poisoned chalice. It is very
unlikely to be accepted willingly.
Might some alternative spontaneous evolution in the nature of money take
this critical geopolitical dilemma in a new direction? Such an evolution
appears to be occurring, symbolized by bitcoin, history’s first example
of a decentralized digital crypto-currency. For China, bitcoin—or
something comparable to it—could be the only way to evade an assumption
of global economic privilege whose essence is ruinous hubris.
Like James Frazer’s sacred king, who is crowned in order to be
sacrificed, the inner meaning of monetary hegemony is economic and
social destruction. China quite clearly understands this, and as the
dollar era comes to a close, it is looking for a way out. That is how
the China-bitcoin story really begins.
|
China, Crypto-Currency, and the World Order, Part 2
I have a lot of friends who are programmers. The programmers have
always gone like, “Those [Bitcoin] guys are crazy.”
And then, almost 100 percent of the time, they sit down, read the
paper, read the code—it takes them a couple weeks—and they come out
the other side. And they’re like: “Oh my god, this is it. This is the
big breakthrough. This is the thing we’ve been waiting for. He solved
all the problems. Whoever he is should get the Nobel Prize—he’s a
genius. This is the thing! This is the distributed trust network that
the Internet always needed and never had.”
So, one of the challenges is you take people who aren’t professional
programmers or mathematicians and then you expect them to understand
it from a standing start. And it’s daunting. And so then it gets a
word attached to it, like ‘currency’ or whatever you want to call it,
and then people think that it is something it isn’t. And you have a
sense of this, but it’s a much deeper concept than currency. It’s the
idea of distributed trust.
—Marc Andreessen (in
conversation
with Brian Fung)
Undercover photograph of BTC Guild, the largest Bitcoin Mining Pool,
and one of the oldest remaining Bitcoin pools (credit: Jakub Szypulka
CC-BY)
It was noted in the first
part
of this essay series that the economic order of the world is being
radically reshaped by two roughly coincidental transformations of
stupendous consequence: a secular shift of industrial capability from
the West toward the East, and an Internet-based revolution in the nature
of money. Of these events, the former is already deeply established, and
generally recognized, while the latter is still at an initial stage of
emergence, and thus far less obvious in its implications. Their
intersection remains deeply obscure.
One topic that seems, tantalizingly, to connect these historical threads
is the prospective death—or at least radical demotion—of the US dollar.
The Triffin Dilemma argues that any currency attaining world reserve
status tends, perhaps irresistibly, to destroy itself.1The mechanism, roughly described, is that the chronic trade deficits
required for the international distribution of a reserve currency
undermine the domestic economic fundamentals upon which that same
currency’s credibility initially, and ultimately, depends. This
endogenous mechanism is sharpened by geostrategic rivalry, and further
destabilized by complicating, partially independent factors such as
the vicissitudes of the petrodollar convention. In combination, their
effect has exhibited a clear directionality in recent times, with the
proportion of international foreign reserves held in US dollars
declining from 55 percent to 33 percent since 2000.
America’s relative economic decline looks set to exacerbate the ‘winter’
of this great cycle. From the other side, the dollar is threatened by
the piecemeal emergence of an entirely unprecedented non-state currency
system, disengaged from all the familiar institutions of monetary
management. At the historical horizon of the globalized US dollar, the
Chinese yuan and bitcoin are hazily gathered together.
Abstractly anticipated, this twin-threat integrates into a single event
of compounded significance, but concrete forecasting can easily become
lost in its novel complexities. For roughly half a millennium,
transitions in world economic leadership have been smoothed by cultural
affinity and intimate strategic collaboration, within a commercial
Protestant tradition that has shared a common language, and common
enemies, since the late eighteenth century.2Transition of world economic leadership from the United Provinces to
the United Kingdom was institutionally facilitated by transnational
elite integration, crowned by the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The
later succession of the United States to global economic preeminence
involved a less clearly formalized, but nevertheless unmistakable
degree of regime coordination, built in large part upon the military,
administrative, and intelligence cooperation forged in the crucible of
World War II. Innumerable indicators might be mentioned, including
even the dynastic factor of Winston Churchill’s hybrid Anglo-American
ancestry.
Nothing comparable is conceivable today, as American global supremacy
erodes in a context of intense strategic competition and pronounced
civilizational difference.
Inside one of the warehouses on Iceland are mining rigs by Cointerra,
KnCMiner and recently arrived spondoolies-tech. These rigs stacked
high clearly tell that bitcoin mining is now a professional endeavour
and students mining entire bitcoins in their dorm are soon to be a
thing of the past. Cloudhashing is set to expand its operations.
Source: cryptocoinsnews.com. All rights reserved.
Relative to the passage from the pound sterling to the US dollar,
systematic adoption of the Chinese yuan would require “crossing the
great ocean”—an expedition so daunting it is unlikely, in any
straightforward sense, to take place. Superficially, digital
cryptocurrencies are set at an even more distant remove, alien even to
those commonalities that span the gulf between civilizations. Yet they
are positively advanced by proximity to the world’s looming monetary
precipice, because they represent a solution to the absence of trust.
The word “bitcoin” stands for two very different things (although one
contains the other). In its narrow and exact usage it names a specific
currency, abbreviated as BTC, incarnating a radically innovative
monetary system whose design was fully specified in Satoshi Nakamoto’s
2008 “Bitcoin” paper.3The identity of Satoshi Nakamoto remains a topic of intense
speculation, exceeding the bounds of the present discussion.
The currency became operational in 2009.
The 2008 paper is both a practical invention and a substantial
contribution to the philosophy of money. Its central insight is that
money functions as a rationing system, acquiring value or application to
tradable goods and services through a scarcity function. If
digital money is to realize this function, it has two interconnected
problems to solve. It has to be intrinsically limited, and it has to be
exclusively alienable.
Bitcoin solves the first of these problems by emulating a precious
metal. It is earned through a process of mining that requires
cryptographic work, in order to access bitcoins from a finite ‘reserve’,
released in stages, amounting in total to 21 million BTC. Preserving the
finitude of this bitcoin money stock depends on the solution to the
second—or ‘double-spending’—problem. Considered the principal obstacle
to the creation of digital money, the problem of double-spending arises
automatically in a medium which effects transfers by copying. Unless
money is deducted from the payer as it is credited to the payee,
value-conserving expenditures are impossible, yet this simple
operation—going against the grain of digital information exchange—seemed
to require the introduction of a guarantor, or trusted external party,
which the system itself was unable to integrally provide.
Private mining rig. Source: bitcoinexaminer.org. All rights reserved.
This is Bitcoin’s most unmistakable breakthrough. Every transaction
taking place within the system is entered into a sequential public
ledger, or blockchain, which has to be updated as a whole for any
exchange to be registered. The cryptographic work of the system’s mining
activity now acquires a secondary, automatic function, validating each
blockchain iteration, and defending the ledger from usurpation by
fraudulent agents. The guarantor of each value-preserving ‘cash’
transfer is thus the entire blockchain itself, operating as a
spontaneous or agent-independent trust mechanism. Through this
continuously updated, integrated record of all commercial events, the
blockchain supports a consistent account of Internet-communicable
synthetic scarcity, or self-regulated digital rationing—in other words,
the world’s first fully-decentralized electronic money system.Bitcoin
scarcity is decentralized due to its independence from the promises of
an issuing authority.
In describing this system, one passes very rapidly from the singular to
the generic, in a way that is easily understood by analogy, and worth
dwelling upon momentarily. Had Netscape been adopted as the name for web
browsers in general, certain confusions would almost certainly have
arisen. Most significantly, the question “will Netscape survive?” would
have been fatally ambiguous. As actual history has demonstrated,
Netscape in this counter-factual sense was able both to die, and to
thrive beyond all prior expectation. Many hundreds of millions of people
use a ‘Netscape’ every day, although under other (specific and general)
names, while only a vanishingly small fraction are aware that Netscape
ever existed. It is not clear whether Bitcoin, in its specific sense,
could ever be entirely extinguished, but it could certainly be
marginalized to the edge of irrelevance: driven from the market by
competitive cryptocurrencies through which Bitcoin, in the general
sense, advances towards ubiquity.
In its broadest evocation, Bitcoin symbolizes a gathering Internet
revolution, of a scale and profundity that is difficult to exaggerate.
The technical capability required to run BTC—installed
blockchain-supporting software—has a potential extending far beyond the
currency itself, and only a very small fraction of this has been
explored thus far. This is most dramatically evidenced in the growth of
a sprawling spin-off bitcoin ecology of altcoins, or Bitcoin-like P2P
contract systems, tagged by the -coin suffix. Prominent altcoins include
Darkcoin,
Dogecoin,
Litecoin,
Namecoin,
and Truthcoin, with
many others on the way. At the outer edge of blockchain abstraction lie
applications such as
Ethereum, whose Turing-complete scripting language can support smart contracts,
and even autonomous intelligent agents. At this point of sophistication,
the ultimate potentialities of the system are not merely undetermined,
but undeterminable in principle, and the gateway to a previously
unvisited techno-commercial cosmos is opened.
It is this extreme generality that Eli Dourado celebrates in his
article
“Bitcoin isn’t Money—It’s the Internet of Money,” arguing:
Bitcoin is not just a substitute for money; it can be a form of
generalized, programmable, decentralized
contracting. […] Most
of Bitcoin’s critics are making a category error. They are taking aim at
Bitcoin the currency, when in fact Bitcoin is much more than a currency,
in the same way that the Internet is much more than the
telecommunication services that preceded it. […] Bitcoin is a new
transport layer for finance that allows decentralized,
disruptive,
permissionless 4Dourado cites Vinton Cerf’s 2012 article “Keep the Internet Open,” where the notion of “permissionless innovation” plays a crucial
conceptual role.
development of applications on a separate layer. It has the capability
to do for finance what the Internet did for communication.
Among the blockchain-based facilities Dourado envisages are assurance
contracts, prediction markets, and continuous micropayments, as well as
notary, bonded identity, and reputation rating services. It is easy to
see why ‘getting’ Bitcoin triggers something akin to metaphysical shock.
As a self-sufficient digital depository for legal identity, it
exhibits—virtually—a potential to absorb the cultural infrastructure of
formal transactions without obvious limit. There is perhaps no
conceivable ‘deal’ without blockchain compatibility, and therefore no
definite horizon to its commercial, legal, or even political utility.
Of particular relevance here is the blockchain innovation of artificial
trust often referred to as trustlessness since it
substitutes for trust, and is thus pre-adapted to a world in
which trust is unavailable.[ref]Google the combination “trustless +
bitcoin” for abundant confirmation.[/ref] Under the conditions currently
impending, a global hegemonic transition occurring beyond international
consensus or civilizational continuity, this deep feature of Bitcoin
seems certain to be foregrounded. By apparent remarkable coincidence, a
collapsing order of promises, or credible global authorities, is
accompanied by the emergence of an alternative system of credibility. As
the traditional supports of the world’s institutional architecture are
subjected to accelerating erosion,5Monetary authorities are the most relevant example here, but every
institution dependent upon some measure of public trust is, in
principle, susceptible to implicit competition from blockchain-based
(trustless) alternatives.
the premium upon trustless functionality can only increase. Bitcoin
suggests itself as a replacement for authoritative guarantors, while
opening entirely novel vistas of decentralized institutional creation.
The contextual friction, dysfunction, and disagreement of a world in
hegemonic disarray only reinforce its attraction.
In comparison to the smooth transitions in economic supremacy,
from the United Provinces, to the United Kingdom, to the United States,
the passage beyond the American world order can only be considered
rough. It is this roughness that shapes the socket, for which
Bitcoin—in its most expansive sense—is the plug. The installation of
trustless systems fits into a hole in the world.
How does the rise of trustless Internet technology modify the strategic
landscape of the great powers, and the world’s other principal actors?
To what extent can their responses be anticipated? Only by addressing
these questions can some concreteness be introduced to our understanding
of the path ahead. They therefore provide the topic for the third (and
final) part of this series.
|
China, Crypto-Currency, and the World Order, Part 3
The German school argued that emphasizing consumption would eventually
be self-defeating. It would bias the system away from wealth
creation—and ultimately make it impossible to consume as much. To use
a homely analogy: One effect of getting regular exercise is being able
to eat more food, just as an effect of steadily rising production is
being able to consume more. But if people believe that the reason to
get exercise is to permit themselves to eat more, rather than for
longer term benefits they will behave in a different way. List’s
argument was that developing productive power was in itself a reward.
[…] The German view is more paternalistic [than that of the
Anglo-Americans]. People might not automatically choose the best
society or the best use of their money. The state, therefore, must be
concerned with both the process and the result. Expressing an Asian
variant of the German view, the sociologist Ronald Dore has written
that the Japanese—“like all good Confucianists”—believe that “you
cannot get a decent, moral society, not even an efficient society,
simply out of the mechanisms of the market powered by the motivational
fuel of self-interest.” So, in different words, said Friedrich List.
—James Fallows, “How the World Works,” The Atlantic (December 1993).
Two years ago, stories of fake tungsten-filled gold coins and bars
began to spread. Between the shortage of physical gold and the
increase in smuggling, it appears that gold fraud is back on the rise.
A mainland China businessman discovered that almost a thousand
kilograms of gold bars, worth HK$270 million, that he bought in Ghana
have been swapped for the non-precious metal bars. Source:
zerohedge.com
The perception of the Chinese Internet among international observers and
commentators is dominated by an impression of
control.1The theatrical tradition of Chinese power is an indispensable
reference here. China has been exceptional among the great
civilizations for the emphasis it has placed upon public perception as
the key to administrative authority, with an understanding of rule as
essentially dramatic. In the narrow context that concerns us
here, it is important to note that in the eyes of the Chinese
authorities
being seen to control Internet communications takes
precedence over the subordinate and instrumental social and technical
capabilities involved. This can be contrasted with Internet security
politics in the United States, where invisible data-traffic monitoring
receives clear priority.
At the center of China’s—deliberately conspicuous—system of digital
communications oversight stands the Golden Shield project, far more
popularly known as “the Great Firewall of China.”
No less than the original Great Wall, or even the Imperial Palace, the
Great Firewall is a monument. It is first of all a statement, and only
secondarily a functional apparatus, with capabilities sufficient to give
said statement public credibility. What it overtly means is more
important than what it covertly does. The message is long familiar, and
recognizably Confucian rather than distinctly communist: signaling
social
defiance
is not a tolerable cultural decision.
This seems to be an improbable environment in which to insert blockchain
cryptosystems. Bitcoin unmistakably retains an aura of extreme social
defiance.2In order to arrive at a remotely concrete sense of “defiance” it is
no doubt important to distinguish between those actors (associated
more with the Left) seeking to break into the public sphere in the
name of protest, and those (associated more with the Right) seeking to
break out of the public sphere, to protect private interests from
social or government accountancy. It can scarcely be controversial to
propose that, while concern for the latter is by no means negligible
in today’s China, it is the former that elicits genuine alarm.
The legacy of the libertarian-oriented hacker counterculture remains
clearly legible in its founding documentation and among its first-wave
supporters. Among its most ardent proponents, the vitriolic
presupposition of government illegitimacy is combined with an
approximately unconditional endorsement of anarchistic—or at least
agoristic—practices.3This aspect of Bitcoin has been dramatized by the online black-market
Silk Road run by Dread Pirate Roberts (Ross Ulbricht), recently
described
by Daniel Krawisz as “the greatest agorist of our times.”
In this sense, Bitcoin appears as the impending fulfillment of the “Californian Ideology”—a hyper-capitalist assertion of spontaneous order, or radical
decentralization, essentially antagonistic to all concentrated
authority.
Any balanced estimation of Bitcoin’s prospects in China has to begin
with a realistic correction of this impression. While insight into
Chinese security analysis is never easily attained, it can be
confidently assumed that revolutionary agorism does not figure
prominently on any official list of Internet threats. Even in America,
in comparatively close cultural proximity to the ‘cipherpunks’ of the
West Coast, Bitcoin is undergoing rapid, and far-reaching
domestication.4This trend is personified by Marc Andreessen, whose
promotion
of Bitcoin “mainstreaming” includes an explicit attempt to reframe the
blockchain (distributed public ledger) as a
defense against excessive anonymity, fully compatible with
government regulatory interests. Insofar as arguments of this kind are
found persuasive in Washington DC and New York, they are likely to
find an appreciative reception in Beijing.
In China, where ideological libertarianism is effectively nonexistent,
the possibility of technologically catalyzed anarchist politics has to
seem vanishingly remote.
The concerns of Chinese officials with regards to the Internet are quite
different. They are overwhelmingly oriented to the perceived threat of
mass activism, triggered by social media networks, and exemplified by
the dynamics of the so-called Color Revolutions in the ex-Soviet
republics and subsequently by the Arab Spring.5Irrespective of the
actual
contribution of social media to these events, the seriousness with
which it was taken by the Chinese authorities is beyond serious
question. During the spring of 2011, the word “Jasmine” was targeted
for
suppression
by the Chinese Great Firewall filter, despite its rich cultural
resonances in the country.
It is the capacity of the Internet to amplify a dissident public
‘voice’, rather than to facilitate a private ‘exit’, that determines the
security priorities of the Great Firewall. From this perspective, the
Bitcoin menace is relatively minor, even trivial, in comparison to
Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and similar channels of vocal dissent.
The administrative challenges Bitcoin does pose to the Chinese
authorities are of a technical, rather than existential-ideological,
nature, and only tangentially related to the country’s monumental
apparatus of Internet control. The most politically-charged concern is
capital flight or money laundering, but this is a topic of mind-boggling
complexity, involving everything from high-level corruption on a titanic
scale, through organized crime, to informally tolerated business
activities and the attempts of small private actors to secure savings or
diversify regime risk. Corruption is clearly perceived by the Chinese
Communist Party as an indirect source of political insecurity, and few
doubt that the potential of Bitcoin to facilitate the concealment and
expatriation of illicit funds was a leading motive for the restrictions
imposed so far.6BTC China was founded in June 2011 with
Bobby Lee
as CEO. It had risen to become the world’s largest bitcoin exchange
(by volume) by 18 December 2013, when it temporarily suspended
acceptance of RMB deposits, following a People’s Bank of China
statement on the crypto-currency, released on the 5th of that month.
Chinese Internet giant Baidu, which had been accepting BTC payments
since October 2013,
ceased
accepting the currency following the PBOC statement. Although RMB
depository services were partially resumed at BTC China in January
2014, Baidu has not returned to the currency, stalling the development
of bitcoin within China as a means of payment. Price movements of
bitcoin on international exchanges have reflected the enormous
significance of Chinese events to its perceived value.
In “How the World Works,” James Fallows excavates the neo-mercantilist
political-economic theory of Friedrich List from its oblivion within the
Anglophone world. He argues that the
laissez-faire commercial ideal, considered by English-speaking
nations as an undisputed norm of rational economic order, has a
remarkably limited application beyond these nations. Elsewhere it is
treated as a set of impractical, culturally and situationally specific
principles, to which only the most nominal deference can safely be paid.
The passage of two decades has done nothing to erode the pertinence of
this observation.
List’s “German System,” which was also Alexander Hamilton’s “American
System”—and indeed the ‘system’ of every challenger power seeking
accelerated industrialization under conditions of strategic
disadvantage—was characterized by a series of anomalous features
relative to the free-market hegemonic norm that has been identified with
Anglophone cultures for over two centuries, and maritime Protestant
Atlantic powers for longer still.7Fallows usefully lists the distinctive emphases of the “German
System”: planning over spontaneity; producers over consumers; outcome
over process; national over individual interest; zero-sum over
positive-sum economic relations; and Realpolitik over moralism.
Yet even these core economic powers, prior to their ascent to industrial
dominion, subordinated commercial liberties to nationalistic development
imperatives. Both geographically and historically, the ‘normality’ of
the open market is exposed as rare and precarious. As Fallows remarks in
“How the World Works”:
Every country that has caught up with others has had to do so by
rigging its rules: extracting extra money from its people and steering
the money into industrialists’ hands. […] Today’s Americans and
Britons may not like this new system, which makes their economic life
more challenging and confusing than it would otherwise be. They are
not obliged to try to imitate its structure, which in many ways fits
the social circumstances of East Asia better than those of the modern
United States or Britain. But the English-speaking world should stop
ignoring the existence of this system—and stop pretending that it
doesn’t work.
Where Chinese Internet policy is concerned, “ignoring the existence of
this system” amounts to an interpretative orientation fixated upon
domestic security politics and human rights issues, while overlooking
its neo-mercantilist features. When this bias is corrected, the “Chinese
System” of digital mercantilism can be seen as a classic example of
strategically accelerated industrialization, based upon selective
protections directed at those business sectors perceived as most
essential to the nation’s economic future. Quite evidently, the Internet
occupies center stage in this strategy, which identifies it as the basic
techno-economic platform of the twenty-first-century world. Arguably,
the peculiarities of the Chinese Internet make far more sense in the
context of geo-strategic industrial competition, than in that of
domestic regime insecurity.
The most pronounced features of the “Chinese System” are not
restrictions on free political expression—although these can of course
be found—but rather the emergence of domestic Chinese business analogs
for the major players of the international (i.e., American) Internet
economy. The most obvious digital Sino-clones include Baidu (Google),
Taobao (eBay, Amazon),
Youku (YouTube), Weibo (Twitter), WeChat (Facebook), and Alipay
(Paypal). From this perspective, it begins to seem that much less is
being prevented than replicated.
As previously noted in this series, Bitcoin designates both a specific
digital cryptocurrency (BTC), and a technical innovation in electronic
communications of extreme generality (the blockchain), potentially
enveloping all Internet-based activity. Besides its intrinsic
significance, the currency can be understood as a test implementation of
the blockchain system. Increasingly, as the anticipated techno-economic
consequences of the blockchain breakthrough have loomed ever larger, it
is the second, expansive sense of Bitcoin that has begun to prevail—even
as the currency has entrenched itself among the world’s resilient
monetary realities.
As the extraordinary
implications
of blockchain technology have come into focus,8Although the ultimate scope of Bitcoin escapes ready apprehension, it
is already clear that it is roughly coextensive with the form of the
contract in general, within which monetary systems are comprehended.
Any actually or potentially formal human agreement is blockchain
compatible, and it is through the blockchain that many previously
tacit social arrangements can be expected to attain formalization. The
horizon of the blockchain, therefore, is that of deal-making in
general. Once this is understood, the predictions of those such as
Marc Andreessen—who sees the potential blockchain economy scaling into
the multi-trillion-dollar range within a matter of decades—seem
entirely reasonable. Global commerce, as a whole, is in principle a
subset of blockchain-supported relationships. As this becomes ever
more obvious, the prospect of an economically ambitious society
attempting to opt out of this future will become increasingly
implausible. It is already unimaginable that China could want to do
so.
historical analogies have escalated. While it may once have made sense
to compare Bitcoin to a particular Internet application of great
generality, such as the web browser, or perhaps to the World Wide Web, a
general-purpose platform built upon the Internet, it is increasingly
common
to find blockchain technology compared to the Internet as such. On this
ever more plausible account the blockchain is of equivalent
socioeconomic import to the basic Internet-enabling innovation of
packet switching
communications—a once-in-a-Kondratieff-wave-level infrastructural revolution. If this is the case, it is a
candidate to be the commanding technology of the first half of the
twenty-first century.
How might the “Chinese System” be expected to respond to this emerging
reality? Everything we have seen so far points in one direction:
Clone war. For China to reject the blockchain revolution would
be an abdication from all industrial leadership ambitions in the coming
digital economy. The only Chinese strategic option compatible with the
digital industrialization path so far taken is a Sinification of the
technology—a blockchain with Chinese characteristics, in which
distributed ledger systems are accommodated to the country’s social and
cultural realities. There is no reason to think this will be an easy
thing to achieve, but nothing else could possibly work.
|
BLOCK 4 - SINGLOSPHERE
CHAPTER ONE - PRIMERS
Singlosphere
In accordance with the widely-held belief that digital communication
technologies ‘destroy distance’, James C. Bennett
coined
the term ‘Anglosphere’ to describe the arena of comparatively frictionless
cultural proximity binding spatially-dispersed Anglophone populations. His
contention was that the gathering trends exemplified by the development of
the Internet would continue to promote cultural ties, whilst eroding the
importance of spatial neighborhoods. In the age of the World Wide Web,
cultural solidarity trumps geographical solidarity.
Whilst alternative culture-spheres – expressly including the Sinosphere –
were mentioned in passing, they were not the focus of Bennett’s account.
His attention was directed to English-speaking peoples, scattered
geographically, yet bound together by threads of common understanding that
derived from a shared language, English common law and limited-government
traditions, highly-developed civil societies, individualism, and an
unusual tolerance for disruptive social change. He predicted both that
these commonalities would become increasingly consequential in the years
to come, and that their general tenor would prove highly adaptive as the
rate of social change accelerated worldwide.
Bennett’s concern with large-scale cultural systems can be seen as part of
an intellectual trend, comparable in significant respects to Samuel
Huntington’s influential ‘Clash of Civilizations’ thesis. In a world that
is undergoing tectonic shifts in the distribution of wealth, power, and
hegemony, such preoccupations are understandable. In these circumstances,
it would be surprising if the partisans of Anglospheric and Sinospheric
cultural traditions were not aroused to ardent advocacy of their relative
merits and demerits, and — if Bennett is taken seriously — such
discussions will take place in zones of cultural communion that are, at
least relatively, increasingly introverted. The rapid emergence of a
highly-autonomous ‘Chinese Internet’ in recent years adds weight to such
expectations.
In March, the
Z/Yen Group released
the ninth in its series of Global Financial Centres Index rankings, in
which Shanghai leapt to shared fifth place with Tokyo (on GFCI ratings of
694). London (775), New York (769), Hong Kong (759), and Singapore (722)
led the pack. (The top 75 can be seen
here).
Both Anglosphereans and Sinosphereans can find ready satisfaction in these
ratings. The persistent supremacy of London and New York attests to a
250-year history of world economic dominance, whilst the ascent of
Chinese-ethnicity commercial cities to the remaining top-slots clearly
indicates the shift of economic gravity to the western Pacific region. Yet
the most interesting pattern lies in-between. Neither Hong Kong nor
Singapore belong unambiguously to a Sinosphere (still less to a broad
Anglosphere). Instead, they are characterized by distinctive forms of
Chinese-Anglophone hybridity – an immensely successful cultural synthesis.
It would be difficult to maintain that Shanghai was entirely untouched by
a comparable phenomenon, inherited in that case from the synthetic
mentality of its concession-era International Settlement, and reflected in
its singular Haipai or ‘ocean culture’.
The existence of an identifiable Sino-Anglosphere – or Singlosphere – is
further suggested by the Heritage Foundation’s
2011 Index of Economic Freedom
(rated on a scale of 0-100). On that list, the top two places are taken by
Hong Kong (89.7) and Singapore (87.2), followed by Australia (82.5) and
New Zealand (82.3). The Anglospherean and Sinospherean territorial cores
fare less impressively, with none meeting the Heritage criteria for free
economies — the United States comes ninth (77.8), the United Kingdom 16th
(74.5), and mainland China 135th (52.0). It seems that the Singlosphere
has learnt something about economic freedom that exceeds the
presently-manifested wisdom of both cultural root-stocks – setting a model
for the Sinosphere, and leaving the Anglosphere trailing in its wake.
As the deep secular trend of Chinese ascent and (relative if not absolute)
American decline leads to ever more ominous rumblings and threats of
geostrategic tension, it is especially important to note a quite
different, non-confrontational pattern – based upon cultural merging and
reciprocal liberation. Within the Singlosphere, an emergent, synthetic
ethnicity exhibits a dynamically adaptive, cosmopolitan competence without
peer, as distinct traditions of spontaneous order fuse and reinforce each
other. Adam Smith meets Laozi, and the profound amalgamation of the two
results in an unfolding innovated culture that increasingly dominates
world rankings of economic capability.
A remarkable
study
by Christian Gerlach excavates the Daoist roots of European laissez-faire
(or wu wei) ideas, and anarcho-capitalist maverick Murray Rothbard was
attracted to the same ‘Ancient Chinese Libertarian Tradition’. Ken McCormick calls it
The Tao of Laissez-Faire. (Those disturbed by this identification might be more comfortable with
Silja Graupe’s leftist
critique
of ‘Market Daoism’.)
McCormick concludes his essay:
The Singlosphere sets both East and West on the right track. The more that
Shanghai recalls and learns from it — and the deeper its participation —
the faster its ascent will be.
May 26, 2011Pacific Rim
Well-engineered, formidable, yet also lumbering constructions are directed
into battle against horrific monsters, with the fate of the world at
stake. Guillermo del Toro’s
movie
Pacific Rim is one of these entities, and the ethno-political
review
by ‘white advocacy’ writer Gregory Hood is another.
Within this cascade of monstrous signs, a convulsive re-ordering of the
world from out of the Pacific is a constant reference. With the shocking
scale of a tsunami, and the insidiousness of an obscure intelligence, it
inundates the Old Order, starting from the ocean’s coastal ramparts. “When
alien life entered the earth it was from deep within the Pacific Ocean. …
the Breach.” City after city falls prey to the Kaiju. “This was
not going to stop.”
The response is formulaic, and statically
defensive. Perhaps some kind of massive sea-wall will work? Hood is at his
best in laying out the weary Cathedralist pieties of the Hollywood plot
line:
If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind, filmmakers are
the educators, grooming the mass public to accept certain ideas in
preparation for them to be implemented as policy. The acceptance of
global security forces instead of national armies, the worship of blacks
as natural leaders, and the promotion of an international political
creed of egalitarianism, secular humanism, and intrusive (but
benevolent) government …
Yet the plot-line of his review is no less predictable than that of the
movie, appealing to a irrecoverable (and already mythical) confidence in a
white lineage of ethno-nationalist self-government, functionally-adequate
native traditions, and tested bonds of kin, as if all of these things
remained untried resources to fall back upon, rather than efficient
historical antecedents to the developments now being deplored. It was
under the conditions of white global dominion that socialism was
entrenched, and evangelical moral universalism elevated to its climactic
pitch of ethno-masochistic implosion. Defenselessness before the
Kaiju was not something the Kaiju brought about.
The most telling blindness of Hood’s review lies close to its heart, in
the denunciation of multiculturalism. Rather than striking at Del Toro’s
movie at its point of maximum Cathedralist vulneraility — which is to say,
in its entirely generic, universalist presentation of the multicultural
ideal — Hood repeats this same indiscriminate category without significant
modification, seeking only to criticize what Del Toro promotes. This would
be seriously unserious anywhere. On the Pacific Rim, it is a truly
disastrous disqualification of perception.
The only reality-sensitive response to the problem of multiculturalism is
to ask: Which cultures? Neither Del Toro (the Cathedral), nor
Hood (ethno-traditionalism), seem to have the slightest interest in this
question. Indiscriminate demographic entropy is either to be promoted, or
lamented, but in both cases accepted as the only relevant alternative to a
fantastically-imagined, dying world of distinct peoples. If the paint is
let out of the tubes, it has to be stirred together with maximum
conceptual rapidity into homogeneous brown.
Discussing the film’s central micro-alliance, between its occidental hero
and oriental heroine, Hood writes:
None of this makes any sense of course. The “drift compatible”
connection seems to require a kind of deep bond that almost always
requires family ties. However, in this film, the conflict is driven by
the struggle of the rebellious hero and the non-white female to prove
that two people who have no shared history or kinship can work together,
and in fact be better than everyone else. Where traditional national and
family bonds have failed us, multiculturalism will save the day.
As an ethno-racial descriptor, ‘non-white’ is simply sad. It isn’t even
trying. Concretely, in this case, it ensures that the true nonsense of the
movie eludes attention, which is the displacement of real Pacific Rim
ethno-synthesis by a merely cosmetic substitute.
As Hood emphatically notes, the relationship between (white American)
Raleigh and (Japanese) Mako is not explicitly romantic, but it occupies
the formula-position of a film romance, even when — admirably — it
restricts itself to an intense practical partnership. I just love
Japanese-American ethno-synthesis to bits, but it has almost no relevance
to the real cultural process on the Pacific Rim, which is overwhelmingly
dominated by Anglo-Chinese hybridism.
Japan is one of the world’s few modern ethno-nationalist states, with a
strongly-preserved native culture, tightly-restricted immigration and
citizenship criteria, and low English-language competence. In other words,
it makes a far more tempting target for ‘multiculturalist’ (or
demographic entropy) criticism than America does. But it’s ‘non-white’ so
Hood doesn’t notice.
Even more peculiarly — and despite its Hong Kong setting —
Pacific Rim represents China’s contribution to the multicultural
alliance through three weirdo brothers who get rubbed out at the first
plausible opportunity. Without wanting to be unnecessarily crude, I have
to repeat — Hong fricking Kong. This is the post-1949 capital of
the
Singlosphere,
and therefore the natural location for a centrally accentuated
US-Japanese working relationship? If this isn’t quite “who cares?
They’re all wogs anyway” it’s something remarkably close.
The Pacific Rim, insofar as it matters, is the a Singlosphere cultural
catastrophe, a distinctively non-generic ethno-synthesis that has created
the most advanced and competitive societies on the planet — Hong Kong,
Singapore, and Old Shanghai among them. Del Toro and Hood conspire to
efface this fact, even as both, indirectly, address it.
Insofar as we are told anything, it is that in our most desperate
moments, we have to jettison Tradition. Instead, we must rely on
feelings, on multicultural partnership, on wishes and fantasies and
hopes about what the world might be, rather than what it is.
–– that’s
Hood, not remotely understanding what he’s saying.
September 15, 2013Quote note (#119)
This
seems right:
Razeen Sally, a visiting associate professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School
of Public Policy, wrote this year in Singapore’s Straits Times that: “A
global city is where truly global services cluster. Business — in
finance, the professions, transport and communications — is done in
several languages and currencies, and across several time zones and
jurisdictions. Such creations face a unique set of challenges in the
early 21st century. Today, there appear to be only five global cities.
London and New York are at the top, followed by Hong Kong and Singapore,
Asia’s two service hubs. Dubai, the Middle East hub, is the newest and
smallest kid on the block. Shanghai has global-city aspirations, but it
is held back by China’s economic restrictions — the vestiges of an
ex-command economy — and its Leninist political system. Tokyo remains
too Japan-centric, a far cry from a global city.”
It’s a striking indication of the extent to which the world order remains
structured by the Anglo-Colonial legacy. However one would
like to see the world run, this hub-net is an essential clue to
the way it is run now.
October 17, 2014Mackinder in Beijing
A long, but insightful
look
at the planetary strategic environment puts recent developments in
theoretical context:
After decades of quiet preparation, Beijing has recently begun
revealing its grand strategy for global power, move by careful move. Its
two-step plan is designed to build a transcontinental infrastructure for
the economic integration of the world island from within, while
mobilizing military forces to surgically slice through Washington’s
encircling containment.
The initial step has involved a breathtaking project to put in place an
infrastructure for the continent’s economic integration. By laying down
an elaborate and enormously expensive network of high-speed, high-volume
railroads as well as oil and natural gas pipelines across the vast
breadth of Eurasia, China may realize Mackinder’s vision in a new way.
For the first time in history, the rapid transcontinental movement of
critical cargo — oil, minerals, and manufactured goods — will be
possible on a massive scale, thereby potentially unifying that vast
landmass into a single economic zone stretching 6,500 miles from
Shanghai to Madrid. In this way, the leadership in Beijing hopes to
shift the locus of geopolitical power away from the maritime periphery
and deep into the continent’s heartland.
As a trivial point of perspective, it might be worth noting that this
blog’s ferocious
Atlanteanism
completely overwhelms its Sinophilia in regard to this question. If the
emergence of a diasporic-maritime China, attuned to its Pacific Rim ethnic
offshoots, is to be forestalled by a revival of dreams of dominion on the
world island, the 21st century is about to take a peculiarly unfortunate
turn.
June 10, 2015
CHAPTER TWO - SYNTHETIC CULTURE
Reign of the Tripod
According to
Arvind Subramanian, even conservative projections of comparative growth trends place China
in a global position, by 2030, that is strikingly similar to that of
Britain and of America at their respective moments of economic
predominance, accounting for a share of the world economy roughly 150% the
size of its closest rival. If this were to come to pass, such leadership
would invoke ‘hegemony’ as a matter of sheer quantitative fact – quite
irrespective of explicit intentions. The ‘Chinese model’ would promote
itself, even in the complete absence of political and diplomatic
reinforcement, and the magnetic power of Chinese culture would continue to
strengthen in approximate proportion to its commercial influence. China
would become the object of irresistible attraction – counterbalanced, no
doubt, by resentments – and its example would burn incandescent, even in
the offended eyes of its detractors. So what is this ‘example’?
In exploring this question, one place to begin is the history of economic
hegemony, and in particular that instantiated by the Anglo-American powers
over their two ‘long centuries’ of global supremacy. This is a topic
pursued with exceptional insight by Walter Russell Mead, most remarkably
in his work
God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World.
Mead locates the key to ‘Anglosphere’ hegemony in the ‘Golden Meme’ of the
invisible hand, originating in the religious idea of providence, and
modernized in Newtonian celestial mechanics, Smithian political economy,
and Darwinian evolutionary biology. At its most abstract, this idea is
both an affirmation and a renunciation, with its potency and suppleness
stemming from both. To acknowledge the invisible hand is to foster a
special kind of positive fatalism, trusting in the spontaneous trend of
history, which is embraced as a covenant, and an overt or implicit
election (in the theological sense). Such themes are undisguisedly
religious, and Mead does nothing to obscure their roots in the Abrahamic
tradition, or meta-tradition, which lays out a providential vision of
history as finite, progressive, and inevitable, tending inexorably to
eschatological completion, structured by superhuman law, and (through its
divine predestination) facilitating the function of prophecy.
The deep culture of the Anglosphere is not only generically Abrahamic,
however, it is also specifically pluralistic. The invisible hand takes
center stage because the center is otherwise vacated, or distributed.
Esoteric providence supplants exoteric sovereignty because an inability to
reach agreement is eventually institutionalized – or at least informally
stabilized — in a triangular balance of power.
Cultural hegemony follows from a semi-deliberate fatalization, as
the sovereign center is displaced by a substantially automated social
process, which no social agent is able to master or entirely impede. Each
major faction steps back into its position in the triangle, from which it
can strategically engage the others, but never fully dominate or eradicate
them. The triangle as a whole constitutes a social and historical motor,
without adequate representation at any identifiable point.
This blog has
previously
touched upon the Singlosphere, where aspects of Anglophone and Chinese
culture converge in Manchester Liberal / Daoist acceptance of spontaneous
order, or laissez-faire. Does this convergence extend to triadic
pluralism, and apply to the Sinosphere core of the Chinese mainland?
Mead’s analysis is highly suggestive in both respects.
In the first place, it encourages considerable equanimity in regards to
the prospective global transition, even when attention is focused upon the
political and ideological heartland of contemporary China. It might seem,
superficially, that the passage from a leading world culture dominated by
tacit Christian attitudes to one in which unfamiliar Sino-Marxist ideas
rise to unprecedented international prominence must be characterized by an
immense – even near-absolute – discontinuity. Can such a leap take place
without succumbing to catastrophic culture-shock and unmanageable
friction? When examined from a broader perspective, however, such alarmism
is far less than fully warranted.
For better or for worse, the over-arching cultural continuity of the
coming shift is ensured by the profound kinship tying Marxism into the
broad family of Abrahamic belief systems. Theologically rooted in the
dialectical engagement with Judeo-Christian spirituality, initiated by
Hegel and Feuerbach, the basic framework of Marxist thinking only
trivially perturbs the structure of prophetic, eschatological, redemptive,
and providential history. Its millenarian expectations are no more
terrifying than those of Jewish and Christian apocalypticism before it,
its prophetic certainties no more irrational, its submission to the iron
laws of history no more constraining, and its moral enthusiasm no more
zealous or impractical.
The specter of a totalitarian Marxist resurgence in China is as realistic
as the fear of a theocratic putsch in the United States of America, which
is to say, it has no reality at all. In both cases, maturity, pluralism,
and established traditions protect against the domination of society by
any particular intolerant faction. It is unnecessary to be either
Christian or Marxist to recognize the continuing world-historical momentum
of a broad Abrahamic meta-narrative, or to accept the consistency of such
large-scale social storytelling with the perpetual regeneration of
practical impetus, or to see a settled, spontaneously improvised social
solution – and incarnation of dynamic conservatism – in the enduring
triangular stand-off between Marxist scriptures, Communist Party
institutional traditions, and market radicalism in today’s China. As with
Mead’s Anglospherean pluralism, the reciprocal limitations that each of
these factions imposes on the others will inevitably disappoint many, but
there is no reason for them to horrify anybody.
Insofar as Mead is correct in identifying Anglosphere hegemony with the
reign of the tripod, or the socio-cultural realization of pluralism (as
triangular dynamic stability), the disruptive potential of emerging
Chinese leadership should be considered as massively discounted, because
the tripod is a Chinese native. Every temple in the country is equipped
with a three-footed incense burner, every museum bronze collection is
dominated by three-legged cauldrons, and each of these tripods has
definite, explicitly conceptual cultural meaning. This is not only based
upon the obvious practical and intuitive truth that the simplest model of
stability comes from the tripod, but also from a recognition that
triangular stand-off exemplifies sustainable dynamism in its elementary
form, disintegrating the universe into strategic possibility.
For literary elaboration of this theme, one need only turn to the Romance
of the Three Kingdoms, perhaps the most widely read of China’s four great
classical novels. Its most conspicuous instantiation as popular
entertainment is seen in the game of paper, scissors, stone, which dates
back (at least) to the Chinese Han Dynasty (206 BC – AD 220), when it was
known as shoushiling.
The ultimate expression of triangular dynamic stability, not only in
China, but worldwide, is undoubtedly presented by the
Classic of Change, the Yi Jing, or Zhouyi. It
is upon this work of singular, inhuman genius, in which sheer arithmetic
speaks more purely than it has ever done before or since, that all of
China’s ceremonial bronzes, literary flights, and childhood games
converge.
In the numerical system of the Yi Jing, the tripod finds a source
more basic than the Abrahamic meta-tradition can provide, regardless of
how Trinitarian this latter has become. That is because, in this Chinese
cultural ur-stratum, unity does not figure as an original unity,
subsequently disintegrated into a theological, dialectical, or
sociopolitical triangle but is, on the contrary, derived. As the Confucian
commentary explains: “The number 3 was assigned to heaven, 2 to earth, and
from these came the (other) numbers.”
In the beginning were numbers – primordial dispersion.
The ‘language’ of the tripod finds its most convenient expression in the
trigram, whose three lines constitute an elementary unit. To grasp the
Yi Jing as a complete arithmetical model of the
dynamic triad, however, it is necessary to proceed immediately to
the structure of the hexagram.
Grasped in operation, the Yi Jing is not only a binary
arithmetical system (as Leibniz interpreted it), but a bino-decimal
conjunction. This is demonstrated by the fact that it systematically
rewards the application of decimal digital reduction, and reveals its
dynamic pattern only under these conditions. (This might, quite
reasonably, be considered a highly surprising suggestion, since digital
reduction – as it arose within the history of Western Qabbalism – seems to
have been generated, automatically, from the interference of the decimal
Hindu numerals with older alphabetical number systems, or ‘gematrias’,
that attached cardinal values to specific letters, without use of place
value. It is immediately obvious that this historical account cannot be
translated into a Chinese context, where alphabets have no traditional
root.)
Digital reduction is an extremely simple numerical technique, involving
nothing besides single-digit additions and neglect of decimal magnitude. A
multi-digit number is treated as a string of single digit additions, and
the process is reiterated in the case of a multi-digit result.
Expressing the series of binary powers in decimal notation yields the
familiar sequence 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096,
8192 … When this series is compressed to a string of single digits by
reduction, it proceeds: 1, 2, 4, 8, (1 + 6 =) 7, (3 + 2 =) 5, (6 + 4 =) 1,
(1 + 2 + 8 = 11 = 1 + 1 =) 2, (2 + 5 + 6 = 13 = 1 + 3 =) 4, (5 + 1 + 2 =)
8, (1 + 0 + 2 + 4 =) 7, (2 + 0 + 4 + 8 = 14 = 1 + 4 =) 5, and repeatedly,
through the 6-step cycle 1, 2, 4, 8, 7, 5. This process exposes the
arithmetical necessity of the Yi Jing hexagram, as an archetypal
exhaustion of the phases of time.
To excavate the triadic or tripodic, it is helpful to turn to the
classical (and now integral) Confucian commentary, the ‘Ten Wings’ (Shi Yi), which explore the structure of the trigrams and hexagrams in various
ways. These include an explicit formula for folding the six lines of the
hexagram back into a triad, by coupling the lines: first and fourth;
second and fifth; third and sixth. These dyads have a consistent
arithmetical order, when calculated in accordance with the reduced
bino-decimal values generated above: 1 + 8 = 9; 2 + 7 = 9; 4 + 5 = 9.
“What these six lines show is simply this, the way of the three Powers.”
Summation to nine regularly serves as a confirmation within the
Shi Yi. For instance, in the section translated by Legge as ‘The
Great Appendix’:
144 = 1 + 4 + 4 = 9
216 = 2 + 1 + 6 = 9
360 = 3 + 6 + 0 = 9
11,520 = 1 + 1 + 5 + 2 + 0 = 9
18 = 1 + 8 = 9
There is much more to say on the importance of the number nine in
traditional Chinese culture, and beyond, but this is not the time. For
now, it suffices to note that nine, or ‘Old Yang’, represents the extreme
point of maturity or positive accumulation in the
Yi Jing, and thus incipient transition. It thus echoes the
function of the same numeral within a zero-based decimal place-value
system, strongly reinforcing the impression that the
Yi Jing assumes cultural familiarity with such numeracy, and thus
indicating its extreme antiquity within China.
The six-phase cycle collapses into a triadic dynamic, whose stages are the
dyads 1&8, 2&7, 4&5. It is thus exactly isomorphic with the
paper, scissors, stone circuit, or rather, this latter can be seen as a
simplification of the Yi Jing dynamic tripod, treating each stage
as simple, rather than twinned. Where the bagua, or set of
trigrams, merely enumerates the set of 3-bit variants in static fashion,
the system of hexagrams rigorously constructs a triangular dynamic, which
is presented as a model of time.
If this is the ‘Chinese example’ at its most quintessential, then it is
exactly the Anglosphere example, as determined by Mead, except carried to
a far more exalted level of abstraction, or proto-conceptual purity.
Dynamic pluralism is under no threat from a Chinese future, insofar as
deep-cultural evidence counts for anything. The reign of the tripod has
scarcely begun.
September 23, 2011Numbo Zhongo
What’s
the Chinese obsession with numbers all about?
August 22, 2013Tianming
The Mandate of Heaven (天命) belongs indisputably amongst the most ancient
and conceptually richest political ideas. Dating back to the transition
from the Shang to Zhou dynasties, over three millennia ago, it refounds
the legitimacy of government in a
conditional natural right (in contrast to the unconditional
natural right asserted by the supplanted rulers of the Shang, and by
divine right theorists in the occidental world). Tianming invests
regimes whose performance expresses virtuous capability.
Legitimacy is not, therefore, a formal endowment, but a substantial
discovery, demonstrated through the art of government.
The claim that Tianming amounts to a realistic theory of
political legitimacy requires far more support than this tentative short
post will offer. In particular, it has to be defended against the
objection that Tianming reverts to a tautology, either
empirically or logically (or both). The Mandate of Heaven might be
formulated: For so long as a regime succeeds it will endure. Is
this not, from the perspective of empirical history, an empty
retrospective judgment, or sheer redundancy, and under logical
consideration, a thinly disguised pleonasm?
Tianming could be dismissed on these
grounds if its negation were inconceivable. Then, indeed, it would
communicate no information. Yet this is not at all the case.
Perhaps the most relevant evidence for this is the provocative thesis
found in Alexis de Tocqueville’s
L’ancien régime et la Révolution that the successful promotion of
social development is more threatening to regime stability than the
complete absence of such achievement. This is an argument widely
discussed
in China today, for obvious reasons. If it holds true, the idea of
Tianming — in anything other than its shallowest and most
sophistical sense — is directly contradicted, in theory and fact.
Reciprocally, it has to be acknowledged that the idea of
Tianming poses an implicit challenge to the Tocqueville thesis,
subject to confirmation or disconfirmation by historical events. The
stakes of this (yet inarticulate?) controversy could scarcely be higher.
An intriguing reflexivity enters into the topic at this point, because the
conditions for the confirmation of Tianming are related, through
intricate nonlinearities, to the prospects of the PRC regime. Is
development success rewarded or punished by ‘heaven’ (the nature of
things)? If the latter, dialectical ruin ensues, as the high are brought
low. If the former, economic ascent and political stability will have
demonstrated their compatibility, revolutionary chaos will be precluded,
and the rebalancing of the world order towards the western Pacific will
continue. Under such conditions, there is every reason to expect that
global trends will be incrementally ‘Confucianized’ with international
political thinking increasingly inflected by Chinese characteristics.
Simultaneously vindicated and promoted, the idea of Tianming will
then find a wider receptive audience than it has ever known before.
August 22, 2013Scary Chinese
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
conducts
a tour of Western dreams and nightmares of China. Whilst the span of the
oscillation is remarkable, he finds the bipolar syndrome itself to be
notably stable across time. The upswing — Wasserstrom suggests — is
associated with hopes that ‘they’ are becoming more like ‘us’, but on the
downswing:
… when the Western China Nightmare is dominant, the risk is that
observers and the general public lose sight of how varied the Chinese
populace is and instead grow accustomed to demonised images of China …
filled not with flesh-and-blood Chinese individuals but a horde of
soulless mannequins. […] Stories that dehumanise China’s population tout
court are also periodically published, though only rarely do they do so
as overtly as a 1999 Weekly Standard article which described the Chinese
people as prone to ‘Borg-like’ group-think conformity.
When calmly dissected and investigated, durable stereotypes usually have
something significant to say, about both their subjects and their objects.
Western sinophobia is an especially rich hunting ground for cultural
explorers, and the importance of understanding it is only going to grow.
Urban Future will be bringing sustained attention to this same
topic in the months ahead.
September 30, 2013Sino-Robotics
Somewhere deep in the task-queue here (at UF) is a post, or article,
exploring the resonances between phobic Occidental responses to Orientals
and robots (as promised, unreliably, in
this post). Some
grist
for the mill:
Last week, the giant Chinese internet and gaming company Tencent
published an article on its news portal about the rising price of
consumer goods in China – not exactly earth-shattering news, except that
the article was written by a robot called
Dreamwriter.
[…] Dreamwriter wrote the 1000-word article, using algorithms that
search online sources and data, in just 60 seconds. The article quoted
economists and highlighted trends in a style indistinguishable from a
human financial reporter. […] According to the
South China Morning Post, Dreamwriter’s article was the first robot-written news article in the
Chinese language.
The Morning Post quoted a Chinese journalist who said China’s state-run
media doesn’t give reporters much creative license, which makes them
easily replaceable by robot writers: “You know, many reporters working
for government-run newspapers across the country usually copy and paste
the statements and news press. They are not allowed to express doubt or
really investigate reports against the authorities. So robot reporters
could easily replace a lot of Chinese reporters like this
nationwide.”
September 18, 2015Oppressionless
Zachary Keck is
bemused
by the findings of a recent Global Scan poll that finds broad Chinese
satisfaction with the country’s media and surveillance environment. Among
the findings, 76% of Chinese feel “free of surveillance” compared with
only 54% of Americans. To the extent that oppression can be subjectively
evaluated, Chinese ‘totalitarian communism’ isn’t doing it very well.
There might be some way to mine into this information rigorously, but
that’s beyond the scope of the discussion so far. Keck muses about the
possibility that the Edward Snowden leaks have soured Western opinion,
while “it’s hard to know how much of the views can be attributed to
different expectations Chinese have about freedom when compared to their
counterparts in democratic countries, and how much of their answers are
attributable to general ignorance about the Chinese government’s
surveillance and censorship. I suspect both factors probably play a role
but that the former is likely more important.”
An alternative explanation is that Western
cultures have developed in a way that sanctifies dissent, and finds the
exemplification of freedom in the act or expression of defiance. The
alternative, Chinese assumption, that freedom is mostly about being left
alone, is classically captured by the proverb “The mountains are high, and
the Emperor is far away” (山高皇帝远). Unsurprisingly, this saying is
thought to have originated in entrepreneurial Zhejiang Province (perhaps
the most civilized place in the world).
Why would anybody but an idiot go looking for the emperor simply to poke a
finger in his eye? Don’t do anything like that, and there’s not much
chance of encountering oppression. Some flaky Internet connectivity
doesn’t feel like a “a boot stamping on a human face —
forever.”
It feels like a minor inconvenience. At least, that’s what the poll
evidence suggests.
April 4, 2014Twitter cuts (#10)
Arthur Chu on an old saw:
(Wikipedia
agrees
with Chu.) Given the authenticity of the wisdom, the inauthenticity of the
attribution is especially interesting. Is this a sign of Orientalism as a
creative cultural influence?
August 12, 2014‘Not Religious’
This map has been doing the rounds:
(UF source
here
(via
this))
Explanation at the original site:
Not religious, in this sense, is everyone who is left over when you
have counted adherents. The World Christian Database, on which the data
is based, use the term ‘nonreligionists’ and defines it as ‘ …
encompassing the 2 varieties of unbeliever: (a) agnostics or secularists
or materialists, who are nonreligious but not hostile to religion, and
(b) atheists or anti-religious/anti-religionists opposed or hostile to
religion.’
Territory size shows the proportion of people who are not religious
living there.
[Absolute numbers seem not to be a factor.]
Even after this gloss, ‘not religious’ is a dubious category, which tends
to be defined in terms of Western (Abrahamic-Theistic) norms. (Is Chinese
medicine, for example, in any serious way ‘non-religious’?) Nevertheless,
the distribution is striking. Any conception of China’s rise (and it’s
probable world cultural impact) is going to be missing something important
if it neglects what is really jutting through here.
October 7, 2014Heavenly Signs
The American Interest
discusses
the Chinese crackdown on Church of the Almighty God (also known as Eastern
Lightning) after a recruiting operation turned murderous. The general
background is most probably familiar, but it’s important enough to run
through again:
The strong Chinese reaction against splinter groups — in this case,
five death sentences—sometimes surprises Western observers, but we only
need to look to China’s history to see why such groups give Beijing
officials the willies. In the 19th-century, the catastrophic Taiping
Rebellion involved a group not wholly unlike the Church of the Almighty
God. In that rebellion a millenarian sect lead by Hong Xiuquan claiming
to be the younger brother of Jesus, rose up against the Qing dynasty. At
least twenty million people died in the ensuing conflict.
There’s another reason that the rise of an apocalyptic cult would be of
such concern. China’s long history of rising and falling dynasties has
given rise to a school of historical analysis that looks for patterns in
Chinese history. This approach, shared by many ordinary people and many
distinguished Chinese intellectuals down through the ages, seeks to
identify recurring features of the decline and fall phase of a dynasty’s
cycle. The rise of apocalyptic religious cults is one of the classic
signs of dynastic decadence, as is the rise of a pervasive culture of
corruption among officials and the spread of local unrest.
Since the 18th century, the divorce of theological innovation from social
revolution in Occidental public consciousness has pushed the religious
question — originally identical with
tolerance
— into ever deeper eclipse. Until very recently, within the West, any
attribution of genuine political consequence to such matters had seemed no
more than eccentric anachronism, although this situation is quite rapidly
changing. Elsewhere in the world, religious issues retained far greater
socio-political pertinence, largely because the common millenarian
root
of enthusiasm and rebellion had not been effaced.
It is possible that the Chinese approach to
dissident
religion
remains ‘strange’ to many in the West. There can surely be little doubt,
however, that whatever convergence takes place will tend to a traditional
Chinese understanding far more than a contemporary
Western
one. The gravity of the
stakes
ensures it.
October 14, 2014Gloom-Core
It isn’t necessary to assume more than a sliver of
positive
feedback for confidence to make a significant difference. Once the future
looks dim enough, it’s irresistibly rational to cannibalize what’s left of
it, and then the term ‘death spiral’ begins to acquire real force. Of
course, there are a great many other dynamic tangles at work, and popular
sentiment is likely far more of an indicator than a driver. Still:
Ideas arising in a social environment quagmired in radical pessimism (or
the opposite) probably require some careful discounting to correct for
skew.
(Via
Zero Hedge)
October 28, 2014白左
“Baizuo” — the greatest thing in 2017 so far.
Makes me think the world might pull through okay.
It’s all (amazingly) good, but this is probably the kernel:
The question has received more than 400 answers from Zhihu users, which
include some of the most representative perceptions of the ‘white left’.
Although the emphasis varies, baizuo is used generally
to describe those who “only care about topics such as immigration,
minorities, LGBT and the environment” and “have no sense of real
problems in the real world”; they are hypocritical humanitarians who
advocate for peace and equality only to “satisfy their own feeling of
moral superiority”; they are “obsessed with political correctness” to
the extent that they “tolerate backwards Islamic values for the sake of
multiculturalism”; they believe in the welfare state that “benefits only
the idle and the free riders”; they are the “ignorant and arrogant
westerners” who “pity the rest of the world and think they are
saviours”.
ADDED: Baizuo at
Weimerica, and Spandrell’s
place.
May 14, 2017
CHAPTER THREE - ECONOMY AND POLICY
Chimerica
“For nearly 30 years we have had two Global Strategies working in a
symbiotic fashion that has created a virtuous economic growth spiral.
Unfortunately, the economic underpinnings were flawed and as a
consequence, the virtuous cycle has ended. It is now in the process of
reversing and becoming a vicious downward economic spiral,”
writes
Gordon T. Long, in a guest post at Zero Hedge. “One of the strategies is
the Asian Mercantile Strategy. The other is the US Dollar Reserve Currency
Strategy.”
The system that Long sees unraveling has been
dubbed
‘Chimerica’ by Niall Ferguson and Moritz Schularick, in reference to the
mythical hybrid beast of antiquity. Chimerica emerged through the dynamic
coupling of the US and Chinese economies, dominating the wave of
globalization in the post-command economy world. It has served as a
powerful engine of development, spreading prosperity beyond the narrow
enclave of the (Euro-American) ‘First World’ and facilitating the global
roll-out of digital network technologies, from personal computing and
mobile telephony to the Internet. In recent years, however, its
unsustainable features have become prominently visible.
Stripped to its fundamentals, Chimerica amounted to something akin to an
informal geopolitical ‘deal’ that simultaneously promoted the
international status of the US Dollar and domestic Chinese
industrialization. The principal financial mechanism was the recycling of
Chinese trade surpluses into US Treasury Bonds, in a process that
accentuated Chinese competitiveness (by restraining the rise of the Yuan)
and suppressed US inflation (preserving the credibility of the USD). This
enabled Chinese industrial expansion to proceed at a far greater speed
than its domestic market could have supported, whilst providing US
governments with the latitude to run a chronically loose monetary policy
immunized against the prospect of currency collapse. The Chinese
manufacturing and US banking sectors were the most obvious beneficiaries.
Both prospered conspicuously.
As Niall Ferguson
wrote
in November 2008, in the early days of the world financial crisis:
Having reached a state of crisis, Chimerica seems certain to unwind. This
might occur either through a measured rebalancing that increases Chinese
domestic consumption whilst reducing US deficit spending, or as a messy
disintegration — involving sudden demand contraction, currency wars, and
escalating mutual recrimination. Whatever the eventual outcome, a
refashioned world order is an inevitable – which is to say, definitional –
result.
Whilst Ferguson hedges his
bets, Gordon Long spells out a specific and ominous forecast, in which the
virtuous cycle of Chimerican globalization reverses into a vicious ‘death
spiral’. As ‘debt saturation’ closes down the option of policy continuity, the actions of the US
Federal Reserve become manifestly ineffective, self-contradictory, and
ultimately paralyzed. The long-postponed process of currency destruction
then begins in earnest. Long offers a useful checklist of milestones on
the road to ruin (proceeding from financial, through economic, to
political calamity):
1. A deteriorating US dollar
2. Rising US interest rates
3. Sustained and chronic US unemployment
4. Asian inflation, especially in food where 60% of Asian disposable
income is spent
5. Pressures on Asian currency pegs
6. Collapsing values of US Reserve holdings
By the end of this process, the world will have been violently catapulted
out of a financial architecture dating back 70 years, and a dominant
monetary philosophy that has prevailed over the course of centuries.
“The eventuality of a fiat currency crisis is ordained and has been since
the early warnings in 2007 of the Financial Crisis,” Long insists. “The
roadmap has been clear to all that actually wanted to look.”
June 1, 2011Handling China
Handle’s
epic
walk-through of Edward Luttwak on the rise of China is simply magnificent.
If the Chinese foreign policy establishment doesn’t put it on a study
list, the world is a more dangerous place than it needs to be. It says
impressive things about Luttwak that his work is able to prompt commentary
of such astounding quality. (Yes, it’s long, but you have to read it.)
As a Sinophile, and even (far more reservedly) a sympathizer with the
post-Mao PRC regime, it’s disturbing to me how convincing I find this
analysis. China really could blow itself up, along with a big chunk of the
world’s sole truly dynamic region, by mis-playing its excellent foreign
policy hand (in pretty much exactly the way Handle lays out). In
particular, its ability to avoid the disastrous course of Germany’s rise
is the most pressing question of the age, and the signs so far are
not
remotely encouraging. Having dug itself quite unnecessarily into a trap of
increasingly embittered anti-China balancing, 2013 looks very clearly to
have been the worst year since the beginning of Reform and Opening for
Chinese geo-strategic decision making.
Reversing course is hard. The important thing
for the Chinese leadership to understand is that challenges to global
hegemony are almost inevitably catastrophic. There has not been a single
case in modern history where such a transition has succeeded, except
through close strategic alignment with the preceding hegemon. Holland
passed the torch to the UK, which passed it on in turn to the USA. If
China envisages an alternative path for itself — rooted in basic
antagonism — it is shelving the lessons of modernity, and turning to
something else, where ancient cycles lose themselves in the fog-banks of
myth. Such deep historical precedent is far too poorly understood to offer
anything like helpful advice. The atavistic popular feeling it rouses,
however, is certainly strong enough to drive developments over a cliff.
US global hegemony has lost the Mandate of Heaven. The only way it could
trawl it back is through the unforced errors of its enemies — which is to
say, those who have blundered into being positioned as its enemies. On
present trends, these foul-ups are all-too-likely to be made. That would
mean world war, naturally tending to thermonuclear ruin, and the end of
civilization. China would be finished as anything beyond a broken warning
about what non-submission to the democratic
zeitgeist leads to (having done to political sanity what Germany
did to bio-realism). Through this climax of idiocy, the human species
would have melodramatically disqualified itself from any significant
historical agency going forward. Military robotics (aka ‘Skynet’, emerging
from the war) would be the only intelligent prospect left.
December 20, 2013Emergent Properties
Economics is complicated, but at least in certain respects it’s not
that complicated. Chart almost any market-sensitive variable and
what emerges is a wave pattern, varying in amplitude, frequency, and
trend, but clearly conforming to a general pattern, mixing an irregular
rhythm with a random walk.
The irregularity and randomness are predicated by elementary economic
theory, since determinism and regularity are strictly equivalent to bank
notes lying on the street, no sooner glimpsed than seized. Zero-risk
speculative opportunities – of the kind any intelligible pattern presents
– are quickly arbitraged back to noise, the equilibrium state, in which
all significant information is absorbed into price.
The residual rhythm is more unexpected, and attests to an irrational
factor, stimulating intellectual and practical controversy. Regardless of
such disputes, it is possible to be confident about two indefinite points.
Firstly, market rhythms are (almost) never easy to accurately predict, and
thus exploit. Secondly, off-trend deviations will eventually be corrected,
unless – very rarely – the trend itself changes shape. The qualification
of the second point deserves special examination, because unrealistic
expectations concerning trend-line transformations lie at the root of the
most notorious error in practical economic reasoning – the belief
(typically hardening in direct proportion to the inflation of a bubble)
that “this time is different.” This slogan, which encapsulates the
stubborn and disastrously expensive syndrome of
downwards correction denial, should be written on the shirts of
those who will soon be losing them.
Any market wave of sufficient amplitude crests
in a bubble, which ‘pops’ in a crash. Unless
this time is different – and it won’t be – China will inevitably
experience such an event. Speculative commentary on the nature and timing
of this event has increased markedly in volume as the global economic
environment has deteriorated. Yet prediction is especially difficult in
this case. China’s market economy is just a little over three decades old,
with only occasional rough patches interrupting near-continuous, rapid
growth. Disentangling the unsustainable component or rhythmic upswing from
the underlying development path involves unusually hazy estimation, given
the incompleteness of the pattern perceived.
In an article published in
Caixin
and
Marketwatch
(via), Andy Xie makes a substantial contribution to this discussion. He
identifies China’s financial vulnerability with a massive asset bubble in
the property market, but remains sanguine about its ultimate consequences.
He argues persuasively that a very substantial write-down of real estate
values, although inevitably disruptive, would have a tonic effect on the
Chinese economy almost immediately, with fast recovery to follow.
Because China’s market economy does not yet have an identifiable long-term
trend, Xie estimates the scale of the country’s property bubble by
comparing the appreciation of real estate prices to wage growth:
China has experienced rapid increase in land prices in the past decade.
Some of it can be justified by income and productivity growth due to the
country joining the World Trade Organization. Most of the increase is a
bubble phenomenon.
While household income may have tripled in a decade, the average land
price has risen by over thirty times. Whatever income growth is to come
cannot justify the current price of land. Nor can a supply shortage.
China has no shortage of land. High-rise urbanization makes demand for
land quite low relative to the population. The sustainable land value is
probably 70% to 80% below current levels.
The role of the property market in contemporary Chinese social life is a
topic of widespread interest, both inside and outside the country. Because
marriage prospects (for men) are tightly bound to their ability to provide
a home, some very deeply-rooted Darwinian forces are harnessed to the
appreciation of property values, making them an overwhelmingly dominant
factor in economic life. For this reason, among others, a real estate
crash that brought prices down to somewhere between a third and a fifth of
their current level promises to be traumatizing and liberating in equal
measure.
Xie recommends that China push through the pain, as quickly as
realistically possible:
Some argue that the property bubble is essential to China’s economic
prosperity. This is utter nonsense. While the property industry has
become bigger relative to the economy over the past decade, it mostly
consumes resources and doesn’t enhance overall productivity.
It is the main driver for China’s inflation. If it shrinks, the economy
may suffer temporarily. However, overall productivity will rise. The
resulting income growth will bring back more sustainable economic
prosperity.
Also, a bubble bursts sooner or later. Government help merely prolongs
it, as the Chinese government did in 2008. And the longer a bubble
lasts, the more damage it inflicts upon bursting. The economy is
suffering because of what happened in 2008.
The country has sufficient capacity to absorb whatever non-performing
loans may come out of this bubble bursting. It could be 20 trillion to
30 trillion yuan ($3.26 trillion-$4.89 trillion). But the waste in the
bubble economy could have been 5 trillion yuan.
China could overcome the legacy of the bubble in four to five years.
Further, better productivity from post-bubble reforms could add another
2 trillion to 3 trillion yuan per annum. The post-bubble recovery could
happen in three years.
Japan couldn’t get its economy growing after its property bubble burst.
The main reason is that its per capita income was already among the
highest in the world.
China is still a middle-income economy. Improving productivity is not
that difficult. Reaching per capita income of $20,000 by 2030, excluding
inflation, is quite possible, which would make China the largest economy
in the world.
August 2, 2013383
At Project Syndicate, Andrew Sheng and Xiao Geng
provide
a brief commentary on China’s economic policy outlook:
At the Third Plenum of the 18th Central Committee of the Chinese
Communist Party, currently under way in Beijing, President Xi Jinping is
unveiling China’s reform blueprint for the next decade. In advance of
its release, the Development Research Center of the State Council,
China’s official think tank, presented its own reform proposal – the
so-called “383 plan” – which offers a glimpse of the direction that the
reforms will take.
Despite a keen sense of the obstacles ahead, the writers are clearly
impressed:
But the kind of deep and comprehensive reforms that China needs are
always difficult to implement, given that they necessarily affect vested
interests. In order to win public support for reforms, thereby
maximizing the chances of success, the government must offer clear,
accessible explanations of its goals. … The Research Center takes a
holistic approach to the reform process, viewing it as both a systemic
change and a change of mindset. Translating its proposals – which are as
profound as Deng Xiaoping’s 1978 reforms – into simple, straightforward
terms is no easy feat, but one that the 383 plan handles with relative
deftness.
It’s almost impossible not to read the
comparison to the 1978 reforms as hyperbole, especially when it is quickly
conceded that “rapid, sweeping transformation is not realistic in a
country of 1.3 billion people.” Nevertheless, the proposed direction of
change is clearly encouraging, most obviously because it seeks so
unambiguously to deepen the market-oriented policy approach of the Reform
Era, by expanding the sphere of decentralized price-sensitive decision
making (while contracting the scope of political discretion).
“The ‘383’” — they explain:
… is shorthand for the plan’s content. First, the proposal describes
the relationships between the Chinese economy’s three main actors:
government, business, and the market. Second, it identifies eight key
areas of reform: governance, competition policy, land, finance, public
finance, state assets, innovation, and liberalization of international
trade and finance. Third, it highlights three correlated goals: easing
external pressure for domestic policy changes, building social
inclusiveness through a basic social-security scheme, and reducing
inefficiency, inequality, and corruption through major rural land
reform.
Shanghai’s new Free-Trade Zone also gets a quick but glowing mention.
Given the near-inevitability of serious disruption in the world economy
over the next few years, as well as some overdue bubble-popping in China
(mostly in real estate), even a cautious crawl in the right direction
looks attractive. Among the reasons not to rush anywhere is the degenerate
state of monetary theory worldwide, which has lead to the adoption of
disastrously misconceived
policies
in almost every major economy. Hedging makes a lot of sense right now.
Once the macroeconomic house of cards collapses, there will be space for
sounder ideas to re-emerge. Judging by China’s
accumulation
of (both public and private) precious metal holdings, along with its
flexible approach to new (and ‘hard’) digital
currency, the intellectual germs of a near-future post-fiat monetary regime could
already be in place. That would really be something solid to build upon.
ADDED: “China will deepen its economic reform to ensure that the market will
play a ‘decisive’ role in allocating resources, according to a communique
issued after the third plenary session of the 18th CPC Central Committee
…” (Xinhua)
November 12, 2013Market-Leninism
Confused Westerners, wondering how the Xi-Li leadership’s quasi-Maoist
political initiatives square with its commitment to economic reform, will
find their quandaries resolved by Zachary Keck’s excellent
analysis
in The Diplomat. Regardless of liberal assumptions to the
contrary, enforcing Central Party discipline on China’s regional fiefdoms
is tightly aligned with the reform agenda. (Realism in this regard is
advanced by the acknowledgement that authoritarian liberalization is the
only kind there has ever been, anywhere.)
Xi and the central Party’s authority over local leaders will go a long
way toward determining the scope and extent of the economic reforms
China undertakes in the years ahead. Xi and Li have both made it clear
that they understand the nature of reforms China needs to sustain
growth. Their ability to act on this understanding is a different matter
entirely. Although they will face stiff resistance from many segments of
society, local leaders are notable in that they are involved in nearly
every major area of reform. […] Thus, overcoming local government
resistance will be a crucial part of Xi’s ability to undertake the
necessary economic reforms. Xi and the central leadership seem to
understand this given their year-long effort to consolidate their
control over provincial and other local leaders.
(The entire article is excellent — read
it
all.)
November 13, 2013Quote notes (#91)
Panda-hugger Martin Jacques
on
the global tide:
A month ago, China overtook the US to become the largest economy in the
world by one measure. By 2030 it is projected that the Chinese economy
will be twice as large as America’s and larger than the European Union
and America combined, accounting for one third of global GDP. This is
the world that is coming into being, that we must learn to adapt to and
thrive in. It is a far cry from the comfort zone we are used to, a globe
dominated by the West and Japan: in the Seventies, between them they
were responsible for two thirds of global GDP; by 2030 it will be a mere
one third
During the preponderant part of the modern period, China’s civilizational
competences were oriented to keeping the Pandora’s box of runaway
modernization firmly sealed. Western intervention put an end to that, and
the escape is now almost certainly irreversible. That is why, in broad
outline, Jacques’ prognosis is correct. An accommodation to fate is in
order.
(‘Doom’ — as tagged — means no more than fate, as we have
begun to
explain, or at least to explore.)
June 23, 2014Phase Change
China is reaching the end of its current (post-1979) growth process,
argues
Michael Pettis, and the direction it takes next will be decided in large
part by its approach to the country’s debt over-hang. Dismissing glib talk
about a magical ‘socialization’ of the debt-burden, Pettis insists that the problem of assigning losses is irreducible, and
the only serious question is where these costs will be concentrated.
Irrespective of the specific policy mechanisms selected, there is
essentially a three-way-option: someone has to pay, and it will either be
the country’s households, its small-and-medium enterprises (SMEs), or its
large state-owned enterprises (SOEs).
Of course if the losses are assigned to the household sector, China
cannot rebalance and it will be more than ever dependent on investment
to drive growth. This is why I reject absolutely the argument that
because China resolved the last banking crisis “painlessly”, it can do
so again.
[… ] Beijing can also assign the losses to SMEs. In effect this is what
it started to do in 2010-11 when wages rose sharply (SMEs tend to be
labor intensive). It is widely recognized that SMEs are the most
efficient part of the Chinese economy, however, and that assigning the
losses to them will undermine the engine of China’s future productivity
growth.
[…] Finally Beijing can assign the losses to the state sector, by
reforming the houkou [sic] system, land reform, interest rate and
currency reform, financial sector governance reform, privatization, etc.
Most of the Third Plenum reforms are simply ways of assigning the cost
of rebalancing, which includes the recognition of earlier losses, to the
state sector. This is likely however to be politically difficult.
China’s elite generally benefits tremendously from control of state
sector assets, and they are likely to resist strongly any attempt to
assign to them the losses.
According to Pettis’ (non-predictive) analysis, re-igniting Chinese growth
in a new phase will be inseparable from an intra-establishment struggle
over the responsibility of the SOEs to cover the legacy costs of the
country’s economic reformation to date.
Status quo resistance to this compelling developmental logic is
sure to provide critical context for the actions of China’s new Xi-Li
administration, as it consolidated power among unusually challenging
circumstances.
July 15, 2014Twitter cuts (#16)
If street protest in Hong Kong continues on its present course, a lot of
people are going to get hurt, for nothing.
Asking excited students to take a step back, and think, doesn’t have a
great track record of success. The alternative, however, is catastrophic.
The window of opportunity for sanity to prevail is closing fast.
ADDED: No doubt politically incorrect, but
admirably pithy:
September 29, 2014China and the Net
At ChinaFile, following the World Internet Conference, in Wuzhen,
a fascinating
discussion
— by English-speaking foreigners — on what is arguably
the crucial issue of the 21st century:
How will China ‘manage’ its relationship with the Internet? It is
hard to imagine a problem which throws economic and political agendas into
more turbulent conflict with each other, or one that more clearly reveals
the ultimate nonlinear dependencies between the two. The entire
ideological history of the world seems to be lensed through it, just as
the future of the world ‘will be’* decided by how it works out.
Some useful background, conveying the sheer scale and dynamism of the
Chinese Internet, can be found
here. As the ChinaFile commentators make clear, this is a topic
howling with paradox-torsion — and thus one peculiarly liable to unleash
creative surprises.
* Scare quotes included to fend off
Templexity
pedants (this blog’s cute alternative to grammar Nazis).
December 4, 2014Digital Sovereignty
Even skeptics (such as this blog) can note the importance of the
discussion initiated
here:
Soviet Union had cinema, the PRC has the Internet.
I personally think that the international audience still largely
underestimate the importance of what China has achieved policy-wise for
the global landscape of Internet. Concepts like “digital sovereignty” that were proposed by China are now emerging from post-Snowden
discussions in proposals at the highest levels in EU countries. Russia
has already embraced it. Of course, the US industry still need the myth
of a “global village” to push products worldwide. Still, I am curious to
see how it evolves as the ad market will continue to shrink, and as
foreign relationships with the US are likely to get less friendly in the
next years. While EU and other countries (esp in Africa and South
America) start realizing that the US-first model of the Internet is too
much a disadvantage for them, the only other real-world case they can
turn to is China. In many regards, China looks like the future of the
Internet. …
It’s tempting for Westerners (and especially Anglos) to see Chinese
government Internet policy as simply backward. That’s almost
certainly an inadequate framework for making sense of the most explosive
Web-growth in the world.
Among other developments, there’s this:
June 30, 2016Drone Business
Whatever the administrative
obstacles
on the path of the Chinese Internet, the basic infrastructure of the
coming robot-facilitated e-commerce system seems to be coming together
remarkably smoothly. For instance,
this.
(This might be UF’s favorite advertisement of all time.)
More here, and
here.
Telecommercial drone-logistics (and the idiots wanted flying cars).
February 5, 2015Quote note (#327)
Urbit perspective on
the Chinese century:
The closest thing to a general-purpose personal server today is
probably the Chinese service WeChat. If you don’t know much about
WeChat, you should really watch
this NYT video.
Catch-up would be sensible. (Abandoning the bizarre Western prejudice that
the Internet is primarily for political expression would be a start.)
Pointed criticism follows. If Urbit delivers, we could actually see some
geographically-distributed competition, which is otherwise looking
increasingly unlikely. 2017 should tell, apparently.
February 3, 2017Switch
Long-anticipated, and
now
officially recognized:
The Chinese economy just overtook the United States economy to become
the largest in the world. For the first time since Ulysses S. Grant was
president, America is not the leading economic power on the planet.
The International Monetary Fund recently released
the latest numbers
for the world economy. And when you measure national economic output in
“real” terms of goods and services, China will this year produce $17.6
trillion — compared with $17.4 trillion for the U.S.A. […] As recently
as 2000, [the US] produced nearly three times as much as the
Chinese.
To put the numbers slightly differently, China now accounts for 16.5%
of the global economy when measured in real purchasing-power terms,
compared with 16.3% for the U.S. […] This latest economic earthquake
follows the development last year when China surpassed the U.S. for the
first time in terms of global trade. […]
… the moment came sooner than … predicted. China’s recent decision to
bring gross domestic product calculations in line with international
standards has revealed activity that had previously gone uncounted.
I’m expecting more discomfort than triumphalism from a China that is being
pushed into the lime-light faster than it is ready for. The political
advantages of catch-up might not match the economic ones, but they are by
no means inconsiderable.
Some gentle
snark from Glenn
Reynolds: “Well, in recent years both China and the United States have
been fundamentally transformed.”
December 5, 2014Death Valley
Strictly gossip-level, but the bold predictions gets it a mention. It’s
Breitbart, so understatement isn’t going to
feature:
San Francisco, heartland of wacky progressive politics but also home to
some of America’s most innovative technology companies, is in trouble.
Not just trouble, actually, but serious shit. […] And the main reason is
China. The
Wall Street Journal has a good explainer on what’s going on over
there, but the basic thing you need to understand is that
a lot of glossy American stocks are about to take a tumble, especially tech stocks.
The core of the analyis:
Fear and greed run the stock market, which is, of course, exactly as it
should be: they’re the instincts upon which capitalism is built. But
that’s a problem for companies who suffer dramatically when global
events conspire to shunt investors into safer bets. […] Businesses like
Twitter and Facebook have always been grotesquely overvalued, according
to conventional analyses. Technology companies get away with hilarious
valuations mainly thanks to upward pressure; the inflation happens right
at the start when companies raise hundreds of millions of dollars on
multimillion dollar valuations, despite not earning a penny in revenue
and having no immediate plans to do so. […] That’s in outrageous
contradiction to their price-to-earnings ratio, one traditional and very
reliable way of valuing companies. […]
Tech stocks have absurdly high price-to-earnings ratios, and any blip in the market has a much bigger effect on high PE stocks
than low PE stocks. So investors are counting on massive future growth
that will likely never come and betting against global
events that shave billions off the value of frothy investments.
It could get a little rough.
August 25, 2015Huge News (if true)
China is bailing out of US Treasury paper (ZH
reports).
August 27, 2015
CHAPTER FOUR - URBAN DEVELOPMENT
Re-Animator (Part 1)
Different truths are ‘harsh’ to different people. For Chinese, one truth
so harsh that it escaped public recognition at the moment where it most
mattered is that almost nobody, outside the country, cared very much about
the 2010 World Expo. By the time China eagerly but belatedly seized its
chance to take up the torch for this global festival of modern
civilization, Expo’s epoch of radiant significance had passed. Harsher
still: this was the basic fact, and principal conditioning reality of the
event, rippling with ominous implications for the future of modernity and
the international response to China’s re-awakening. Ameliorating it are
more shadowy, contrary truths – first among them that Shanghai had already
discounted a tired world’s Expo indifference, and worked around it, in
order to make the event into an opportunity for something else, and for
itself.
The history of World Expo, from London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, is too
abundantly documented to rehearse here. The basic pattern, however, is not
difficult to outline, since it conforms to a relatively smooth curve from
meteoric rise (1851-1940) into gradual decay (1958 onwards), almost
perfectly tracking the trajectory of modernist optimism, from its ignition
in the promethean forge of industrial revolution through to its expiry in
postmodern / postcolonial cynicism, elite masochism, and apologia.
Importantly, this has remained an essentially Western story, despite the
consistent globalism of its cultural ambitions. The ascent of Western,
globalizing, industrial capitalism, in its European and American waves,
was reflected in World Exhibitions of heart-stopping glory. The crisis and
decline of the West – both relative and absolute — has thrown the event
into marginality, neglect, and self-doubt, clasped in the death-grip of an
embittered and self-mortifying anti-modernism. Most crucially — and
astoundingly — the long-evident dawning of the historical revitalizing and
frenetically modernizing ‘Asian Century’ seems to have had a negligible
impact upon the declinist ‘Grand Narrative’ incarnated in World Expo,
which has plunged ever deeper into twitchily gesticulating, hypersensitive
panic at the supposed social and environmental calamity of modernistic
growth.
The irony of this situation merits explicit emphasis. Precisely when
globalization shifted from questionable aspiration and ideology to
definite historical fact, with the emergence of robust, non-Western
economic development cores, first in Pacific East Asia, then South Asia,
and beyond, the project of cosmopolitan modernization underwent a
seemingly irremediable delegitimation in the court of approved ‘world’
opinion. Apparently, if the West cannot any longer strut across the world
stage with invincible and unchallenged confidence, the only acceptable
alternative option is hair-shirts for all. If this epitome of triumphant
dog-in-the-manger resentment does not exemplify ‘cultural hegemony’ at its
most potent and most toxic, it is hard to imagine what might.
An overwhelming abundance of public evidence attests to the implacable
momentum of Expo degeneration, although most of this data resists tidy
quantification. Since the end of World War II, the original purpose of the
event, which was to promote industrial modernization worldwide through a
comprehensive public exhibition of advanced productive technologies,
structural engineering, manufactures, and commodities, has been
progressively phased-out, to be replaced by an agenda that reflects the
concerns of inter-governmental bureaucracies, national diplomatic
services, and tourism boards. Public relations displays have been
systematically substituted for technological exhibitions, and the number
of significant mechanical and product innovations achieving popular
exposure through Expo – once substantial — has fallen to near-zero. Expo
themes have been steadily stripped of their associations with accumulative
materialism and refashioned into earnest exhortations for moral and social
transformation, as an event that was initially designed to celebrate
modernity has increasingly come to apologize for it. Predictably enough,
this bureaucratically-alchemized transmutation of a festival into lament
has been accompanied by a precipitous collapse of popular interest and
engagement. Audiences that once flooded in to catch a vision of the
future, now avoid an event that musters all the allure of a United Nations
teach-in.
In the West, this is all tediously familiar. Scarcely anyone pays
attention to Expo anymore, or cares much about it. Perhaps most, if jolted
into an opinion on the matter, would vaguely approve of the politically
correct course the event has taken, although not sufficiently, of course,
to ever entertain the prospect of attending one. After all, few Westerners
believe in modernity anymore, world trends distress them, and Expo seems
roughly as relevant to their anxieties as the prospect of Mars
colonization.
In the East, things are more puzzling. Societies undergoing rapid
modernistic development make natural Expo hosts, as demonstrated
consistently throughout the history of the event. There has never been a
great World Expo that has not broadly corresponded to a moment of
exceptional national and urban flourishing. Why, then, has Expo not
undergone a profound Asiatic revitalization, restoring it to former
glories? Why has the western Pacific Rim not captured Expo, re-tooling it
into a promotional vehicle for its own developmental prospects, as America
did in the early 20th century?
Weighed by sheer visitor numbers, the two largest World Expos in history
have been East Asian. Yet the moribund, guilt-wracked pathos of Occidental
decline continues to dominate the event. Japan spent its Expo 1970
attempting to prove that it could out-do even the West in growth-sapping
sanctimoniousness (as its economy would later demonstrate), whilst the
mood in post-Expo 2010 Shanghai seems remarkably devoid of any euphoric
sense of accomplishment, and more akin to that which might be expected
from a group of schoolchildren freshly escaped from an
abnormally-uninspired six-month lecture on ethically-guided behavioral
rectification, delivered by an international Mandarinate. Having just
executed the largest discrete event in human history, the predominant
feelings are dutiful relief and anticlimax, numbed by something like
deliberate amnesia. In any case, there’s Shanghai to get on with, so why
waste time remembering Expo? Doesn’t that just stink up the joint with the
odor of Western death?
(Some suggestions, tentative answers, still more downside, and a lot more
upside, to come.)
August 4, 2011Re-Animator (Part 2)
What was inside the UK national pavilion at Expo 2010? Did anyone get in
there? Maybe they could pass on the inside dope? Because one thing is for
sure, if ‘Anglosphere’ cultural resonances mean anything, expectations can
be pitched down to sub-basement levels. Like the UK, Australia did a good
— even excellent job – with the outside of its pavilion, but its
exhibition was, to be brutally frank, a disgrace. Vacuous, patronizing,
revoltingly sentimental, and despicably cowardly – details would be nice,
of course, but actually there weren’t any — it served to perfectly
illustrate the collapse of Expo, from a festival of dynamic modernization
to a whining indulgence in modernity’s most destructive cultural
pathologies. Where once an exhibition, whether corporate or national,
boldly declared: “This is what we’re doing (isn’t it magnificent?),” now
they exhaust their attenuated energies exploring new, although
consistently unimaginative, ways of saying “sorry.” Narcissistic guilt
flaps pointlessly about the exhibition space like a shoal of stranded
fish, dying on a beach.
Incredibly, the USA pavilion was even worse. Not only was the pavilion
itself a prefabricated strip-mall insult, unworthy of comparison with a
second-tier Wallmart, but the exhibition inside took the obsequious
pandering of the Australians to a whole new level. We wanted a space
shuttle or a predator drone and they gave us Hillary Clinton saying “ni hao” plus some nonsense about planting flower-beds in the ghetto. Anyone who
left this pavilion without deep and abiding detestation for everything
America represented itself as being probably thinks Barney is a pretty
cool guy. This was the society once capable of staging the Chicago Expo of
1893, the New York Expos of 1939-40 and 1964-5, of making incredible
things and exhibiting them, of depicting a compelling vision of the
future, and now … morbid Spenglerian reflections were inescapable.
Wandering amongst these monuments to misdirection, bland meaninglessness,
sugary PR, and piteous ‘please-don’t-hate-me’ concessions to the strident
anti-modernist moralism of the age – which is to say, to sheer, ruinous
decadence — consciousness pixilated out into semi-random dot-pattern,
swirled kaleidoscopically by a storm of frustration that could only be
relieved by barking out at the local Expo authorities, and beyond them at
the city, country, and region that was hosting this event “Could you
please stop being so danged polite!”
The West is obviously spiraling down the drain, and what it needs, above
anything, is some inspiring competition. In particular, and in 2010, it
needed a western Pacific Rim, full-throttle development,
blazing-a-path-to-the-future Expo that – purely by inevitable implication
– maximized the humiliation of the senescent ‘developed’ world and jolted
it with the roughest imaginable type of
tough love from its path of decline. (Of course, the societies
most in need of this shock therapy are too lost in the enthralling
minutiae of their own degeneration to have noticed it, but still …)
Instead, Expo 2010 remained scrupulously courteous, deferential to deeply
decayed Expo traditions, and respectful of the multicultural piety that
even the most wretched examples of systematic social failure have a
dignity of their own. What it lacked was a massive injection of pure,
unselfconscious, ethno-historical arrogance, based on unmoderated
confidence in what was being achieved.
Perhaps this can be stated even more offensively: modernization should
make people feel bad. Its most altruistic or epidemic function is to so
thoroughly deride and humiliate all of those who are failing to modernize
that eventually, after every excuse and projection has been attempted and
exhausted, behavior is changed. Backwardness is made shameful,
and thus corrected. That’s how history works. It began that way among the
jig-saw principalities of Renaissance Europe, it worked that way in Japan
(bringing modernization with the Meiji restoration), in China, long
denigrated for its ‘stagnant Confucianism’, now big mummy of the Dragon
economies, in India, finally lashed psychologically out of its absurd
‘Hindu rate of growth’ by the China model, and everywhere else that has
ever climbed out of complacent sloth onto the developmental fast track.
It’s long overdue to start happening in the West, because what has been
happening there — for the best part of a century now — simply isn’t
working, and this chronic social failure is nowhere near clear, painful,
or embarrassing enough to the populations concerned.
Nothing would be better for the West than to have its nose rubbed in its
own decay, the more abusively and insensitively the better. In order to
accelerate the process, the entire treasure chest of colonial
condescension should be re-opened and rummaged through, searching for
whatever will best aggravate, provoke, and catalyze transformation,
perhaps with strong insinuations of racial and cultural inferiority thrown
in for spice. The lesson of history is that the human species is
comfortable with inertia, and generally more than happy to gradually
degenerate. One of the few things that ever stops people, and turns them
around, is the transparent contempt trickling down from other, more
dynamic societies. If Expo needs a ‘social dimension’, that’s it.
No doubt 2010 is still too recent for alternative or counter-factual
history, for an Expo-punk (or X-punk) genre, searching out everything that
might have been re-animated through the event — but the venture is
irresistible. Call it Asia Unleashed 2010, an utterly impolite
assertion of new socio-geographical realities that expresses, in raw and
overwhelming style, the central truth of the age: the simultaneous
de-westernization and radical re-invigoration of modernity.
Asia Unleashed could have borrowed heavily from the actual Expo
2010, adopting almost everything that was created by the host, in fact,
and much else beside. The China Pavilion, Theme Pavilions, Urban Best
Practices Area, Expo Cultural Center, Expo Center, Expo Boulevard, Expo
Museum, and site landscaping, as well as the Shipping Pavilion, GM/SAIC
Pavilion and exhibition, Telecoms Pavilion, Oil Pavilion, Shanghai
Corporate Pavilion with all its stuff, Coca Cola Pavilion, plenty of the
international pavilion designs, and even a few of the internal exhibitions
… all keepers. What gets laughed out are the schmaltzy public relations
videos, the sorry, sorry, really truly sorry song and dance act,
the weren’t we awful performance, the Kumbaya Pavilion, the
Environmental Hypersensitivity Pavilion, the Victimological Grievance
Pavilion, the Beyond Growth Pavilion, the There Must Be A Gentler Way
Pavilion, any national or corporate pavilion without exhibition objects
(roughly half), almost everything bearing the imprint of tourist boards,
media studies graduates, or diplomatic services, and every usage of solar
panels that isn’t strictly tailored to commercial exploitation on a
massive scale. In addition, any national pavilion based entirely on ethnic
kitsch gets grouped together with others of its kind in an exotic tourism
area, because it’s admitting to a complete absence of creative capability
and needs to be mocked. No robots, no platform: that’s the rule.
Asia Unleashed also needs a lot of things brought in, most of all
machines. Expo is all about machines, even though every Expo over the last
half-century has been pitifully deficient in this regard. It scarcely
needs mentioning that the entire Expo site should be pulsing, crawling,
and twitching with robots of every type and scale, from industrial
goliaths, automated submarines and space vehicles, through charismatic
androids, to intelligent household appliances, Go players, robopets, and
insectiform mechanisms. To push the process along, those countries and
corporations with the laziest robot exhibits can be publicly ridiculed
over the PA system.
Expo is an exhibition, and its historical sickness is perfectly tracked by
the degeneration of this elementary conception into PR. Organizers at all
levels, from the pinnacle of the international Expo bureaucracy (BIE)
downwards, clearly need to be forcefully reminded of the difference. For
instance, video technology is an entirely suitable object for Expo
display, and videos themselves can quite appropriately play a supportive,
informative role. To center an ‘exhibition’ upon videos, however,
especially when they have been put together, using state-of-the-art
advertising techniques, with the entire purpose of selling a national or
corporate brand through image associations and spin, is a complete
abnegation of responsibility and should straightforwardly be banned, or at
least boycotted, derided, and rendered ineffective through inundating
contempt. The only acceptable center of an Expo display is an object,
preferably astonishing, fetched from the outer edge of industrial
capability in order to concretely represent the trajectory of material
progress. Displaying such objects – and thereby respecting audiences
sufficiently to evaluate them for themselves – is the non-negotiable,
basic function of Expo as an institution. If it can no longer accept this
task, it should be terminated (by a giant robot, if possible).
Asia Unleashed is dedicated to the latest and impending phases of
global industrial civilization, which should be more-or-less implicit in
the fact that it is a World Expo, although sadly, it isn’t. There’s plenty
of room for artworks and other singular cultural creations, but the
emphasis is edgily modernistic. Green technology gets in because it’s
technology, and the tourism industry gets in because it’s an industry, but
in both cases the spin-meisters have been reined back hard, and the
preliminary question insistently raised: “What, really, are you exhibiting
here?” The only organizers who get to avoid such suspicious interrogations
are the ones overseeing the erection of some fabulous structure that looks
as if it comes from the set of a science fiction movie, or unloading
partially-animated assemblages of glistening metal from mountainous stacks
of shipping containers, because – clearly – they understand what an Expo
is all about. The cyclopean space elevator anchor station, taking shape in
the Extraterrestrial Resources Exploitation Zone, serves as a model for
the guiding spirit of the festival. The machinery in the 3D printing
pavilion printed the pavilion.
The mining industry employs monster trucks weighing 203 tonnes, with a
capacity to carry 360 tonnes, they cost US$3 million each, their tires are
four-meters in diameter, and driving one is like “driving a house” – why
on earth didn’t Expo 2010 have one? Asia Unleashed most certainly
would. For developed countries with the resources to put on an impressive
show at Expo there needs to be something like a price for admission, and
an awe-inspiring piece of industrial machinery fits the bill exactly. The
Canadian tar sands are being criss-crossed by these monster trucks, and
the Canada national pavilion should have been strongly advised to
bring one over. Instead they brought … (hands up if anyone remembers).
All the imagination that has been squandered over decades in utopian
speculations of the “another world is possible” type has been far more
productively employed at Asia Unleashed, counter-balancing the
tendency of advanced industrial capabilities to flee from the arena of
spectacle. The monumental achievements and consequences of intensely
miniaturized and softened technologies demand exhibition, from silicon
chip fabrication, gene sequencing, and rudimentary nanotechnology, to
cryptosystems, social networks, digital microfinance, and virtual
architecture, even as they slip through their inner inexorable logic into
invisibility. To present these frontiers of industrial capability rapidly,
dramatically, and memorably to a highly-diverse, transient Expo audience
requires the application of creative intelligence on a massive scale. The
growing challenges of this task are worthy of the rising
computer-augmented talents brought to bear upon it.
Asia Unleashed never happened, of course, partly because the
international Expo institutional apparatus is locked into the Occidental
death-slide, but mostly because it would have been impolite. Ultimately,
postmodernist multicultural political correctness – today’s hegemonic
globalist ideology — is an elaborate etiquette, designed to prevent the
‘insensitive’ identification and diagnosis of failure, and to elude,
indefinitely, the blunt statement: “What you’re doing doesn’t work.” No
Expo that remained true to its deep institutional traditions could avoid
such a statement arising, implicitly, through contrast. Hence, Expo has
been condemned to die, by inertial forces too profound for Expo 2010 to
fully arrest, let alone reverse: Better decayed than rude.
From the wreckage of the Expo institution, however, Expo 2010 was able to
extract, polish, and resuscitate a crucial modernist topic: the city as
engine of progress. More on that in Part 3.
August 11, 2011Re-Animator (Part 3)
By far the most interesting element of
World Expo 2010: Shanghai, was Shanghai. Whilst deeply-rooted
regional traditions of courtesy sustained the fiction that this World Fair
was about the world, it really wasn’t. Whatever the diplomatic benefits of
the almost universally convenient internationalist pretense, to China and
Expo’s foreign participants alike, Expo 2010 was about Shanghai, and for
Shanghai. The Expo was global because Shanghai is, it was about China
because Shanghai is China’s gateway to the world, it was about cities in
order to be even more about Shanghai, nobody uninterested in Shanghai paid
it the slightest attention, and Shanghai used it to restructure,
intensify, and promote itself.
Expo as an institution was in decline before 2010, and continues to
decline. Shanghai was rising before 2010, and continues to rise, but now
infrastructurally upgraded, thoroughly renovated, and decorated with the
historical merit-badge of Expo hospitality.
Better City, Better Life, a typically airy and aspirational Expo
theme, is a cold-sober description of the Expo-effect in Shanghai.
Cities are, in certain important respects, generic. There is such a thing
as ‘the city in general’ as the work of Geoffrey West, in particular, has
demonstrated. We know, thanks to West, that cities are negative organisms,
with consistent scaling characteristics that structurally differentiate
them from animals and corporations. As they grow they accelerate and
intensify at a quantifiable and predictable rate, exhibiting increasing
returns to scale (in sharp contrast to animals and businesses, which slow
down in proportion to their size). Organisms and firms die normally and by
necessity, cities only rarely and by accident.
Cities belong to a real genre, but they are also singularities, undergoing
spontaneous individuation. In fact, they are generically singular –
singular without exception – like black holes. It is not only that no city
is like another, no city can be like another, and this is a
feature that all cities share, arguably more than any other.
Beyond such generic singularity, there is an additional level of enhanced
differentiation that emerges from the position cities occupy within larger
systems. These systems are not only internally specialized, but also
hierarchical, dividing core from periphery, and distributing influence
unevenly between them. Ultimately, within the fully global incarnation of
the ‘world system’, cities acquire secondary metropolitan characteristics,
to very different degrees, in accordance with their geographical and
functional proximity to the center of the world. They transcend their
local histories, to become hubs or nodes in a global network that
re-characterizes them as parts of a whole rather than wholes made of
parts, as metropolis-versus-periphery rather than (or on top of)
metropolis-versus-town.
The geographical structure and historical instability of modernity’s
core-periphery architecture has been the focus of the ‘world system
theory’ developed from the Annales School of Fernand Braudel (1902-85) by
Immanuel Wallerstein (1930-) and – most impressively — Giovanni Arrighi
(1937-2009). According to the world system theorists, the revolutions that
matter most are not national regime changes, such as those in France
(1789) and Russia (1917), but rather global re-organizations that mark out
the basic phases of modern history, jolting the world into new
core-periphery structures. Modernity has undergone four of these shifts up
to the present, with each phase lasting for a ‘long century’, introducing
a new core state, or hegemon, with enhanced capabilities, and a new urban
center – successively, Venice, Amsterdam, London, and New York – that
operate as an effective capital of the world.
As the example of New York attests, this status is not primarily
political. Nor does prominence in manufacturing seem to be a relevant
factor (the ‘world capital’ has never been the dominant industrial center
of its respective region or state). Over the course of modern history to
date, the crucial features of the world capital seem to be that it is the
largest urban agglomeration in the leading (‘hegemonic’) region or state;
that it is an established financial center that quite rapidly attains a
position of global pre-eminence in this respect; that it is an open port
city with clear maritime orientation; and that it has an exceptionally
internationalized demographic profile, with a large segment of
internationally-mobile, opportunistic residents. A significant period of
leadership in the creative arts might plausibly be added to this list.
Functionally, the world capital serves as the supreme nerve-center of the
global economy, specialized nationally, and then super-specialized
internationally, as the financial, logistics, and business services hub of
a system whose global integrity is reflected in the city’s privileged
singularity.
The exceptional drama of our age lies in its nature as a time of
transition between phases of modernity, somewhere in the winter of a long
century, when an epoch of hegemony is exhausted. More specifically, the
walls are closing in on the American Age, as commentators of almost every
intellectual and ideological stripe are increasingly aware. Overstretched,
essentially bankrupted, politically paralyzed and disillusioned, America
sinks into self-conscious crisis, its mood dark and clouded. It would be a
mistake to limit attention to America, however, because the crisis is
world-systemic, heralding the end of an international order that arose
among the chaos of the world wars and achieved definition in the post-WWII
United Nations and Bretton Woods institutions (IMF, World Bank, and the
descendent of GATT, now the WTO). It affects not only the role of the US
dollar as international reserve currency, an Atlantic-centered NATO and an
Occidentally-skewed UN apparatus, but also the European Union, the
post-colonial Middle Eastern state-system and (very) much else besides.
Over the next two decades, under the impact of economic forces of extreme
profundity (far exceeding the responsive capacity of existing
institutions), a revolutionary re-ordering of the world can be expected to
unfold. If America succeeds in maintaining its position of leadership
within the global system for a period that significantly exceeds the long
20th century (which began no earlier than 1914, and thus might be expected
to persist for some additional years), it will have broken a pattern that
has remained consistent throughout a half-millennium of history. Whilst
not strictly impossible, perpetuation of the present hegemonic order would
be, quite literally, a stretch.
Another vision of a break from historical precedent, this time
transparently utopian, envisages – rather than the continuation of US
pre-eminence — the obsolescence of the core-periphery global structure in
its entirety, ending hierarchical geography and hegemony in general. Even
If such a vision truly rises to the level of a definite expectation
(rather than a nebulous exercise in wishful thinking), it remains
ungrounded in reliable historical and theoretical foundations. Altruistic
political intentions – were such ever credible – would still be quite
insufficient to overcome the spontaneous, dynamic trend to approximate
world systemic equilibrium, in which a core zone, and its metropolitan
capital, are automatically nominated, by diffuse economic currents
searching for a central clearing house.
Whilst no doubt deeply disappointing to utopian eschatology, and to all
dreams of historical conclusion (or passage to the promised land),
phase-shifts in the world-system are less ominous than they are often
depicted as being. Among Arrighi’s most important insights is the reminder
that whenever an attempted reconstruction of the world order has been
based upon a frontal military and geo-strategic challenge to the hegemon,
it has failed. This is exemplified, above all, by the German and Russian
histories of the 19th and 20th centuries, in which repeated direct
confrontations with the established Anglophone-dominated international
system led only to frustration, regime collapse, and subaltern
re-integration.
Perhaps ironically, a marked subjective aversion to hard power assertion
and the assumption of hegemony can be quite reliably taken as a positive
indicator for the objective emergence of hegemonic status. Holland, Great
Britain, and the United States of America were all, in certain crucial
respects, accidental imperialists, whose successive ascents to world
dominance shared a prioritization of commercial motives, retarded state
involvement, strong ‘isolationist’ and ‘anti-imperialist’ cultural
currents, and a determined avoidance of ‘Clauswitzean’ decisive collision
(especially with the prior hegemon). The British and American ways of war,
in particular, are notable for their common emphasis upon hedging and
triangulation, such as the exploitation of offshore position and maritime
supremacy to avoid premature entanglement in high intensity ‘continental’
conflicts, the usage of financial and logistic capability to manipulate
conflicts at a distance, and the diplomatic inclusion of defeated
adversaries in reconstructed, poly-centric, ‘balanced’ systems of power.
Hegemony was, in each case, peacefully inherited, even when it was
cemented by war (in partnership with the previous hegemon) and
later gave rise to opportunities for increasingly aggressive imperialistic
adventurism.
Given this broadly uncontroversial historical pattern, it is all the more
surprising that the German example is so widely invoked in discussions of
China’s ‘peaceful rise’. In fact, China’s ascent has stuck far closer to
the model of hegemonic hand-overs than to that of confrontational
challenges, as indicated by the prioritization of commercial development,
the highly cooperative (even synergistic or ‘Chimerican’) relationship
with the prevailing hegemon, the gradual accumulation of financial power
by way of spontaneous, systemic re-distribution, and the equally gradual
consolidation of maritime interests, emerging out of the global trading
system, which draw the focus of government strategic policy – perhaps
reluctantly – from domestic concerns out into the high-seas.
Historically, China has been far more a continental than a maritime power,
and this fact provides the single most persuasive objection to the
assumption of an impending Chinese (Long) Century. The emergence of a
continental world system core would be as decisive a departure from
precedent as any yet discussed, and if such a possibility is entertained,
disciplined prediction falters. If inverted, however, this problem becomes
a forecast in itself: the trajectory of China’s rise necessarily implies
its transformation into a maritime power (an insight already tacit in the
controversial 1988 Chinese TV series
River Elegy).
A vague intuition, partially but elusively crystallized by Expo 2010, is
now precipitated by sheer historical pattern-recognition into the form of
an explicit question:
Is Shanghai destined to become the capital of the world?
(Part 4 to come)
August 16, 2011Re-Animator (Part 4)
If the deepest traditions of the World Expo are those cemented into its
origin, it would be incautious to over-hastily dismiss one prominent
feature of its inaugural instance. The Great Exhibition of the Works of
Industry of all Nations, held in London, in 1851, was staged in the
effective capital of the world. In this case, at least, the defining
internationalism of the Expo is difficult to disentangle from the
indisputable historical fact that the entire world was rapidly becoming
London’s business. In a gesture of reciprocity so perfect that it
approached simple identity, London invited the world to itself exactly as
– and because – it was inviting itself to the world.
The Great Exhibition made irresistible sense because it put the future of
the world on display in the only place that could. To see the
concentrated, realistically sifted, programmatically arranged destiny of
the earth, it was necessary to visit London, since it was in London that
everything came together.
Over its first two decades (and four episodes), World Expo alternated
between London (1851, 1862) and Paris (1855, 1867), as if oscillating
between the relative historical potencies of maritime and continental
power. Yet this apparent hesitation actually compresses and conceals two
distinct, complementary, and unambiguous trends. Britain was ascending
inexorably to global hegemony, whilst disengaging from World Expo, whilst
France was managing equally inexorable comparative decline, as it made
World Expo – to a remarkable extent – its special preserve.
It is tempting to propose a theory of institutional consolation to account
for this pattern. Long after Britain had abandoned all claim to Expo
leadership, France continued to invest heavily in the event, chalking-up a
record of Expo hospitality unmatched by any other country and setting the
course to Expo institutionalization through the Bureau of International
Exhibitions (BIE). The BIE, established in 1928, has always been based in
Paris, and remains a bastion of Anglo-French bilingualism.
French Expo-enthusiasm expresses a more general relationship to the world
system of great importance. Having relinquished its (Napoleonic) role as a
challenger to the world order in the early 19th century, France has
maneuvered, with unique capability and determination, to remain an
indispensable secondary power, or – more precisely – a balancer. Its
relationship to the successive phases of Anglophone global hegemony has
been guided by an extremely consistent deep policy of accommodation
without acquiescence, characterized by imaginative and unrelenting, yet
restrained rivalry. Close to the core, yet never quite part of it, France
has been able to draw sustenance from the world order whilst contesting
its cultural meaning (as English-speaking, protestant, and
laissez-faire individualist).
World system challengers, it should be clearly noted, never host World
Expos. The Expos held in Japan (Osaka 1970, Tsukuba 1985, Aichi 2005) and
Germany (Hanover 2000) took place long after their armed resistance to the
Anglo-American world order had been broken and both countries had been
beaten into docility. Russia has never hosted one. Moscow of the USSR was
offered the 1967 World Expo, but declined it (presumably judging it
dangerously destabilizing to a closed society).
World Expo has thus acquired a secondary tradition, as a deliberately
eccentric platform from which to contest the core future of the
world system, and to propose a pluralized (or embryonically multicultural)
alternative. Already in 1855 and 1867, and then in 1878, 1889, 1900, and
1937, World Expo staged the view from Paris, one that accepted
the global reality of consolidated, revolutionary modernization, whilst
systematically de-emphasizing its techno-commercial determinism and its
convergence upon Anglophone cultural traits. Industrial globalization was
reconfigured as a condition to be critically interrogated, rather than an
opportunity to be vigorously promoted.
Between the primary and secondary impulses of the Expo, collision was
inevitable. Predictably enough, the occasion was provided by the
reconnection of Expo to the global core.
Even given this truncated and radically simplified schema of Expo history,
which had been largely settled in its essentials by 1870, the significance
of the two New York World Expos, staged in 1939-40 and 1964-5, comes
clearly into focus. Mid-20th century New York, like every world systemic
capital, represented the leading edge of modernization as a revolutionary
global process — emergence and consolidation of a new world order and new
age (novus ordo seclorum) – compared to which the authority of
established international institutions counted for nothing.
Both New York Expos flagrantly violated BIE regulations in numerous
respects, but even after the withdrawal of official sanction, they ahead
anyway. These were, non-coincidentally, the first rogue Expos. They were
also among the most memorable and influential in World Expo history.
For the first time since the mid-19th century, Expo had found its way back
to the capital of the world, in order to provide an uncompromised and
unambiguous foretaste of the
World of Tomorrow
in the place that was orchestrating it. BIE opinion mattered little,
because Expo was not being hosted in New York so much as re-invented,
echoing the originality of 1851. This was where the future would come
from, and everyone knew it. All that was necessary was to tease the city
into anticipating itself, and what resulted was a
Futurama.
There was an additional message, easily overlooked due to the scarcity of
data-points: hosting World Expo is one of the things the world capital has
to do — as a kind of ritual responsibility, or a coming-out party.
Shanghai has done that now. Precedent suggests that one additional Expo
would be appropriate (perhaps in 2025, or 2030), although it might have to
be unsanctioned next time.
Of course, Shanghai is not yet the capital of the world, but it is
heading there. From the late-1970s, after centuries of exile and denigration, the
offshore, diasporic-maritime, capitalistic China of the
tianchao qimin — those ‘abandoned by the Celestial Empire’ – has
been steadily, and rapidly, re-integrated with the continental mainland
and its ‘market socialist’ structures. Floodgates of talent and investment
have been opened, and as this scattered, sea-salt scented population has
reconnected with the motherland, the ‘Chinese miracle’ of recent decades
has taken place. Shanghai is the main-circuit socket that links this other
China — oriented to oceanic trade, entrepreneurial opportunity, capital
accumulation, international mobility, and a society of flexible networks —
to the vast potentialities of the country (and flexible Sino-Marxist
state) lying up the Yangzi, and beyond. If the process of reconnection is
not interrupted, the next phase of modernity will be centered in this
city, where China meets the sea.
Despite its self-identification as the ‘central country’ (or ‘middle
kingdom’ – Zhongguo), China has not been at the core of the world
process for centuries. Instead it has been a complacently declining legacy
power and a badly-treated outsider, then successively a second-tier
affiliate, a truculent challenger, and a cautious balancer, until its
prospective status as core inheritor (or virtual hegemon) began to
percolate into global popular awareness over the final decades of the 20th
century. Very little of this is a matter of motivation, or strategic
assertion. Quasi-Marxist assumptions of economic inevitability and
directional base-superstructure causation come into their own in this
respect. Global leadership is nominated by industrial reality, not
political will, and hegemony can neither be perpetuated beyond the
endurance of its economic foundations, nor long disdained once such
foundations have been laid. Eventually a reality check becomes
unavoidable, and policy is hammered into compliance with the demands of
world system equilibrium. Core-periphery relations are decided by trade
and capital flows, not by political declarations. Since comparative
success and failure show no sign at all of disappearing, it can
confidently be expected that hierarchical geography – however re-arranged
– will not be withering away any time soon. Realists will follow the
money.
There will be a new world capital (you can count on it), but will it be
Shanghai? It would be reckless to presume so. The world system tradition,
in its eagerness to anoint Tokyo as the successor to New York (during the
1980s), provides a cautionary lesson. There was no Tokyo World Expo, and
it turns out that there was not an urgent or essential need for one.
So, is Shanghai next? That should have been the animating
question of Expo 2010, and perhaps it will have been in the future. The
whole world has a stake in it, because it tells us what is coming, and
that is what World Expo was designed to do. For an emerging world capital
to mask itself as a generic city passes beyond modesty into a species of
accidental deception, but tact can easily be confused with pretence –
especially by those on unfamiliar cultural terrain. It might be that
Shanghai said everything that was necessary in 2010, and that what it said
will eventually be heard, and understood.
Expo begins again in each new world capital, in 1851, in 1939, and – far
more problematically – in 2010 (?). In Shanghai’s case, we are still too
close to the event, and too entangled in the current revolution of
modernity, to know for sure. What Expo 2010 will have been depends upon
what the world becomes, how its center of economic gravity shifts, how its
new center condenses, and what it makes of Shanghai.
(final lurch into this fog-bank coming next (yippee!))
August 26, 2011Re-Animator (Part 5)
Dispatched from the British Consulate, Doctor Helen Goodwhite arrives at
the Jiangnan Special Hospital for Inexplicable Foreign Devilry to
interview a problematic inmate.
Dr Goodwhite: How are you feeling today Mister Vaughn?
They tell me you’re quite a bit calmer.
Vaughn: OK, I guess. A little disoriented. How long …?
Dr Goodwhite: Do you remember why you’re here?
Vaughn: Not exactly.
Dr Goodwhite: Those scars on your arms, any ideas?
Vaughn: [Hesitating] Some kind of accident …?
Dr Goodwhite: I’ve got some witness reports here, all
very consistent, maybe they’ll jog something. It seems that you were
walking down Nanjing East Road when you suddenly started shrieking “a-ya,
a-ya, a-ya” with a highly unconvincing Chinese accent before switching to
English and shouting “Get out. Get out. We have to get out of the city.”
After that, when nobody took any notice, you continued to ‘yell
aggressively’ …Umm, let’s see [riffling through her notes], ah yes,
“Haibao spawn, you’re all effing Haibao spawn, effing plague-blood zombie
Haibao spawn,” and so on, considerable obscenity it appears, and then …
ah, here we are “filthy future-toxed effing robot Haibao spawn, die, die,
we’re all going to die” et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Then you rushed
across the street and smashed the plate-glass window of an Expo gift shop
with your bare hands. [Looking up] Do you remember any of that, mister
Vaughn?
Vaughn: Some of it, yes. Now you mention it. It’s coming
back. But it wasn’t really like that.
Dr Goodwhite: It wasn’t?
Vaughn: Not really, no. At least, those things happened,
yes …
Dr Goodwhite: They did?
Vaughn: Yes, but it’s just, what they meant …
[hesitating]
Dr Goodwhite: Go on.
Vaughn: Well, they didn’t mean anything of course, what I
meant to say was, well, it was sort of a mistake.
Dr Goodwhite: A ‘mistake’?
Vaughn: Yes, or, I guess, more of a misunderstanding.
Dr Goodwhite: I’m afraid you’re going to have to be a
great deal more specific if we’re going to make any progress.
Vaughn: It’s rather complicated.
Dr Goodwhite: Please. Just start at the beginning.
Vaughn: I suppose it began at the pavilion.
Dr Goodwhite: The UK Expo pavilion?
Vaughn: I was working there you know.
Dr Goodwhite: It’s in the file.
Vaughn: So you know what it looked like?
Dr Goodwhite: Yes, of course.
Vaughn: The tendrils, the shimmering, the name like a
taunt from … them.
Dr Goodwhite: It was called the ‘Seed Cathedral’,
according to this.
Vaughn: Seed Cathedral, Sea Cthudral, whatever, it had
been sent back, sent up, to show us their true ‘face’. … At least, that’s
what I thought at the time, but that’s just ridiculous, isn’t it? I
realize that now.
Dr Goodwhite: But at ‘the time’ you thought ‘they’ had
‘sent it back’?
Vaughn: I’d been working too hard. It was quite
stressful, you know. I wasn’t sleeping well, worrying, and that’s when
they began chatting.
Dr Goodwhite: Who were ‘they’ Mister Vaughn?
Vaughn: The Haibao, of course.
Dr Goodwhite: Ah yes, the Expo mascot …
Vaughn: Mask, not mascot.
Dr Goodwhite: Did you know that the Shanghai Corporate
Pavilion was defaced with luminous blue paint, on the night of September
the ninth? [She passes a photograph.]
Vaughn: [Shudders silently]
Dr Goodwhite: The message is rather cryptic, but your
words reminded me of it, for some reason. It’s a bit difficult to read
from the photo, but I’ve got a transcript. “We are many and yet singular.
Our name equals 90, the seething void, enfolding artificial intelligence
and the terminal alpha-omega. We come from the depths, from the blue
screen at the end of the world. Cthublue.”
Vaughn: I don’t know anything about that.
Dr Goodwhite: Really?
Vaughn: It’s Haibao cultist, hardcore. I’d never touch
that stuff – not ever.
Dr Goodwhite: Yet you seem to recognize it.
Vaughn: From dreams — bad, really bad, dreams. I told
you, I wasn’t sleeping well. They wouldn’t stop talking, telling me things
I didn’t want to hear, I couldn’t stop them. I tried, but they kept
calling me.
Dr Goodwhite: Calling you to bow before the most
high?
Vaughn: [Outraged] I never said that. I’d never say that.
It’s absurd, obscene. It’s not even code.
Dr Goodwhite: [Checking her notes] So, you understand now
that ‘hairy crab’ isn’t a secret anagram for ‘Haibao’?
Vaughn: Yes, I can see that, of course.
Dr Goodwhite: It isn’t even close, really — too many
letters, for one thing.
Vaughn: Well, six and nine are rotational twins, and ‘o’
is a ‘cry’. [Sobs slightly] … It’s all nonsense. I see that now. I was
confused.
Dr Goodwhite: The trouble, Mister Vaughn, is that this
subject still seems to excite you rather disproportionately. I think we
need to conduct a little test. Let’s see what happens when we compare this
[she reaches into her bag and lifts out the statuette of a tentacle-faced
abomination, sculpted long ago by some Pacific island tribe, presumed
extinct] with this [a soft, cartoonish, vaguely anthropomorphic blue doll,
suggestive of a toothpaste advert for children]. The similarity isn’t
especially striking, is it?
Vaughn: No, no, no, no, NOOOOOOOOOO.
Dr Goodwhite: I’m sorry, what?
Vaughn: [In an almost indiscernible whisper] Deep ones.
Dr Goodwhite: I didn’t catch that.
Vaughn: From the depths, the ocean – deep ones. They’re
from the sea – ‘treasure from the sea’ [laughs morbidly]. Even you have to
understand that, doctor. Globalization, technocapitalism, Shanghai, alien
invasion, the Thing — it could hardly be clearer. It’s escaped from the
abyss, and now it’s exposed. The time has come. Sea Change, Modernity,
call it whatever you want, it doesn’t matter. The Haibao will tell us how
to think soon enough, and we’ll comply, because they’re behind us, beneath
us, and we’ll peel away from what they always were like dead skin from a
snake. They’ve shown us the ultimate city god already, so it won’t be
long. Their words are arriving, whispers, mutterings …
Dr Goodwhite: [Disquieted]
Oabiah nasce zhee ute ewoit.
Vaughn: Excuse me?
Dr Goodwhite: That means nothing to you?
Vaughn: Nothing.
Dr Goodwhite: Strange, then, that it’s tattooed on your
arm.
Vaughn: I’ve no idea how it got there.
Dr Goodwhite: Alright, let’s move on, shall we?
Vaughn: Move where doctor? We’re already here, in the
city at the end of the world, the thing that came out of the sea. We
aren’t going anywhere. It’s coming for us, right now, and it can’t be
stopped. What did you expect? A New Jerusalem? [laughing unpleasantly]
Dr Goodwhite: Alright Mister Vaughn, I think we’re done
here. We need to get you some proper, professional attention. Then, after
some rest, back to your family …
Vaughn: [Prolonged laughter, even more ghastly] Too late,
doctor! Way too late. The Haibao have already taken them. It came for the
children first, don’t you realize that? Do you know how many Haibao dolls
my sweet little kiddies have accumulated? [Voice cracking] Seventeen! They
might as well have tentacles growing out of their eye-sockets — it would
all amount to the same thing. Haibao melted their souls into the blue
screen months ago. That generation’s gone. Long gone. It was over even
before the Haibao clones slithered out of the television set.
Dr Goodwhite: [Backing away nervously] This has been a
very interesting chat, but I’ve really got to be going now. I’ll tell the
consulate that … that …
Vaughn: [Zoned-out into the blue] They want to transmute
us — replace us – with something unspeakable, with a bionic monstrosity
from beyond the blue screen. Our metropolises are turning into, into …
Actually they were never ours. The deep ones, the Haibao, were always
using them to modify us, using us to make them – that’s the circuit: alien
animation. It was a cosmic gamble, a bet, and now they’re raking it in …
Dr Goodwhite: [Turns pale, a hideous comprehension
dawning] Better city, better life …
September 2, 2011Arts of Re-Animation
There’s always something huge happening in Shanghai — and usually several
things. Out at the leading edge over the last two years has been the
tsunami of urban development along the Huangpu waterfront to the south of
the Puxi metropolitan core, in an area that has been named ‘Xuhui
Riverside’ or ‘West Bund’. The scale of what is underway there is (of
course) utterly stunning.
A mixture of new residential complexes and prestige towers is under
construction, and the immediate waterfront has already been redeveloped
into a strip of interconnected parks and boardwalks (constituting the
8.4km ‘Shanghai Corniche‘). Along the river, a neo-modern aesthetic prevails, characterized by
elegantly re-purposed heavy industrial structures: slabs of concrete,
disused rail tracks, and massive cargo cranes. As elsewhere in the city,
the heavy-duty Shanghai 1.0 has been playfully folded over itself, in a
stylish celebration of modernist heritage. The future is presented as a
re-launch of the past. For anybody mesmerized by time-spirals, it’s
irresistible.
The role allotted to the arts in this process
of urban re-animation is especially notable. Even in a city blitzed into
delirium by an explosive growth of arts space, the proliferation of
galleries, theaters, museums, and other cultural centers in the West Bund
comes as a scarcely-comprehensible shock. The subsonic sucking roar of
this new cultural capacity, emitted in overlapping ripples as it extends
its devouring appetite throughout the city and far beyond, reaches a
magnitude that seems to bend space and time. There are entire national
cultures in the world that would be hard-pressed to fill it.
The coming out party for this arts infrastructure was held on a suitably
stupendous scale.
Westbund 2013: A Biennial of Architecture and Contemporary Art
included an
interlocking set of exhibitions, each of which would have been dazzlingly
impressive on its own. Sound Art China introduced the country’s
sonic bleeding edge in its Revolutions Per Minute event, set up
within four renovated oil storage tanks. The adjacent West Bund Exhibition
Center — a redeveloped industrial structure of truly cyclopean proportions
— hosted a multi-threaded sound / video / architecture / cinematic history
show in and around a central ‘Inter-Media Megastructure’ that fully lived
up to its grandiose name. A more modest urban development exhibition in a
nearby warehouse space did its best to explain the epic convulsions that
the area was undergoing. (I think the appropriate word is ‘awesome’,
cubed.)
There’s only one reasonable conclusion: Shanghai is sheer cosmic splendor
compacted for terrestrial application, and expressed through aesthetic
overload. Cynicism can wait for another occasion.
December 16, 2013Dotting the ‘I’
Whatever else is to be learned from ‘A Dream I Dreamed’ — the
Kusama
Yayoi
exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai (Dec 15 to March 30,
2014) — the most superficially striking lesson is sociological.
Shanghainese — and especially young Shanghainese — can’t get enough of
this stuff. After almost two months, queues no longer regularly stretch
all the way through People’s Park and out onto Nanjing Xi Lu, but they
still over-spill the gallery. Both thematically and socially, this is a
show about multitudes.
Kusama,
born in 1929, has an artistic career stretching back to the 1950s.
Throughout seven decades, as her celebrity has waxed and waned in waves,
her artistic focus — or, more exactly, her strategic ‘obliteration’ of
focus — has remained remarkably constant. Sensuous disintegration of self
and world into dot pattern has been a continuous preoccupation.
The MoCA show concentrates upon Kusama’s very
recent work, mostly from the last two years. To a general audience, the
best known pieces are probably her large, brightly bi-colored, speckled
pumpkins, enjoyed for their pop-art accessibility and unpretentious
aestheticism. When encountered within the context of the show, however,
the disciplined dot shading on these works takes on an unsuspected
seriousness, as it is sucked into swirls, drifts, and flurries of dots in
different colors, across picture planes and sculptured surfaces, and even
into illusory volumes. Through a power of pure multiplicity, Kusama’s
vivid, relentlessly cheerful pop-art chromatics become the tails of
neonized guiding streaks, hurtling into cosmic vistas and shattered states
of being.
Dotted tulips, dotted dogs, huge mushroom-styled dotted spheres, ‘Infinity
Dots’ (2012), ‘Infinity Double Dots’ (2013), and the ‘Infinity Nets’
(numerous, 2013) created by the diffuse dot-puncturing of space … it
becomes all-too easy to understand why Kusama chooses to live in a
Japanese mental hospital as an OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder)
patient, and why her own accounts of her work wander so uninterruptedly
between aesthetics and psychopathology. Her installation ‘I’m Here, but
Nothing’ (2013), consisting of a living room suffused with violet light
and blitzed with countless hallucinatory dots, provides something close to
an insanity portal. Visitors entering the ‘Obliteration Room’ are handed a
sheet of colorful dot stickers and invited to go crazy. It’s at once
humorously and seriously dotty.
The works are typically without center, diffusing perception smoothly
across sheer distribution, sometimes through spaces expanded to infinity
through installed mirrors. The sense of religious suggestion is
occasionally made explicit, as in ‘Transmigration’ (2011) — an
‘infinity-net’ style acrylic painting whose numinous title is only
reinforced by its thematic continuity with the rest of the show. In
‘Narcissus Garden’ (2013), a packed array of stainless steel spheres,
mirroring and the assembly of featureless particles are finally fused
(although this work is more notable for its neat infolding of Kusama’s
artistic vocabulary than for its aesthetic power). To immerse ‘oneself’ in
this exhibition is to be strewn across the void, lost in clouds, and in
crowds.
Kusama’s appeal manifests an East Asian ‘pop’ sensibility that clearly
works in Shanghai, attesting once again to the influence of contemporary
Japanese culture throughout the region, and to the continued relevance of
common religious traditions. Beyond — or simply through — the deliberate
frivolity of this work, something profound, and shattering, is being
shared. It’s well worth adding yourself to the crowds.
February 11, 2014Urbanization in Focus
Might urbanization be the leading theme of China’s 5th
generation CCP administration? The background to this question is the
process of Chinese urbanization itself. Over the three decades of Reform
and Opening, China’s urban population rose from 20% to 53% of the (rising)
total, resulting in over half a billion new urbanites. The economic and
geostrategic consequences of this transformation have profoundly
re-structured the world. (It is the central fact of the Pacific-centered
Modernity 2.0.)
In the Atlantic, Matt Schiavenza
communicates
the basics:
In China, economic growth and urbanization have gone hand in hand. When
Deng Xiaoping initiated Reform and Opening in 1978, the vast majority of
the population lived and worked in the countryside — just as Chinese
people had for centuries. But over the past three and a half decades, as
special economic zones churned out exports and China modernized its
cities, hundreds of millions of people migrated to urban areas seeking
work in the manufacturing and service sectors. This … has made China —
and the Chinese — much wealthier.
The guideline themes of China’s 4th
generation CCP leadership – ‘harmonious society’ and ‘scientific
development’ – were no doubt sculpted by the stresses and policy
challenges of massive urbanization, but they addressed the phenomenon
indirectly. There are numerous indications that a more
specifically-focused emphasis upon urbanization is now emerging. In
particular, China’s new Premier Li Keqiang envisages the topic as a nexus,
where many of the country’s development and governance issues meet.
The Chinese journal Qiushi published an article on urbanization
by Li Keqiang in its Winter 2012 issue (translated into English by He Shan
and Chen Xia
here). Framed by the expectation (attributed to “Foreign economists”) “that
China’s urbanization and U.S. high technology would emerge as twin engines
of the global economy in the 21st century,” it rewards close scrutiny.
The analysis of Michael Pettis, who
identifies insufficient domestic consumption (by households) as China’s
pre-eminent economic obstacle, is a valuable preparation for this
discussion, which begins: “Urbanization has the greatest potential for
boosting domestic demand.” Li argues that China remains relatively
under-urbanized, so the propulsion to “exponential urban growth”
continues, with at least partially predictable implications. Since “urban
residents spent 3.6 times more than rural dwellers in 2010” it can be
confidently anticipated that consumer spending will rise as a function of
urbanization, contributing automatically to economic re-balancing.
… it is estimated that every rural resident who becomes an urban
dweller will increase consumption by more than 10,000 yuan (US$1,587).
And each one percent increase in the urbanization rate in only one year
will see more than 10 million rural residents absorbed into the cities.
This will, in turn, translate into consumption totaling more than 100
billion yuan (US$15.9 billion) and correspondingly create more
investment opportunities.
Full realization of these opportunities, Li argues, will require reform or
abolition of the country’s hukou system of residence registry,
with its “urban-rural dual structure.” In other respects, too, vigorous
government action is recommended, as long as it achieves “conformity with
the objective law of urban development.” (Investigating “the objective law
of urban development” is the primary mission of this blog, so it is a
concept we shall obsessively return to.)
Core government responsibilities are taken to include the mitigation of
social conflicts and problems, infrastructure investment, and
administrative intervention to constrain housing-market instability.
Urbanization management is thus recognized as a governmental priority.
Given the complexity and the global significance of this task, which
amounts to the integration of another quarter-billion Chinese into the
economic mainstream in a little over a decade, there is really no decent
alternative to remarking – with an absolute minimum of smugness or sarcasm
– good luck with that.
***
Even when direct construction expenditures are ignored, by systematically
raising the level of household consumption, Chinese urbanization dominates
the country’s macroeconomic landscape. It is no great exaggeration to see
the emergence of the world’s most dynamic consumer economy as a
side-effect of a three decade-long urbanization process, although – as in
any such complex development – the causality is turbular, and
self-stimulating.The Chinese consumer is a creature of the new urban
epoch, and an incitement to its further elaboration.
As noted in the first part of this post, the centrality of urbanization to
China’s macroeconomic predicament has been explicitly addressed in a
significant
article
by China’s new premier, Li Keqiang. The conversion of rural folk into
urbanites (or ‘citizens’ according to strict etymology) is accompanied by
a 3.6-fold rise in per capita consumption. In addition to the
purely quantitative impact upon the level of domestic economic demand, the
rise of urban consumers also drives a qualitative transition,
characterized above all by the expansion of the service sector (in both
absolute and relative terms). Li seeks to align administrative action with
this trend:
Escalating the growth of the service industry is critical to adjusting
the industrial structure. Effective measures should be taken to build a
favorable environment for the growth of the service industry, both in
terms of its size and quality. The government should promote the
development of production-related service industries such as modern
logistics, e-commerce and scientific research and design. It should also
ensure that consumption-related services such as tourism, recreation,
care of the elderly and domestic services receive a boost, and the
development of small and mid-sized service companies gets support.
Urbanization promotes a more service oriented economic structure, which in
turn promises to lower the energy-intensity of economic output; raise
total factor productivity (TFP); proliferate entrepreneurial small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs);
accelerate the emergence of knowledge-based and creative industries; and
increase employment opportunities. In other words, a predictable series of
dependencies – from urbanization, through consumerism, to
service-orientation – subordinates economic policy to “the objective law
of urban development” which alone makes its goals realizable. The
expansion and improvement of cities will decide whether China works.
The orchestration of central policy questions under an urban theme is also
strikingly seen in the area of regional development. Here, too, the
country’s most intractable problems are to be unlocked by an urban key:
Regional development is closely related to urbanization. Less-developed
regions lag behind in terms of growth, especially in urbanization. In
areas which boast mature development conditions and large environmental
capacity, the government should actively and steadily facilitate
urbanization by reasonable allocation of resources, centralized layout
of businesses and encouragement of intensive land usage to fire up new
engines of growth and enhance the local capacity for self-sustained
development. The government should tailor its regional, industrial and
land policies to different regions and sectors, rather than adopting
general and all-inclusive policies.
The infrastructural investment and social policy tools that have been
employed to ‘Open up the West’ since the turn of the millennium are now
specifically envisaged as ways to catalyze, accelerate, and guide urban
development in backward regions. Cities are to be the solution.
Some extra links:
Mi Shih’s excellent
introduction
to chengzhenhua (城镇化) — and why ‘urbanization’ isn’t the right word
For a more hostile take on the Chinese urbanization agenda, see Gordon
Chang
here.
Nin-Hai Tseng
at
Fortune: “[Stephen] Roach offers an interesting statistic:
China’s services sector requires about 35% more jobs per unit of GDP than
do manufacturing and construction.”
***
Capital Absorption: On the topic of Michael Pettis,
this
superb recent article is sure to become an indispensable reference point
for China economy watchers. Pettis has long argued that Chinese investment
levels exceed the country’s absorption capacity, and the new article
places this argument in a broader theoretical framework, which he explains
with extraordinary lucidity. If he is correct in his basic assessment,
some widely-held assumptions of development economics will require drastic
revision, with cultural and institutional factors (“social capital”)
acquiring far greater prominence.
Pettis has a deserved reputation for bearishness on Chinese growth
prospects, but this article makes a guarded case for optimism in regards
to the country’s development strategy, which he sees shifting from an
investment-driven growth model to something more
institutionally-sensitive. This political sub-forecast predicts
significant movement in the direction of market-oriented reform during the
Xi-Li period.
***
Opening Moves:
At
the South China Morning Post (via):
Premier Li Keqiang fought open opposition from financial regulators in
his bid to push through a landmark plan for a free-trade zone in
Shanghai. It is the clearest sign yet that the nation’s new leadership
is determined to deliver long-delayed economic reforms. […] The new
Shanghai free-trade zone plan, officially announced at the beginning of
July, is expected to be the testing ground for major policy reforms. It
would promote cross-border commodity and capital flows, with key
experiments in freeing foreign exchange markets and liberalising
domestic interest rates.[…] Within two months, Li made an initial
proposal covering 21 initiatives, whose details were not officially
announced. These included shortcuts for foreign banks to set up
subsidiary or joint venture operations and special permission for
foreign commodities exchanges to own warehouses in the free-trade zone
in Shanghai … […] … other mainland cities, facing unemployment and
slower growth, are also keen to follow Shanghai’s move to lure foreign
capital. But Li is not understood to be interested in rushing to copy
the Shanghai model for other mainland cities.
***
Handle_MZ commented: “it can be confidently anticipated
that consumer spending will rise as a function of urbanization,
contributing automatically to economic re-balancing.”
I read “The Great Rebalancing” and I think this prediction strangely
contradicts Pettis’ main narrative. Pettis says that the consumption share
of Chinese GDP is a necessary function of both the populations
propensities to save and consume and the whole of Government economic
policy to include the PBoC’s interest rates, capital
controls and stabilization of the dollar exchange rate.
The objective is sustainable high GDP growth through high levels of
investment, stable wages, and productive factor capital accumulation —
especially in the export and tradables sector. A corollary objective is
improved global competitiveness in markets farther up the value chain.
If household consumption is a product of means which seek the above end,
then any increase in consumption (i.e. from urbanization) that disrupts
this end will only be met with compensatory government moves that push
it back down. Policy is the unmoved mover of consumption levels. Well,
slightly moved, but by that aforementioned sustainability criterion. But
rebalancing cannot occur under the current system unless the
government is wise enough to support it.
And at any rate, urbanization creates a surplus of labor which suppresses
the growth rate of average urban wages. The more urban consumption rises
(from rising wages, for example), the more attractive it is the move from
the
countryside, which also pushes urban wages back down. This helps China’s
global competitiveness, but may actually reduce domestic consumption
relative to the less-urbanization counterfactual.
Admin response: As you know from previous discussions,
there are numerous assumptions that need straightening out before pushing
far with this. At this point, I’m satisfied with the conclusion that
urbanization is being conceived as a solution to the country’s most
pronounced economic quandary (at the highest level of the new leadership).
I think this is quite solid, irrespective of the issues that Pettis and
you raise. On the latter, though, it seems hard to believe that
urbanization is incidental to “social capital” formation, of the kind that
— Pettis argues — raises capital absorption capacity, and thus directly
contributes to the amelioration of the consumption deficiency problem.
That’s in addition to the direct consumption effects emphasized by Li
Keqiang.
This isn’t intended as an adequate response to your argument, just a
provisional rejoinder.
July 29, 2013City Limits
There’s undoubtedly a Quixotic character to the ‘China should do X’ mode
of outside commentary, but Yukon Huang’s short Bloomberg
article
advising revision of the country’s urbanization policies represents the
genre at its best. Noting the agglomeration effects that yield
disproportionate returns to urban scale, Huang recommends a turn away from
the proliferation of new minor cities, and towards megacity growth.
China is already in a class by itself in accounting for 30 of the 50
largest cities in east Asia. It boasts half a dozen megacities with
populations of more than 10 million and 25 “large” cities exceeding 4
million. In fact, though, the only way China will achieve its desired
productivity gains is if its leaders allow cities to evolve more
organically in response to market forces. They need to let cities like
Beijing get bigger.
Urban concentration creates real problems, but these are indistinguishable
from the challenges any genuine process of socio-economic advance has to
confront. The solutions to these problems will be the same steps that
carry the country forward into unexplored territory — beyond ‘catch up’
and into the open horizons of the future. Everything learned from concrete
economic history suggests that technological and business opportunity will
be ratcheted upwards by exactly those forces which promote megacity
agglomeration — and better still urban concentration or intensity — to
historically unprecedented levels. That is how — and where — deep social
innovation takes place.
Instead of actively trying to spread out growth to small new cities,
China’s planners should embrace the agglomeration economies, which
militate for larger metropolises. As land and wage costs escalate, some
industries will eventually gravitate to medium-size cities, but services
will continue to drive expansion in the larger ones. Smart people like
to mix with other smart people, and globalization has amplified their
financial returns. Beijing and Shanghai have continued to grow because
of buoyant higher-value services, even as their manufacturing bases have
shrunk. All this explains why in China, productivity in urban areas is
more than three times that in rural areas.
But aren’t China’s megacities already too big to be sustainable? As a
matter of fact, some urban specialists have concluded that even China’s
biggest cities may be too small. They cite “Zipf’s law,” one of the
great curiosities of urban research. The law, which is surprisingly
accurate for many countries, claims that the biggest city in a country
should be about twice the size of the second-biggest, three times the
size of the third-biggest, and so forth. On this basis, China’s largest
cities appear too small.
Thinking through power laws (such as Zipf’s) dispels the idea of ‘normal’
city sizes. Optimum urban scale is decided by network effects, and is
dependent upon the entire social ecology — regionally, nationally, and
even globally. The ‘ideal’ size of Shanghai, for instance, cannot be
derived from some model of a generic city, but has to be understood,
instead, with reference to the singular role this city plays as a hub in
multiple networks — especially commercial webs — within which it amasses
specialized functions. As these webs expand and thicken, their critical
nodes tend to grow and intensify spontaneously. It is natural, therefore,
throughout the process of global modernization, for the limits of urban
scale to be pushed out ever further, in accordance with the functional
sophistication of the system’s crucial hubs, and the associated
refinements of specialization these key cities foster.
Beijing is subject to stubborn environmental constraints, with limited
water resources prominent among these. Its distance from the coast is also
a growth-inhibiting factor. Shanghai, in contrast, is destined to vastness
by such implacable historical forces that it is hard to imagine even the
most determined policy resistance standing in the way for long. As the
country’s commercial capital, any realistic power law distribution of
urban scale begins with Shanghai at the summit. It would be best to bend
to the inevitable, and let it become the world’s laboratory for urban
intensity, tracking the advance of modernity into the Pacific Century. The
rewards for this acceptance would easily overwhelm the costs.
September 11, 2013Modern Legacy
In 2012 the global distribution of Internet connectivity still looked
strikingly
Atlantean:
Two years later, Alissa Walker at Gizmodo
asks
(rhetorically):
Where is the internet? This map might explain it better than any
statistics could ever hope to: The red hot spots show where the most
devices that can access the internet are located.
On the new map, too, the Pacific Century has
yet to dazzle. It seems that infrastructure — even the most advanced
digital infrastructure — incarnates a legacy, rather than virtuality (or
potential). By accentuating the Internet-of-Things, the new map has
actually dulled the digitization of emerging markets, drawing vision back
on a retro-futural path to the historical roots of the modern world order.
(The color scheme also tends to under-emphasize the spiky
urban-concentrations of the Asian Internet, relative to the more diffuse
Euro-American distribution.)
Follow the Gizmodo link for various image options, including alternative
Internet visualizations (such as
these, and — from the comments —
this).
September 1, 2014Shanghai Tower
It’s Aesthetics Week
@
Social Matter. Here’s the XS twist:
It’s the new Shanghai
Tower, in
Lujiazui. Latest glistening jewel in a fabulously beautiful city.
May 6, 2015Shanghai Tower
It’s a “Green Smart Cultural Vertical City” apparently. (Still a fantastic
building, although not much seems to be happening inside yet.)
Here’s the view from the Observation Deck,
looking down on it’s closest Shanghai competitor (the Shanghai World
Financial Center):
And on number three, the Neo-Deco Jin Mao Tower:
August 29, 201635 Today
Shenzhen’s birthday is this Wednesday. I’d have put up a 1980 photo, but
there wasn’t anything there.
Shenzhen today:
The Wikipedia
profile.
August 26, 2015
CHAPTER FIVE - NICK LAND'S TRIPS
Out West
The real (paying) job calls. For the last few days of March (and 1st
April), I’m going to be ‘away’ on a research trip to Kashgar (Xinjiang).
If connectivity isn’t a problem, ‘away’ might not mean much from the
perspective of Cyberspace, but I’m expecting at least moderate disruption
(most probably exacerbated by colorful ethnic distractions and horrible
torrents of baijiu).
If anyone has any Kashgar questions, or information to offer, I’ll do my
best to bend my investigations responsively. (I’m not thinking of using
this blog as a platform for Xinjiang material, but that’s not a dogmatic
commitment, if there’s any interest in the topic.)
[This short Kashgar
profile by Ron Gluckman is over a decade old — it will be interesting to
see how it has dated.]
ADDED: If the main things you are searching for
in life are alcoholic intoxication, coffee, and smooth Internet
connectivity, Kashgar cannot — in all honesty — be recommended. On the
positive side of the ledger, there’s far more of the Old Kashgar left than
first appearance suggests (Otangboyi Road is the place to go, following it
past the Idkar Mosque to the night market). The Silk Road commercial
culture still thrives, reaching a truly delirious pitch in the Grand
Bazaar, which oveflows with sensation-drenching commodities from thousands
of kilometers around. The tea is delicious — a spiced up black tea, drunk
without milk, but with a distinct hint of Indian chai. Ditto the
yoghurt (as thick as cream cheese, with a razor sharp edge), and — of
course — everything delectable that can be done with a dead sheep whilst
remaining haram.
It’s hard to work out the ethnic balance, but it’s at least predominantly
Uyghur (I’ve seen figures between 70-85%). There’s no obvious indications
of social tension, with everyone seeming to get on with their lives quite
frictionlessly, and no signs that I could pick up of street-level Han
paranoia. Han Chinese women navigate the streets alone except for small
children, seemingly perfectly relaxed about the social environment, and
untroubled by any prospect of violence. Our group (two Han, one Bulgarian,
one Brit, and one Uyghur government guide — who is excellent btw) have
encountered nothing but friendliness, often combined with impressive
efforts to sell us stuff. It has to be said, though, that the government
propaganda is shockingly crude.
For example, a note at the Idkah Mosque, after explaining the history of
CPC renovation efforts, helpfully explains:
All of it shows fully that Chinese government always pays special
attentions to the another and historical cultures of the ethnic groups,
and that all ethnic groups warmly welcome Part’s [sic]
religious policy. It also shows that different ethnic groups have set
up a close relationship of equality, unity and helps to each other, and
freedom of beliefs is protected. All ethnic groups live friendly
together here. They cooperate to build a beautiful homeland, support
heartily the unity of different ethnic groups and the unity of our
country, and oppose the ethnic separatism and illegal religious
activities.
Perhaps it sounds better in the Uyghur.
Of course, at the end of the day I’m a regime apologist. Afghanistan and
Pakistan are right next door, each demonstrating in their own way the
wonders of ethno-democratic self-assertion.
March 27, 2013Out West (again)
Urumqi this time. I’ll fill things out a little when I get a chance (more
for my own sake than under any pretence of communication).
That Baijiu holocaust problem I worried needlessly about in
Kashgar? Urumqi is a very different city …
ADDED: After arriving yesterday we took in the
International Bazaar, a more mall-sructured, and thus rather less
atmospheric version of the Kashgar Grand Bazaar, trading similar goods.
The most distinctive items were chunks of fossilized wood, so precisely
metamorphosed that the minutiae of organic structure were clearly
discernible. It’s hard not to be impressed when examining the fine-grained
organization of a thing that died 150,000,000 years ago.
Next stop was Hong Shan Park, situated at the north-east edge of the city
in 1947, but now enveloped. It’s high, and gives a vantage point from
which to get oriented. Better still, the viewing pavilion there also
serves as an urban development museum, including scale models (1947 and
today), lots of photographs, and basically everything needed for a firm
space-time fix. Finally, there was dinner with the local officials — our
hosts — which was great fun (even though I’d been horribly sick the day
before and still felt shaky). The Baijiu onslaught then unfolded
(my travel companion from work turned out to be crazily lihai,
and probably saved me by deflecting some of the white death torrent onto
herself). Maybe I wrote some scraps fished from the gulfs of shadow? Then
oblivion.
Next day: Tarim Mummies, the Urumqi version of Shanghai’s M50 (art hub),
and the city’s massive new industrial park called the UETD.
The mummies — dessicated accidentally by the arid environment — are very
well known, for good reason. Their state of preservation is incredible —
you could still wear their clothes (after almost 4,000 years). The whole
anthropo-ethnographic backstory is enthralling too, and I need to try and
get my head wrapped around it. The oldest mummies are ‘Europoid’ and
really look as if they could have been Cornish. (Scientific consensus, as
I understand it tenuously, identifies them as ‘Tokharian’.) This throws
the Uyghur-Han ethnic elbowing into disconcerting perspective, but it’s
just too out there to be truly politically sensitive (I’m
hoping). If the Welsh start claiming chunks of Xinjiang based on ancestral
rights I guess that could change. The old mummies come in two pairs, two
3,800-y.o. females, both ‘Europoid’, then a pair from a thousand years
later, a Europoid male and a mixed Euro-Mongoloid female. Both of these
later mummies are tattooed, and for reasons not yet understood were buried
with non-matching boots. Then the exhibition throws in a mummified Han
official from AD500, but if you folllow the exhibition around in a
disciplined counter-clockwise circuit, there’s no reason to be thrown off
by this bizarre and crudely-motivated non sequitur.
The art space had some OK stuff, and reflected the guiding Urumqi
attitude: well-meaning, relentlessly multi-cultural, driven by Han, and
extremely tame. If you like art that drags you into extra-cosmic abysses
of shock and dread, there wasn’t much there to set the pulse racing. Lots
of pleasant, (unthreateningly) intelligent, traditional, craft-based stuff
though.
The industrial park was really something. Pure China, in the sense that it
was mostly a (truly immense) construction site, from which some slender
threads of raw potential had tumbled backwards into the present. It
already has a population of 270,000, and looked roughly 10% complete. This
‘Park’ — an entire urban district until a few years ago, when it was
re-purposed — is programmed to become a glstening science-fiction entity
that would over-awe 70%+ of the world’s cities (with most of the remaining
30% being Chinese). We saw a truck plant and the local Coca-Cola operation
— full of clattering robotic bottling machinery — and got to ask some
questions about the bases of Xinjiang growth. The impression we got is
that serving the wider Central Asian market is the cornerstone of
everybody’s plans.
ADDED: Six hours on the road and — just to keep things moving forwards
smoothly — a two hour visit to a baijiu factory in the middle
(plus a lot of other stuff). Two bottles of sample (non-retail maximum
strength) rocket fuel in my bag, and four hours sleep to cling onto.
Beyond the lesson that Shariah isn’t exactly calling the shots in northern
Xinjiang, analysis and reflection is going to be delayed.
May 8, 2013Out West (yet again)
Whatever the prejudices you might harbor against Urumqi Internet
connections in second rate hotels, they’re probably over-generous. I’ve
been effectively de-twitterized by sheer technological crappitude rather
than anything more sinister, but this channel seems to be (barely) OK.
(Annoyingly, they provide a computer in the room, which locks everything
into chronic dysfunction.) So apologies for the deteriorated state of
communications over the next few days.
The main objective of this trip is to explore Xinjiang’s Buddhist
heritage, which is so vast and rich that even some superficial scratching
should turn up some interesting stuff. The main current of Buddhist
influence into China passed this way, hybridizing wildly with other
cultures in one of the world’s great mixing zones. After arriving off the
steps, the Uyghurs were Buddhist for centuries, before Islam got a grip
around the turning point of the first millennium (I’ll try to fill in some
dates with greater precision later on).
Updates as events, energy, and time permit.
ADDED: Scheduled to arrive at the site of
interest tomorrow. Up to now, it’s been a mix of some interesting stuff
(but probably not Outside in material — weird Uyghur dances with
cups of water balanced on heads? I didn’t think so), Internet nightmare
(Twitter inaccessible again), and grand finale: the mandatory
baijiu-crazed ‘austere-enough-for government-work’ welcoming
banquet. The inebriated babble effect is no doubt obvious. We saw some
astounding Tianshan vistas too (‘Tianshan Grand Canyon’ — don’t be put off
by the ridiculous name), but I’m hopeless at natural wonder, so I won’t
even try to communicate it.
We’re in Baicheng now. I’ll be impressed if anyone’s heard of it, bt it
seems shockingly well-governed, and probably the most attractive modern
city in Xinjiang. For us, it’s just the gateway out to the Buddha caves,
but it’s been an interesting surprise. It’s prosperous — due to
petrochemicals — well-designed, seems highly livable, and it’s partnered
with Wenzhou (which you should have heard of), a relationship that has
been very effectively milked.
Our hotel is a beautiful Jiangnan-style place, which also came as a
serious shock. We’d expected we were on the way down from the Urumuqi
quarters to something seriously dire, but instead find ourselves in one of
the nicest hotels in Xinjiang — and that does actually mean really nice.
Still no reliable Internet connectivity though (by which I mean the
opportunity to run my VPN), so the twitter shakes are getting bad. [If
Spandrell’s out there — I’m not hiding from your ruthless tweet-fu logic,
my tongue’s been cut out.]
September 22, 2013Guizhou
Over the next few days I’ll be in Guizhou, known for its karst landscapes,
insanely spicy food, and comparative poverty. The computer is coming — but
so are the kids, so blogging is likely to be erratic at best. It’s going
to be a test of my Outside in addiction, and one that I’m already
failing … digit tremors and threads of mild delirium are creeping in, and
I haven’t left the house (or keyboard) yet.
ADDED: As Spandrell points out in the comments,
ethnic complexity should have been added to the list of main Guizhou
promotion points. There are a whole bunch of ‘minorities’ here, of whom
the Miao are probably the best known, and exotic ‘tribal’ clothing
(especially impractically-ornate head-dresses) are easy to spot even in
the metropolis — more as attractions in shops and restaurants than on the
street. The tribals are obviously little folk, giving the province a
land-of-the-pixies feel. We’ve yet to see any foreigners here.
We’re still in Guiyang, the provincial capital, which might be the
smallest Chinese city we’ve ever seen — just 1.2 million according to our
(highly untrustworthy) guidebook. I pretty much always like Chinese
cities, and this one — whilst definitely odd — is no exception. The
architecture is only tenuously sane, consisting in large part of highly
eclectic experiments in variants of hybrid Chinese modernism, or an
oneiric re-visitation of global architectural history spliced with Chinese
characteristics. Unconvincingly restored Ming complexes co-exist with
space-ship roofed towers and grandiose domed edifices from an imagined
1920s. They’re doing something ambitious with the river, but it’s hard to
quite tell what.
We spent the morning at Qianling Park, right at the edge of the city, and
an amazing place to visit. Forested misty hills, covered in obscure
Buddhist carvings, with the province’s largest temple at the top.
Thousands of monkeys populate the park, and even though some of these now
form a welfare-dependent semi-criminal underclass, they were still the
best-behaved wild simians we’ve yet encountered — fearless, dignified,
entertaining, and pacific. (There was no sign of the ‘heavy begging’ we’ve
encountered among macaques elsewhere in China — let alone among the
terrifying monkey gangs in India — and I’m putting that down to the
Buddhist influence.)
ADDED: Anshun, the gateway into central Guizhou, is a scruffy town of
roughly 400,000. Our hotel — The Triumphal (seriously) — was supposedly a
4-star, everything about it was vaguely dysfunctional, and the Chintz
aesthetics were like needles in the eyeballs. (The room included its own
Internet-connected computer, which meant that both the machine and the
connection were scarcely endurable.)
Once out into the scenic areas (no easy task), the squalor and hassle was
thoroughly redeemed. We were ‘doing’ geology rather than ethnography, so
the main cultural stimulus was provided by Miao grannies selling cucumbers
and boiled eggs to the tourists (all Chinese, as far as we could tell).
The area around Huangguoshu — where a new city has been built on (tourist
industry) spec. — is dominated by vast, rugged, karst tracts: canyons,
caverns, sculpted mountain-pillars, and brutally-sliced cliffs, cross-cut
by innumerable waterways and small lakes. It’s truly stunning.
A high point for us was passing behind the Huangguoshu Great Waterfall
(Dapubu), climbing through a series of winding limestone caves that broke
out intermittently into open ledges, in front of which the largest
waterfall in Asia deluged downwards thunderously. We’d already explored
the mind-melting Tianxing area earlier in the day [insert karst landscape
superlatives here] and were bouncing against the outer limits of
stimulation absorption.
Philosophical stimulation? One curiosity of special note (at Tianxing) had
the English label ‘The Root of the Human Race’ — it was indeed a root, of
some old, tough rock-clinging creeper, but it only really made sense in
Chinese, because “Human Race” translated the character ‘ren’ (very roughly
an inverted ‘V’), and what was being described was a rising cascade of
converging connections. The ‘ren’ ideogram is sometimes explained as an
image of convergence, so the Tianxing root was radicalizing [sic] a
pre-existing conception, but one that blatantly contradicts the dominant
image of human ancestry — whether Darwinian or Biblical — as a ‘tree’
diverging from a single root. It has the potential to be upsetting in all
kinds of ways, so I’ve reserved this creeper a stretch of undistracted
attention sometime soon …
May 1, 2013Hong Kong
Latest travel distraction is the world capital of the
technocommercialists. Of course, it’s a city that I adore to the edge of
brain-stem seizure. Just seeing the Kowloon container port is almost
enough to persuade one that the process on this planet is actually going
OK.
Naively, I had expected that Mandarin would have made some obvious inroads
since the last time I was here (roughly six years ago). No sign of that,
though. It’s quite stunning how much English there is here, and the extent
to which English remains the default alternative to Cantonese. That has to
have important implications in respect to the cultural foundations of Hong
Kong autonomy.
Expeditionary inertialization due to exhausted children prevented
exploration getting off the ground today. Nothing too adventurous is
likely to happen, but I’ll try to record a few sporadic notes here. Hong
Kong is an iconic city, with an exceptional intensity of sociopolitical
meaning, so it should be possible to discuss — and even argue about — it.
I’m only here (with family) for a few days, then returning to Shanghai for
six weeks of solitary, extremely high-intensity production. After
Thursday, if anybody has extravagant demands to make, it’s the time to
make them. Whatever is ever going to be possible should be possible soon.
Most likely, I’ll learn some crushing lessons about project feasibility,
because all my excuses will be gone.
ADDED: Hong Kong has to be a critically
important example for the development of the sovereignty discussion. It’s
almost certainly the freest society in the world, whilst quite clearly
under the sovereignty of a nation that, even to its its most ardent
defenders, equally certainly isn’t. Perhaps this doesn’t rise to the level
of a paradox. After all, up until 1997, when it served (retrospectively)
as a crucial case of the neoreactionary thesis — distinguishing liberty
and democracy with extreme clarity — the structure was not altogether
different. Even then, the colonial metropolis was evidently pitched at a
far lower level of liberty than its comparatively small, powerless, and
insultingly disposable possession. Given the international image of the
PRC, however, it would surely be hard to argue that the peculiarity had
not been exacerbated.
In Hong Kong, the PRC ‘oversees’ an outpost that operates as a zone of
uninhibited reflection upon its ideologically hyper-sensitive motherland.
There are many ways to explore this. It connects with the larger issue of
Cantonese ethnic self-consciousness — a topic of truly immense
significance for China’s medium-term future. It has important academic and
media dimensions. It also shapes the concrete reality of China’s
engagement with the world, especially in its most ‘deterritorialized’ or
cosmo-capitalist dimension.
On this trip, the area which brought it most into focus was the visual
arts. Most particularly, a fascinating exhibition at the Asia Society Hong
Kong Center called
Light before Dawn: Unofficial Chinese Art 1974-1985. This show
covered material that might have been found in Shanghai today, except what
would have been explored approximately, cautiously, and with nervous
cunning in Shanghai, was brought together brazenly and (for anyone
habituated to mainland cultural norms) provocatively in Kong Kong. The
message of the exhibition was stark: Socialist Realism was benighted, and
the cultural escape from the command economy era was a liberation from
totalitarian night. The three decades from 1949-79 were a horror story,
from which China has been released. It scarcely needs to be said that this
is not a narrative in conformity with the ‘official’ PRC storyline of
Reform and Opening, and its historical meaning.
Setting aside the details of the show, for the moment, the questions it
raises concern Hong Kong, China, sovereignty, and cultural autonomy. Does
China surreptitiously appreciate this offshore zone of critical leverage?
Does it merely tolerate Hong Kong’s role as gadfly, due to the preeminence
of other factors, and interests? (Chinese mainland capitalism clearly
makes massive use of the ‘One Country Two Systems’ arrangement, in many
different ways.) How functional is a peripheral zone of exorbitant
freedom, considered abstractly, as an appendage to large-scale
authoritarian social structures in general? Could this be the way that a
rational apparatus of power realistically discriminates, eagerly seizing
upon an invaluable exemption from impractical universalism? That is what
Outside in suspects.
June 29, 2013Vietnam (scraps)
My Vietnam is like my China: accessed from the South, from the mega-urban,
commercial culture, and from pre-communist traditions. It’s very much the
view from Saigon (and that isn’t something I regret). Saigon would be a
great place to live (in small part because the idea of calling it Ho Chi
Minh City is a transparent joke).
Doi Moi looks like it should work a lot like Gaige Kaifeng (as a local
version of generic ‘Reform and Opening’ in a ‘Market Leninist’ regime) —
but it doesn’t seem to be quite working out. If rationalized corruptocracy
is close to ideal limit of effective government among large states,
Vietnam seems to have managed the corruptocracy far better than the
rationalization. Infrastructure development — the magic sauce of recent
Chinese hyper-growth — has not reached ignition. The country is too small
to fund its own ambitions, and too chaotically kleptocratic to bring in
foreign investment on the scale required. Despite many excellent things
going for it, the country is floundering with a morose economic spirit
that is almost Western.
Vietnamese coffee is among the most sublime
offerings this tortured planet supplies. Thick, dark, and massively
caffeinated, it makes a Starbucks brew seem like dishwater. One cup and
the flight has paid for itself, as far as the utilitarian calculus is
concerned.
A visit to Saigon’s fine arts museum is a grave disappointment. The
building is a beautiful colonial structure, but the contents — once
despicable trash had been ceremoniously burned — would fill a small room.
There’s no way Vietnam will be setting the world art market on fire in the
immediate future.
Cao Dai is very strange. Created as a new religion in 1926, with the
obvious brief to make spiritual sense of Vietnam’s peculiar position with
cultural history and geography, it canonized Victor Hugo and Sun Yat-sen
as signatories of “the third alliance between God and man” (after Moses
and Jesus). Cao Dai’s Masonic founder, Nguyen Gia Tri, rounded out the new
sacred triumvirate.
“I saw an eye” was the way my seven-year-old daughter recorded her
experience of the main Cao Dai temple. That would be the Sauronic Cosmic
Eye, repeated obsessively as a motif, overlooking the white-robed devotees
during their observances. The quantity of lurid symbolism is quite
overwhelming. For anybody with the slightest attachment to a restrained
religious tradition, the effect would be one of unbridled spiritual chaos.
Apparently good natured, and seriously interesting, though.
Vietnamese water puppet theater — more engaging than I had expected.
[Typing on this device is killing me — I’m heading out into the fragrant
tropical night for a cigarette.]
January 17, 2014Angkor (scraps)
Siem Reap (Cambodia) is a scruffily exotic town that never threatens to
over-stretch the adjective bank. For anyone who has been out of the
tropics for a while, it’s charming enough, and the locals are pleasant,
dignified folk. Our hotel, with its hints of French colonial heritage and
lush foliage is more than OK (as long as you don’t make the mistake of
testing their catering capabilities). Siem Reap, however, is just a
jump-off point.
The Angkor sites, in contrast, incinerate all available positive
adjectives within seconds, threatening speechlessness. It’s absolutely
necessary to assume a front-rank wonders-of-the-world baseline in what
follows, with awe-struck mind-melt accepted as the default perceptual mode
(in the absence of, and in addition to, any explicit qualification). There
might be more stunning spectacles to be found on this earth, but that
would require a serious argument.
The Angkor temples were constructed over a
period of 630 years, reaching a climactic golden age of architectural
production in the 14th and early 15th centuries. Go read a history book (I
still need to).
Angkor Thom is an entire temple city, with large tracts of rain forest
within its walls, and a moat of lake-like scale without. One architectural
feature well worth noting at an early stage follows from the fact that the
Khmers never mastered the arch, so their internal spaces have a massy,
geological character, often rising to impressive heights, but without
culminating vaults. Technically, therefore, it is a kind of anti-gothic,
ascending through sheer mountainous upsurge of stacked stone, rather than
gravity-defying structure. It is if the earth were imperiously commanded
to soar, without the slightest hint of sublimation into anything other
than itself. These are fabulously sculpted artificial mountains — sacred
mesas. According to my guidebook, there are 11,000 carved figures and
1.2km of bas reliefs on the Bayon — the core of Angkor Thom. These
carvings were detailed to the level of fine textile design on the skirts
of miniature dancers, while including giant enigmatic faces several meters
across (and in great number).
Angkor Wat is not only a monumental aesthetic composition, but also an
enthralling philosophical puzzle. As befits the final days of the snake
year, it is a symbolic complex strung together by nagas. These
seven-headed serpent monsters are arrayed around the site as guardians,
rearing up from the end of every balustrade. They also figure prominently
on the series of huge, continuous bas reliefs that wrap the main
structure, and — truly provocatively — provide hoods for numerous Buddha
statues throughout the site. (Angkor Wat is thought to be devoted
primarily to Vishnu, with Buddhism present as a later arrival.) This
hissing religious insidiousness needs futher attention at a future point.
Click image to enlarge.
(Five-headed nagas are atypical — this one was found at Ta Prohm.)
The third prominent naga moment occurs on the most revered of the bas
reliefs, which depicts the ‘stirring of the ocean of milk’. A quick step
back first …
Viewed panoramically, Angkor Wat epitomizes timeless serenity. Close
examination of its narrative carvings, however, reveals an obsession with
war. Armies clash, and parade, on earth and in the heavens. Even the
torments of the underworld have the character of military atrocity —
stabbings, slashings, and impalings. The cosmos depicted tends to a
slaughterhouse.
It is here that the naga key can be inserted. The stirring of the ocean of
milk (the Milky Way?) is a tug-of-war between gods and demons — a cosmic
war, therefore, whose thread is the vast naga Vasuki, whose body is
stretched across a hundred meters (?) of delicately-carved display space.
Crucially, a central pivot, consisting of Mount Mandala resting upon the
body of Vishnu in turtle-form, converts this conflictual back-and-forth
into rotary dynamism — appropriating war to a celestial function …
Click image to enlarge.
ADDED: The third temple in the core of the Angkor complex is Ta Prohm. For
sheeraesthetic rapture, it might be the most stunning. (I’m going to add
some snaps as soon as bandwidth considerations allow that.)
Ta Prohm has been shattered and devoured by the jungle, with broken
masonry fused (at once beautifully and hideously) with monstrous trees. It
thus vividly presents a hard collision between culture and nature in the
starkest possible terms. The trees conducting the slow-motion assault are
known locally as ‘spung’ (botanically: tetramelesnudiflora). No director
could have chosen better assailants than these behemoths, with massive,
twisting roots. It was obvious from this spectacle that trees do tentacle
horror even more impressively than cephalopods, if allowance is made for
the inhuman time factor.
An almost equally superb example of semi-digested cyclopean civilization
is found at Beng Mealea, a two-hour tuk tuk ride away, through
jungle-fringe countryside. The heritage preservation problems of
intervening in this titanic clash are fascinating to contemplate. How does
one appropriately restore — or merely save — an intricately-carved shrine
half-eaten by a colossal tree? Is a formula even imaginable?
January 21, 2014Cambodia (scraps)
The Angkor remains tend to overwhelm the experience of the country —
probably as the pharonic remains of ancient Egypt do there. The better
half raised some thought-provoking points about the situation. A regime
based on god-king sovereignty, caste, and war — hardcore even by the
wildest imaginings of contemporary reactionaries, therefore (and with no
hint of ‘neo-’ in sight) — created a legacy that continues to support the
country six centuries after the collapse of the Khmer kingdom. How does
this affect calculations of social order, economics, and time? It
certainly inclines the mind toward illiberal musings.
***
Cambodian money is a study in the contemporary world order. In Siem Reap,
especially, the economy is fully dollarized. The local currency, the Riel,
is worth USD0.00025, and we never came across a note worth more than 25
cents until leaving SR. Riels were used as change (compensating for the
absence of US specie). Seignorage bitchez. Everyone says it doesn’t amount
to much in aggregate, but the symbolism is certainly something.
In Kampot, we threw a chunk of the local economy into chaos trying to
break a 10 dollar bill. The first group of street traders we approached
had no idea whar it was (might as well have been some kind of arcane
futures contract). It was only when we got into the center of town that
‘money’ and ‘small change’ became differentiable concepts?
***
The whole ‘Khmer Rouge accelerated dysgenics’ idea makes a lot of sense,
conceptually, but the locals seem competent enough on the evidence
provided by casual exposure. Given where the country has been, it seems to
be doing OK.
The second HBDish (or as we say ‘Spandrellish’) point raised in respect to
the Vietnamese was ‘tropical work habits’ — I’ll plead agnosticism, while
reluctantly noting that Siem Reap contained the first “6-11s” I’ve ever
seen …
***
Cambodian politics? Not much new information really, except (1) the state
of media openness seems quite high (for better and for worse, given the
chronic Cathedralism of the contemporary journalistic mind), and (2) the
pervasive promotion of the Cambodian People’s Party is recognizably
‘communist’ in its indifference to the pseudo-binary balance recognized by
friend and foe alike as the hegemonic global norm. Going out on a limb,
I’d hazard that the country is doing well by effectively suppressing
anything beyond nominal democracy, but the pressure to deteriorate will
only get worse.
***
Being disconnected in stages is a new experience. All connectivity
disappeared at 9pm last night (or so) — it wasn’t something I appreciated.
Satellite-linked neuro-embedded chip? Yes please.
***
Conversations with a Tuk Tuk Driver #1 (Democracy):
Us: “So who did you support in the last election?’
TTD: “I voted for Sam Rainsy.”
US: “What did you like about him?”
TTD: “He promised to spend more money on things. Hun Sen is spending a lot
of money, but Sam Rainsy said he would spend even more money.”
Conversations with a Tuk Tuk Driver #2 (Colonialism):
Us: “This place [a pepper farm] is great. [Joking, to kids] Would you like
to become Cambodian pepper farmers?”
TTD [jumping in]: “Easy. There’s a lot right next door available for
US$6,000. Enough space to grow pepper, mangoes, papaya, bananas, keep some
chickens, some cows — that’s really good money, cows.”
Us: “It sounds like a lot of work.”
TTD: “No problem! Cambodian people would do all the work. You could just
lie in hammocks, telling them what to do. They’d do all the farming, ask
if you want something to eat, bring you drinks …”
[more later]
January 26, 2014Scrap snaps (#1)
The Mogao Caves are located in a harsh place. (Click on images to
enlarge.)
The caves shown are in the northern cluster, whose exterior features have
not been defaced by reinforced concrete. The southern group has been
externally ruined by Zhou Enlai (although he seems to have meant well),
but its interiors are the great treasures of the site, and some are open
to the public, by guided tour. Some images of southern cave interiors
(reconstructions) to follow.
April 12, 2014Scrap snaps (#2)
Photography is forbidden in the Dunhuang grottoes, and under the close
supervision of the mandatory tour, this prohibition is strictly enforced.
Photography is also forbidden in the adjacent Mogaoku Museum …
The spine of the museum consists of a row of (extremely impressive) cave
reconstructions, sampled from among the 492 decorated caves at the site.
(A two-hour tour of the site takes in perhaps 10.)
The following images are of reconstructions, not originals. The
photographic quality is especially dire, given the unusual lighting
conditions and cramped space. What I’m posting here is what I’ve got.
(Click on images to expand.)
Cave 003:
Cave 217 (one of the most renowned caves,
whose images — disputedly — convey scenes and stories from the
Lotus Sutra):
Cave 275:
Cave 419:
April 13, 2014Disconnection
Unplugged in Gulang Yu (involuntarily). Normal service to be resumed ASAP.
Here‘s some soft jungle to be going on with.
… Damn, POS pseudo-connection can‘t even manage that.
(Have they hung Bryce yet?)
ADDED: Looks like it’s possible (finally) to put up a few tropical retreat
snaps (and seems like they’re clickable):
(I can’t get enough of this arborohorror.) One more:
ADDED: The two posts that have made all this (‘Trannygate’) craziness
worthwhile —
(1) Nyan Sandwich
at
More Right “…
is Neoreaction a heretical political-insight-seeking movement, or a
right-wing activist movement?”
(2) Nick B Steves
on
the Official Neoreactionary Position (endorsed
by the most right-wing person on the Internet).
May 30, 2014Shenzhen
The new airport doesn’t by any means say it all, but it says a lot:
If it were not that ‘modernity’ (also) connoted friction and nostalgia,
would there be any hesitation in describing Shenzhen as the most modern
city in the world? It is nothing beyond what the opportunities of the
present era have enabled it to be — a uniquely unambiguous urban seizure
of the global now. (Urban Future adores this place to the edge of
neurological catastrophe.)
[Disjointed commentary to be added as the opportunity arises]
Huaqiang Bei — Chips with everything:
Shenzhen, and Huaqiang Bei in particular, places absolutely unapologetic
euphoric commoditization on display. This is the world’s Gizmoverse.
No one can have even the faintest idea how massively electronic production
differentiates into lineages, species, sub-species, and minutely subtle
varieties, until they wander through these markets. Combining innovative
variation, replication at mind-melting scales, and fierce commercial
selection (expressed through adaptive minutiae of product specification
and price), the ecological analogy — based on fabulously complex networks
of competition and cooperation — is irresistible. The electronic jungle is
open to exploration.
Each product line opens niches for others. Not only are there dazzling
multitudes of mobile phone types — an entire phylum now, honing classical
forms, and branching off chaotically down lines of mutation — but also
symbiotc industries for phone cases (“protective shells”), stands,
re-chargers, input and output accessories, cables and connectors, each
assertively seizing its patches of commercial display space.
The Huaqiang Bei outlets are described as ‘factory shops’ — sheer
industrial exuberance jutting into exchange space. As an indicator, bulk
discounts are the norm. Buy a single gizmo of any kind and the deal is met
with the friendly but puzzled question: “Only one piece?” Racks of
Cyberspace candy tilt towards rapid circulatory flow.
More (always massively more) on a descent into the commoditronic core of
intensive modernity:
(There are other aspects to Shenzhen than turbular emergent machine-mind
markets, and they deserve a chilled Shenzhen post. Then, some deeper
engagement with the seething interior of Darwinized social logistics,
competitive supply, or the Commoditronic Thing.)
September 12, 2014Scrap note (#14)
… Shenzhen fragments (from the world’s tech-comm paradise).
Sucking up to the specter of Sino-Capitalism:
Ironically, my connectivity here is so bad it’s driving me out of my mind,
so this is arriving in pieces …
Our hotel is in Huaqiang Bei, the center of
the Shenzhen electronic market zone. The area is packed with emporia,
which are in turn packed with products — and more specifically
commodities. Rather than masking the traits of commercial
mass-production under a veneer of ’boutique’ rarity, the Shenzhen spirit
is most gloriously manifested in the naked exhibition of hyper-alienated,
techno-proliferated, trade-format volumes. Chips (of all kinds)
come in sheets, which are then stacked into piles, and tessalated into
display places designed to minutely explore minimal differences (product
micro-specifications and volume-linked price slices). This is capitalism.
It’s easy — in a decline-phase Westernized world — to forget what it looks
like.
Cables:
Skynet embryo chips in the Huitong Professional Security Market:
The drone market is only just getting started (at least, we didn’t see any
stacks):
September 13, 2014NZ Scraps
Fragments from the West Coast, plus some bits and pieces.
Currently in a gothic inspiration — the Otira Hotel — just beyond Arthur’s
Pass. Bought for one million dollars, along with the whole village of
forty houses. It’s on the rail-line, but remained on the market for years
because:
1) It’s a Gold Rush ghost town with no economic base
2) It’s deep in a valley that plunges it into permanent shadow for half
the year
3) There’s a massive quake due (on the fault-line it straddles) which is
expected to destroy everything
The new owners have stuffed the hotel bar with Gold Rush antiques,
taxidermy specimens, the first telegraph cable, freaky life-size
marionettes … it should be getting dark for the full effect (but it isn’t
yet) …
On an Internet ration tonight (Dec. 27.), but I’m going to try to keep
this alive — meaning updates undramatized by an ‘ADDED’. Also pics (but
some slight time lag likely there).
The NZ west coast is dominated by a near-continuous strip of temperate
rain forest, blurring into sub-tropical rain forest in the north. The
peculiar local vegetation, including numerous species of giant ferns, give
the landscape a prehistoric flavor. It’s also extremely rugged, with the
western slopes of the NZ alps cascading right down to the coast. The sea
is brutal, and the coastline deeply mauled. The early exploration of this
area was
tough. It’s
conspicuously Gnon-tinged geography. (Patience needed on the pix front,
apologies.)
Only 30,000 people live on the west coast of the South Island — and most
of them are trying with greater or lesser urgency to leave. The landscape
is glorious (the British Columbia comparison is inescapable). Once drone
logistics make it viable to survive in web-linked isolation in this area,
it’s going to make a spectacular refuge. For the moment, it’s populated by
hippies, hill-billies, and extraction-industry social detritus (a great
horror fiction mix, however — drugs, guns, and expendables).
Finally — NZ West Coast
pics (via the better half).
December 25, 2014Singapore
No one really denies that Singapore is the most functional
society on earth, which is interesting in itself. Everything works here
(even multiculturalism (of which they have the superior Confucian hegemony
version, rather than the ethno-masochistic late-Christian fiasco)).
Practical civilization reaches its zenith in the orchid zone of the
Singapore botanic gardens, or somewhere close to it. This drives a lot of
people — even those who profoundly admire the place — into a sulfurous
rage.
No one likes an apple-polisher of Gnon (or scarcely anyone, I’m exempting
myself, along with a few others). By demonstrating social functionality,
Singapore makes everyone look bad, which doesn’t go down well.
The Sings make us all look like useless scum. Yes, there is that.
Conversation snippets:
“How much crime is there in Singapore?”
“Not much. I saw a sign saying ‘Warning! Five bicycles have been stolen
from this area in the last three years.’ People were leaving them there
unlocked.”
“I’ve known a lot of Singaporeans, but I’ve never really had a Singaporean
friend. … If you’re used to going out on a Friday night, getting hammered,
and waking up in the morning feeling like crap, it’s hard. No one does
that here. The Singaporeans are sensible all the freaking time …”
The stairwell door to the apartment where we’re staying has a biometric
identification system (plus two redundant human security guards).
The demographic problem — I’m increasingly convinced — is hugely about
education costs (in money and time). It’s k-selection catastrophe. That’s
a can to be kicked down the road for the time being, though, because no
one has a solid solution to offer right now. Mentioned here because it’s
deep, highly general, and the
only criticism of Singapore that deserves to be taken remotely
seriously.
3.5 million citizens, and 1.5 million permanent residents. (‘PRs’ are
obligated to do national military service.)
I’ll try to update this further (and if I was Singaporean I’d almost
certainly deliver).
January 7, 2015Scrap snaps (#3)
Huangshan — It isn’t K2 (but then I’d never be idiotic enough to try
scaling K2.)
April 2, 2016Vietnam (scraps) II
Arrived in Hanoi a few hours ago (first time in the northern part of
Vietnam). Will be here a couple of days, then down south to Hoi An, and
Hue. I’ll try to ad some notes pics, in stages.
One less than massively-inspired snap so far, of the Hanoi Old Quarter,
(near our hotel):
Anyone with a particular desire to know that
I’m nodding along in glum agreement can feel free to tell me its one of
the most execrable pieces of photographic garbage to yet soil the
terrestrial infosphere. Hoping, in inadequate excuse, that it gives some
vague hint of the local atmosphere. Will try to up my game to a more
ordinary level of sub-mediocrity in the days ahead.
(Organization this time should be up to a reasonably competent Chaos Patch
tomorrow.) A
ADDED: At the shrine of the Long Do God, heaps of ‘Choco-Pops’ packets and
a pyramid of canned beers offered solemnly in sacrifice.
May 14, 2016NZ Stuff
Barry Crump is seen as
capturing
the edge of the place. There’s a recent
movie based on
one of his books (recommended for the Outer-Anglosphere cultural flavour).
There’s also a route to Samuel Butler,
through
the back country.
The outlaw myth is far more integral to the Anglo culture than much of NRx
can easily be happy about. Everyone is going to sympathise with the
runaways, not with the search party.
Some (real) advice from the bush: “Keep moving or you’ll be eaten.”
(Deeper than it was meant to be at the time.)
December 22, 2016Disconnection VI
Posted from Tokyo, first time in Japan, which is awesome so far.
An open society without being stupid about it would be the NRx
fast-summary (sound, but limited). It was vastly easier to get
into Japan than the United States.
Staying in the AirB&B equivalent of a coffin-hotel, but the situation
is good (in Ueno).
Civilization level meets high expectations, and friendliness level exceeds
them.
Much more English signage than expected, and the inherited Chinese
characters have preserved their meanings, if not their phonological
values, so the urban landscape is surprisingly intelligible.
Micro-artisan businesses of extreme excellence, typically run by elderly
people, are everywhere.
Automation dialed up to eleven.
Yet to see a single over-weight person (which out-performs the
stereotype).
Ginza:
January 27, 2017
SECTION A - NEO-TRADITIONALISM
Neo-Traditionalism
Paradox prompts thought. Arriving at the unthinkable after proceeding,
step-by-step, along the path of reason, unsettles comfortable mental
routines and points – obscurely – towards something new. Nothing twists
this prompt more intensely than time-paradox, which grates thought open
upon the basic tangles of reality.
The main creative current of Shanghai visual arts grasps this
instinctively. Whilst predictably multidimensional (and in other respects
unpredictable), the work revealed by Shanghai artists and art spaces
gravitates distinctively towards themes and techniques that can be
plausibly described as neo-traditionalist. This inherently
paradoxical inclination is itself a deep tradition, with relevance far
beyond the visual arts and knotted roots that can be traced back to the
Song Dynasty.
At the Shanghai Himalayas Museum Inaugural
Exhibition
(scheduled to last until the end of September), this neo-traditionalist
tendency is represented with unprecedented scope and penetration. Entitled
Yi Xiang (意象) in Chinese, it has been translated (lamentably)
into ‘Insightful Charisma’ in English, but this is only a minor tripping
point. (‘Meaning Manifested’ would have been far superior.)
Yi Xiang, or the tension between essentials and their expression,
echoes China’s
historic
neo-traditionalist response to the challenge of modernization, as
formulated during the Qing and Republican period: ‘Chinese learning as
essence, Western learning as application’ (Zhongxue wei ti, Xixue wei yong, 中学为体,西学为用). Further scattered echoes of this deep impulse – to
guarded assimilation – can be heard, preserved even through superficial
inversion, in such recent expressions as ‘Socialism with Chinese
characteristics’.
Yi Xiang is a complex exhibition, divided into five sections,
each labeled by a single Chinese character. Threaded through each is a
neo-traditionalist current, modulated in different ways. This is most
economically grasped as a refusal to decide between past and future,
tradition and modernity, but to aesthetically stress both together, in a
single cryptic direction. The inevitable consequence is a time-scrambling
artistic (and curatorial) jolt, which simultaneously progresses into the
past and regresses into the future.
The show is self-consciously refracted through China’s landscape tradition
of shanshui (山水) – literally: ‘mountain, water’ – the aesthetic
fusion of the rigid and the fluid, permanence and change, stability and
flux. Shanshui is extended beyond scenic representation into a
method of historical reflection, exploring an intricate time-scape of
modifications, appropriations, blockages, deluges, accommodations, and
adaptations. The sweep of this insight more than suffices, on its own, to
justify the entire exhibition. (I should note, however, that one brilliant
but determinedly contrarian commentator has interpreted this focus upon
shanshui as an evasion of fengshui, arguably bypassed
due to its politically awkward associations with ‘feudal superstition’.)
Shen (神) or ‘spirit’ is housed in a single softly illuminated
gallery, filled with classic Shanshui works from the Qing, Ming,
and even Song dynasties, along with a smaller number of early modern
pieces directly inspired by them. This exquisite, compact sub-exhibition
elegantly illustrates the way in which the modernization of tradition is
itself a tradition.
Li (理) or ‘reason’ (a term with rich Neo-Confucian
reverberations) is devoted to ‘Chinese Cube’: an explicitly philosophical
uptake of the classic Yijing into a variety of modern codes,
translating tradition into a recursive, cryptographic puzzle box.
Qi (气) or ‘internal force’ (‘familiar’ through the
Dao and Traditional Chinese Medicine), is the largest part of the
show, consisting of cutting-edge works presented within a coherent,
neo-traditionalist curatorial context. The quality of the work displayed
is outstanding, including pieces by Li Hongto, Shao Yan, Wang Jieyin, Wang
Tiande, Yang Yongliang (and Ma Haiping), and many others. (I hope to
return to these artists in future posts.)
Jing (境) or ‘imagery’ is devoted to architecture, with the
neo-traditionalist theme partially displaced into a negotiation between
nature and urban construction. The visionary work of
Ma Yansong dominates this part of the show.
Yun (韵) or ‘rhythm’, with its musical sub-theme, pursues the
involvements of mountains and water more determinedly than any other part
of the show. A complex work by Ding Yi is perhaps the center-piece of this
section.
Neo-traditionalism is the main driver of China’s cultural renaissance, and
the manifested meaning of its greatest aesthetic delights.
Urban Future will be returning to it as frequently as practically
possible.
***
The momentum of modernization is directly proportional to the
restoration of tradition
(discuss).
Abundant evidence relevant to this thesis is on show in Hong Kong, at two
art exhibitions of exceptional interest.
At the Hong Kong Museum of Art,
The Origin of Dao: New Dimensions in Chinese Contemporary Art
(curated by Pi Daojian, open until August 18) exemplifies the infolding of
audacious experimentation into profoundly conservative aesthetic
commitments. The show is divided into two parts. One includes works in a
variety of media, and is moderately stimulating. The other, devoted
entirely to recent ink works (with supporting video) is truly outstanding.
Works by Yang Jiechang, Gu Wenda, Zhang Quan, Shao Yan, Kan Tai-Keung, Qiu
Zhijie, and others, excavate the creative potentialities of traditional
Chinese media and forms, propelling them into a dazzling variety of new
horizons. One especially conspicuous theme is the fluid boundary between
text and image inherited from the Chinese script, evoking meandering lines
of exploration, elaborated in the cryptic gulf between pictorial
representation and intelligible sign. The modernization of native
aesthetic tradition progressively liberates these lines — whether broken
or unbroken — from both resemblance and significance, on a path of escape
into pure form.
Shao Yan demonstrates this trend with particular vividness, through the
creation of ink abstracts poised between calligraphy and landscape. An
accompanying video shows Shao at work, like a gongfu Pollock,
realizing a type of Chinese action painting that draws upon the occult
root of cultivation (anticipated by the equation of calligraphy and
sword-fighting depicted in Zhang Yimou’s Hero).
At the Hong Kong Asia Society,
Light before Dawn: Unofficial Chinese Art 1974-1985 (through to
September 1) concerns the liberation of Chinese art from the constraints
of Socialist Realism, as shown through the work of the Caocao, Wuming, and
Xingxing artists. From both a Neo-Traditionalist and Shanghai perspective,
the Caocao Society works are especially significant, consisting of ink
paintings that explicitly (and provocatively) revive artistic impulses
which had been ideologically proscribed due to their associations with the
Confucian literati. Qiu Deshu’s masterpiece
3-5 Times Shouting (1980) steals the show.
July 29, 2013
CHAPTER ONE - ARTWORKS
Ink-cantations
When art history invokes the ‘contemporary’, it refers to now, the
current moment, and thus points into an unresolved perplexity.
Now remains undefined, whether by science, philosophy, or mystical
religion. Our contemporary ‘now’ is not merely an instant — not even a
stretched or dilated instant. It is a time that is still with us, or which
we continue to participate in, at once proximate and elusive, still
awaiting its sense, obliquely intersecting the narrower present of
chronological location and practical schedules.
The visual arts, at their most reflective, enter into this perplexity as
into an animating spiral. Whilst succumbing to categorization — or time
definition — within a still obscure and incomplete contemporaneity, the
art work can also make the act of definition its own, reaching out into
the now, and telling us what it has found. In doing so it tests
itself against an ultimate abstraction.
In some such now, current but chronologically indeterminable, Chinese
visual art encountered a critical threshold. The difference between
heading forward or backward, advancing or retreating, ceased – at some
‘point’ — to be an option, or a choice. Instead, for that complex cultural
trend and inheritance at once defined as — and defining —
neotraditionalism, true modernity was discovered in the acceptance of tradition
as a path. This wave of creative – even explosive – experimentation
was also an excavation, and a recovery. It demonstrated that innovative
variation was inextricable from the maintenance of a course,
directed into a future already cryptically indicated by the past.
Beyond Black and White: Chinese Contemporary Abstract Ink, on show
at Pearl Lam Galleries (until September 7, 2013), focuses with glorious
intensity upon the neotraditionalist current. In keeping with this focus,
it both fulfills and deranges expectations, through the audacious
explorations of a heritage made new.
The exhibition poises itself between a number of
dynamically balanced dualities. Most graphically, it is integrated by its
primary material, the contrastive complements of black and white, ink and
paper, yin and yang, perturbed only at the margins by subtle
deviations of media, and occasional encroachments of color. Architectural
balance is sustained by the great double-helix of Chinese ink wash
tradition, the distinct but inter-twined lineages of pictorial and
calligraphic expression, image and sign, with each strand inciting the
other into heightened flights of formal abstraction. Past and future – as
already emphasized — are mutually suspended in a multiplied
contemporaneity. Through all of this, Chinese art is re-balanced in the
world, communicating with alternative cultural traditions at the abstract
limit of each, where the escape from formal constraint fuses with the
reality of time.
“Abstract Ink” – as a culmination of tradition — is already distinctively
Chinese, but the true cultural singularity that is pursued here exceeds
the medium, to involve, minimally, a reciprocal creative irritation of
painting and writing – twin twisted tracks that, between them, describe an
aesthetic trajectory into abstraction. The Chinese tradition, propelled by
this double training, cultivates resemblance and significance
simultaneously, and thus, through relentless sublimation, flees both, into
a horizon of purity where strokes and (gray-scale) tones become sheer
flight, or indices of escape — cosmic gestures without substance or
meaning.
Arrayed along the northern end of the gallery, several series of small
pieces by Qiu Zhenzhong undertake systematic experiments with
stroke and tone. Calligraphic scripts are disentangled by cursive lines
into unintelligible forms, or melted through tonal dissolves into the
indefinite, whilst images are simplified to the brink of an archaic
ideography.
Wang Tiande – an artist of obvious centrality to the neotraditional
renaissance – contributes two small pieces worked in his characteristic
subtractive method — which combines stroke and tone in a piercing scorch –
one tilted into his experimental practice from calligraphy, the other from
painting. These pieces represent him (and testify to his importance),
rather than demonstrating his work at its most fully or ambitiously
achieved. Also included is a technically-complex textile work, in which
the scorch method creates a calligraphically-annotated shirt.
Wei Ligang is represented by a single, large, calligraphy-based
work (Unicorn-Crane, 2010), whose golden, flowing background
relaxes the show’s chromatic discipline. Color also creeps in through
Feng Mengbo’s video work (Not Too Late, 2010), which makes
the modernization of tradition both theme and medium.
Qiu Deshu, a bold pioneer of neotraditional revival from the early
1980s, has two pieces on display (Fissuring, and
Fissuring Life, 2012), more remarkable for their intelligence than
their dazzling aesthetic presence. Abstract explorations of paper tearing
and folding, they employ an intermediate ink tone to collapse shape onto
the picture plane, bearing witness to a vanished spatial dimension. (As
with Wang Tiande, the casual encounter with Qiu Deshu in this show is best
taken as an invitation to further engagement with a neotraditionalist
artist of supreme importance.)
For sheer visual drama, the calligraphic dimension of the exhibition is
dominated by Wang Dongling. The three works on show (Tiger Wind, 2010; Benevolence and Integrity, 2013; and
Chuang-Tzu’s “Free and Easy Wandering”, 2013) are not only striking
(even stunning) in themselves, but also remarkable for their extraordinary
variety. Tiger Wind is a large three-character cursive work whose
bold sweeping lines – unmoderated by intermediate tones – compose a frozen
leap of tensed energy. Benevolence and Integrity is a more
architectural work, structured by soul-sucking slabs of abysmal blackness,
whilst Chuang-Tzu’s “Free and Easy Wandering” is a more
traditionally composed work, using serried Chinese script to playfully
explore the combinatorial space of shape and shade. These outstanding
pieces amply reward a visit to the exhibition on their own.
Three superb works by Lan Zhenghui and
Zheng Chongbin complete the more painterly dimension of the show,
displaying the potential of Ink Abstraction at a thrilling level of
aesthetic achievement. Lan Zhenghui’s huge ‘mop’ work (Leap Series No.4, 2010) exuberantly jumbles ink-tones and stroke-angles to construct a
monumental celebration of the medium as a vehicle for artistic liberty.
Zheng Chongbin’s exquisite abstracts (Untitled No.16, 2007; and
Formless, 2010), sharpening the tonal scale with vivid acrylics,
conduct an utterly absorbing visual expedition into the limitless
involvements of light and darkness.
“These artists are part of a growing circle in China that draws
inspiration from traditional Chinese ink painting and its philosophy as
well as Chinese calligraphy,” the gallery explains. As the story of
Chinese neotraditionalism takes shape, Beyond Black and White will surely find a place among the tellers,
as well as in the tale. It is also a feast for sense and thought alike.
Catch it if you can.
Address: Pearl Lam Galleries, 181 Jiangxi Zhong Lu, (G/F), Huangpu
District, Shanghai (021 6323 1989),
online.
August 1, 2013Ningbo
Some time fragmentation is wholly predictable until Wednesday, in Ningbo
(Zhejiang), due to an end of summer family break with berserk offspring.
That was to have been compounded by computer crisis until the excellent IT
guy at the hotel here sorted out what had seemed an insoluble connectivity
problem. We’re at a beautiful Park Hyatt out at the edge of the town, done
out in an aesthetic that mixes Jiangnan elements with the company’s
cosmopolitan minimalism (rough textures, earth tones, and intricate
landscaping seem to be consistent themes.) Our explorations of the city
isn’t likely to amount to much, but there are a couple of cool things to
report on over the next couple of days. My expectation is something like
the Hong Kong activity slump, but on heavy tranquillizers, so I’m throwing
in a Chaos Patch to keep the wolves at the door.
ADDED (August 27): Besides the hotel itself,
the main object of our neo-traditionalist excursion is the
Ningbo Museum,
which won a Pritzker prize for architect Wang Shu last year. Wang was the
architect behind Ningbo’s pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo (2010), a
building I raved about at the time (in obscure places). His most
distinctive design characteristic is monumental facades of brick and tile,
recycled from demolished villages, and tessellated into endlessly
absorbing surfaces, minimally punctuated by irregularly oriented and
distributed windows. These walls look truly fantastic, each being an
intricate composition, subtly incorporating drifts of texture and color
from the non-uniform component elements. Exactly how the construction
process works remains a mystery to me at this point, since it relies upon
an astonishing degree of craft attention at the smallest scale of assembly
— and therefore seems to make economies of standardization and scale
impossible. In any case, somehow it’s done.
The second aspect of the Ningbo Museum is a hybrid structure, marrying the
intricate recycled facades with colossal brutalist structures, consisting
of comparatively homogeneous roughened concrete. The geometric language of
massive angled planes comes straight off the Atlantic Wall 1944, and has
an undeniable military-totalitarian edge. (Whatever one thinks about the
alternative neo-traditionalist aesthetic expressed in our hotel, it
doesn’t seem adamant about engaging in a conversation about death camps.)
Conclusion? Not yet.
August 26, 2013Ningbo Museum
The Ningbo Museum, which won a Pritzker prize for architect Wang Shu last
year, is a challenging edifice. Combining traditional elements and
materials with monumental modernism — in its most uncompromisingly
brutalist manifestation — it realizes a peculiar complex of delicacy and
terror.
Wang’s signature facades already display the same ambiguity in embryo.
His vast sheer planes, shown in the Ningbo Tengtou pavilion at the 2010
Shanghai World Expo (2010), memorialize a demolished past. The bricks and
tiles from obliterated villages are recycled into exquisitely tessellated,
endlessly absorbing surfaces, sparsely punctuated by irregularly oriented
and distributed windows. The tension between crushing scale and intricate
composition is immense (and intimate). Subtle drifts of texture and color
from the non-uniform materials make the walls into sensual displays of
abstract pattern, whilst their massive geometric rigor approaches a state
of absolute menace (with
an unmistakable military-totalitarian edge).
In the structure of the Ningbo Museum, this
tension is compounded to an almost hysterical pitch by a hybrid structure,
fusing the flattened village mosaics with colossal blocks of comparatively
homogeneous textured concrete. The building looks like a modern fortress,
assembled in an architectural language of hard defensive pragmatism. Every
aperture is pressurized in the direction of a slit, as if even
minimal openings were a reluctant concession to weakness and
vulnerability. For the landmark cultural institution of an open,
commercial city, nestled deep within China’s traditionally pacific
Jiangnan region, this structural vocabulary is jarring, and indubitably
provocative. If it has a message, it is not easy to decrypt.
August 29, 2013Blow Ups
Shanghai’s the Power Station of Art is hosting The Ninth Wave, a
solo
exhibition
of work by Cai Guo-Qiang (1957-), through to October 26. It’s … explosive.
The name of the show, and its central exhibit, is taken from a painting
(1850) by Russian artist Ivan Aivazavosky (1817-1900). This image of
inundating disaster is of clear relevance to the show, but it also serves
as a pretext and screen for an adoption of signs that Cai Guo-Qiang
invests with singular (and cryptic) evocations. Deep rhythms of time,
power, and number are a consistent theme flowing through the exhibition.
The Ninth Wave (2014) is a re-purposed boat, crowded with (99)
stuffed animals. It was floated down the Huangpu to be installed in the
show, making it the memorial of an event — a signature of Cai’s work.
Superficially, it’s a Noah’s Ark, and an icon of ecological calamity, but
this barnacled hulk, with its crew of traumatized inhuman survivors, also
satirizes the dramatic narratives — whether comic or tragic — that are
employed to frame the profound, ruinous tides of cosmic transition.
Cai Guo-Qiang has seared his name on the cultural imagination in
fireworks, pursuing an incendiary path to neotraditonalist aesthetic
restoration. Working with gunpowder is the revival of a traditional
Chinese artistic medium. Cai modernizes its potential for public
spectacle, in ‘Explosive Events’ or ‘Pyrotechnic Explosion Projects’ which
are stunningly documented in the show. Yet, among the things Cai explodes
is media compartmentalization. The fallout from his work includes
char-marked images, production diagrams, and video recordings. His
detonations spread across the entire multidimensional domain of visual
aesthetics. Time itself is envisaged as a system of explosions, burns, and
debris.
The Bund Without Us (2014) epitomizes
his usage of gunpowder as method for the production of static images. The
process of creation is staged as an event, in which a complex, controlled
explosion ‘draws’ the picture in gunpowder burns. The image is left as an
aftermath. An enactment of devastation feeds naturally into a narrative of
apocalyptic disappearance. (The title references an ecological catastrophe
fable.)
Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter (2014) was created through an
innovative re-combination of traditional media, depicting the cycle of the
seasons in gunpowder-scorched porcelain. Rhythmic regularity emerges from
a violent process of combustion, excavating a sublime order of recurrence
from both nature and history.
Silent Ink (2014) has ripped up a large gallery space to create
an ink-filled pool, choked with multiple allusions, from the trite to the
abysmal. Once again, a traditional medium is unpredictably modernized,
pouring continuously into a colossal installation that evokes urban
redevelopment, chemical pollution, and quotidian ravaging in general,
while opening onto deeper cosmic themes of harsh time-cycles and
spontaneous restorations. (The title, of course, echoes an
environmentalist
classic.)
Head On (2006) is a huge lupine loop, constructing a frozen
dynamic in three dimensions. Ninety-nine wolves model social history as a
cycle of collective leaps, crises, and dazed re-beginnings. (As in
The Ninth Wave, with its 99 mammalian survivors, Cai escalates
traditional Chinese numerology to figure a point of catastrophe and
reversal.)
Catch the wave, if you can.
Power Station of Art, 200 Huayuangang Lu, Huangpu Qu, Shanghai (86 21 3110
8550), Web.
September 8, 2014The Qin Model Army
Qin Shihuang’s terracotta funerary army hasn’t ever been high on the
UF China attractions list. In Xi’an, there’s no choice but to see
it though.
The site is an extraordinary place. For a start, it is only very
incompletely excavated — deliberately so — making the great halls a
monument to the archaeological enterprise, almost as much as to the
partially-exhumed exhibit itself. Qin Shihuang’s tomb is still
undisturbed. It’s is beyond the capabilities of contemporary archaeology
to deal with it, according to Chinese experts. Mercury saturation from
moats of the alchemically-precious substance add a toxicity problem to the
other technical difficulties.
The worked-site (and exhibition area) is divided into three pits, of which
the first is the hanger-scale structure shown here, in which the vast
majority of the excavated warriors are displayed. Pit-2 presents the
opportunity for a closer look at individual warriors. Pit-3 dramatizes the
archaeological effort with special intensity.
The slogan “Dreams from the Qin Dynasty come true” might strike those of a
more Confucian inclination with some misgivings, but it seems to have been
selected as the condensation of the site’s official meaning. The
non-uniformity of the model army, which is the main aesthetic point
foregrounded, might perhaps be a hook for some ideological ambiguity. It’s
not being presented as a fantasy of clone troopers, at least.
May 8, 2015Art Machined
Mohammad Salemy produces a
manifesto
for the deepening machine age. “What makes this experiment necessary is
the severity of the cultural crisis in which art stubbornly refuses to
find itself.”
‘Manifesto’ is a UF categorization, that responds to the text’s
dominant imperative tone, as exemplified by: “Art needs to be removed from
its contemporary ivory tower to deal with the implications of its
appearance, but unlike twentieth-century modernisms, today art cannot
afford to be solely about the limitations of its supporting material, or
only conceived in relation to its own history and ontology.”
Much, too, though for awkward contemplative nihilists:
Art, whether artists agree or not, is the void of meaning folded in
cognitive wrapping paper, visible only as the surface of cognition and
as the materialization of both the historical and semantic emptiness
which it carries. It is a series of verifiable claims inserted into the
real world and reified to take up the empty space of meaning, a void
occupying another void.
September 10, 2015
CHAPTER TWO - CONFUCIAN RESTORATION
Confucian Restoration
One of the many reasons to be suspicious about political activism on the
Occidental off-spectrum right is the parochialism that feeds it. There is
a global process that will settle what occurs in its broad structure,
making local pretensions to decisive ideological agency simply ridiculous.
The fundamental economic outcome — and thus the fate of the world — is not
ultimately controllable even by the central financial administrations of
the major world powers (unless certain intriguing axioms of radical
contemporary fascism are defensible), so the idea that extremely
marginalized Western cabals are positioned to seize the political driving
seat is so saturated in self-deception that it wastes everybody’s time. In
addition, technological developments complicate all economic forecasts
essentially, and obscurely. We cannot even approximately delimit what
unforeseen technical breakthroughs could entail.
The geopolitical context is even clearer. The
collapse of Islam, and rise of China, are re-organizations of the world so
evident in their unfolding, so vast in their implication, and so
inadequately thought, that they make a mockery of all political programs
yet conceived. It is first necessary to know, if only in roughest outline,
what is taking place in profundity — tidally, and inexorably — before
determining an ideologically relevant act. The process comes first.
Already in Moldbug, and increasingly elsewhere, there are signs within
some of the most thoughtful regions of the Occidental ‘reactosphere’ that
could be interpreted as a pre-adaptation to an impending Chinese global
hegemony (complementary to the decline of the West). The most recent is
here. When we entertain speculations about the nature of ‘our’ envisaged
reaction, it cannot be realistically disentangled from what the world will
have become. (I’ve been dismissive of Moldbug’s “Call me Mencius” line in
the past, not — I hope — vindictively, but out of the anticipation that we
will increasingly be talking about the original Mencius, and the potential
for confusion is already visible.)
From the (cultivated) Chinese perspective, the structure of world history
is not defined through modes of Abrahamic eschatology, but with respect to
deep rhythms of Confucian Restoration, describing a spiral, in which
advance and return are synthesized. If the hypothesis of a continuing
trend to a more Chinese world is — at least momentarily — granted
credibility, then the present (second) epoch of Confucian Restoration is
the key to historical intelligibility on a global scale.
Mou Zongsan could
prove more important to us than any Western political theorist writing
today. The restoration he conceives has the remarkable advantage of
already taking place. He does not have to imagine what ‘would be
nice’, and because he doesn’t, neither do we. Instead, we can explore what
is in fact happening, even if from an angle that remains unfamiliar. An
alternative order need not be extracted from the rot and ruin of the old.
The new Urban Future site should be going up in the next few
days, re-focused by a division of labor with this blog. The dark thrills
of collapse will still dominate here, but UF2 will devote itself to the
lineaments of a restored civilization and a renewed modernity which are —
from the perspective of Shanghai — much closer to ‘home’. When the
threshold is passed, of course, I’ll invite you all over. It won’t be so
rough over there, so please take your shoes off at the door.
June 10, 2013Mou Zongsan
Jason Clower has edited an indispensable volume of Mou Zongsan’s writings
(Late Works of Mou Zongsan: Selected Essays in Chinese Philosophy, forthcoming). In the first words of his introduction, he says: “If
twentieth-century China produced a philosopher of the first rank, it was
Mou Zongsan.” This judgment strikes me as near-irresistible. A taste (from
two of the first three essays):
From Objective Understanding and the Remaking of Chinese Culture
…to adapt to the times you have to understand the times. For that you
need right knowledge of the present age (xiandai 現代)
… Compared to political and social activities, the influence of
scholarly culture is an influence on a virtual level (xuceng
虛層), but “the virtual governs the solid” (xu yi kong shi 虛以控實) and its influence is wide and far-reaching, which is why I
call it a “decisive influence.” We should not take it lightly and think
that it is not an urgent matter.
***
… to have objective understanding. The first step is to understand
ourselves; the second step is to understand the West. Then we can look
for the way out for Chinese culture, and we hope that our young friends
will take on this responsibility. In its simple essentials, this
responsibility is to revive the ancient meaning of Greek philosophy. Its
original meaning was what Kant defined as a “doctrine of practical
wisdom” (shijian de zhihuixue 實踐的智慧學). And what
is wisdom? Only “yearning after the highest good” is wisdom. As most
people know, philosophy is the “love of wisdom,” and the “love” in
question is the kind of love that is “heartfelt yearning for that
highest good in human life and constantly wanting to put it into
practice.” That is why Kant called “philosophy” in its ancient Greek
sense a “doctrine of practical wisdom.” The term is very apt. But this
ancient meaning of philosophy has already been lost in the West.
Nowadays all that is left is linguistic analysis under the conditions of
advanced civilization, with logic having been reduced to applied
computing. This does not actually count as philosophy, only the
degeneration of philosophy into a technology. To enter into the depths
of philosophy, it has to be that “love of wisdom,” the “yearning after
the highest good.” But though the West has forgotten it, this sense of
philosophy has been preserved in the Chinese tradition, as what the
Chinese ancients called “teachings” (jiao 教). Buddhism
exemplifies the meaning of “teachings” most clearly, but Confucianism
has it too, as the “teaching” referred to in the Doctrine of the Mean
when it says, “The understanding that arises from authenticity is called
our nature, and the authenticity that arises from understanding is
called teaching,” and when it says, “What heaven decrees is called our
nature; following our nature is called the Way; cultivating the Way is
called teaching.” The meaning of “teaching” here is not institutional
education as currently practiced, which takes knowledge as its standard.
Rather, it is “philosophy,” the “yearning after the highest good” of a
doctrine of practical wisdom.
***
Nowadays in the West, Anglo-American analytic philosophy is in command,
and the most famous on the European continent are Heidegger’s
existential philosophy and Husserl’s phenomenology, the “dainty
philosophies” (xianqiao zhexue 纖巧哲學) of the
twentieth century, uninformed by the great Way of the
gentleman superior man. Only that which connects upwardly
(shangtong 上通) with noumenon or being-in-itself
(benti 本體) counts as informed by the great Way of the
gentleman superior man, whereas those two men do not have an
idea of noumenon. So as far as I am concerned, Husserl’s phenomenology,
though written so tortuously and with such show, is at bottom
impoverished to the point of having no content at all. For it has lost
the wisdom of method and given up philosophy’s stock-in-trade, so that
all that is left for it is to say empty words. All those questions of
theirs can just be consigned to science; what need is there for
philosophy to be its cheerleader? So nowadays, we cannot rely on the
West for real philosophy; we have to come back to ourselves and
understand Chinese philosophy. My life’s work has been very simple, it
has been preliminary objective understanding, but it has already
surpassed previous ages. Thus I once wrote a letter to a student of mine
on the mainland saying that my life has been very ordinary, and the only
exceptional thing is that very few people nowadays can surpass me in
objective understanding. I have no prejudices. I have even read some of
Marx’s Capital, and have done so with an open mind. I
am not even a complete stranger to economics; it is simply not my
specialty. So my disgust for Marx is not a bias but a true inability to
appreciate him even after I had understood him.
[On the one occasion where I found Clower’s translation decision
intolerable, I have graphically amended it (twice)]
***
… I believe that for the work of absorbing Western culture, the best
medium is Kant. … I am not a Kant expert but I do believe that I have a
relatively good understanding of Kant. To understand Kant one must first
understand his original meaning. There are more people who teach about
his first Critique and people know a bit more about this one. There are
fewer who teach about his second Critique and people know a bit less
about it. As for the third, no one teaches about it and no one
understands it. I have been translating it and at the same time working
hard to understand it and understand Kant’s original meaning, in order
to be able then to digest it. In my view, Kant really is talking about
problems and wants to solve some problems, but to see his limits in
solving those problems, the only way is with traditional Chinese
philosophical wisdom. Chinese wisdom can take Kant even farther. If Kant
experts only read Kant and Westerners only read Western philosophy, they
will not necessarily understand Kant’s original meaning. Among British
and American translators of Kant, each of the Critiques has three people
who have translated it but no one person has translated all three. They
are expert in just one aspect of Kant and so do not necessarily
understand Kant. I am not an expert, for my foundation is Chinese
philosophy, and therefore I can discern Kant’s original meaning and take
him a step further.
[Mou translated all three of Kant’s Critiques into Chinese.]
***
Why do I say that Kant is the best medium for reminting Chinese
philosophy? I often say that “one mind with two gates” is a shared
philosophical model. From ancient times the West has recognized the two
gates, as Kant did, but nowadays Western philosophy is only left with
one gate, and this amounts to a shrinkage in philosophy. In the West,
the noumenal aspect of the one mind with two gates has not been
developed well. It did receive a little of the attention due it from
Kant, but it was negative, and Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus continued Kant’s
negative approach, so that all was left were a few ripples. …
Wittgenstein’s point was that anything belonging to the world of value,
of the good and the beautiful, is mysterious and unsayable, and that
whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent. This sort of attitude
is as negative as it is possible to be, and in keeping with this, on the
European Continent, Heidegger and Husserl did not touch noumenon at all.
The two gates are the original meaning of philosophy, but now all that
is left is the one gate of phenomena. Chinese philosophy happens to be
just the opposite. It is best at noumenon but not good at phenomena.
That is also the real reason that China wants modernization.
***
If you can deeply understand the significance of “one mind with two
gates,” then you will understand that the more advanced civilization is,
the greater the need for a “doctrine of practical wisdom” and for what
in China has been called “teaching” to firm up the course of our life
and right the problems that come with advanced civilization. Therefore
Westerners should also look to China for instruction and not just expect
Chinese people to come seek instruction from them. But Westerners are
able not to respect Chinese because Chinese do not read their own books
and hence have no instruction to offer.
From Meeting at Goose Lake
– The Great Synthesis in the Development of Chinese Culture and the
Merging of Chinese and Western Tradition
We commonly say that Song-Ming Confucianism was skewed in the direction
of inner sagehood. By the end of the Ming, in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries when Wang Fuzhi, Huang Zongxi, and Gu Yanwu
appeared, they already knew that Chinese history was about to turn in a
new direction, that they could not continue in the direction that
Song-Ming Confucians had been going for six hundred years, because it
placed too much weight on inner sagehood. Thus people like Huang, Wang,
and Gu began advocating openness to external things, expanding from
inner sagehood to outer kingship as well, and thus it was that they
began to emphasize the pragmatic study of statecraft (jingshi zhiyong zhi xue
經世致用之學). But the reason that this development from inner sagehood
to outer kingship was interrupted and did not bear fruit was the Manchu
Qing dynasty. The arrival of the Manchus meant that China was ruled by
an alien race …
The three hundred years of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth
centuries comprised the Manchus’ Qing empire, and the Qing empire
brought not even a scintilla of benefit to Chinese culture. That is
China’s recent history. How could China’s original history and culture
produce the Communist Party? It was the shallow intellectualism of the
May Fourth movement. Why was the movement so shallow? Because of the
baleful influence of mid-Qing textual studies. As its influence spread
gradually, Chinese intellectuals lost the ability to think and to carry
on with the development of thought. And because of those three hundred
years of Qing rule and the intellectuals’ loss of the capacity to think,
the historical opportunity was lost and the movement toward and demand
for a development from inner sagehood to outer kingship was repressed.
If there had been no three hundred years of Manchu rule, the natural
course of the Chinese nation’s development would have been little
different than the West’s. It was exactly during the seventeenth,
eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries of the Qing that the West
progressed quickly toward modernization. … Of itself, the cultural
life-force of the Chinese nation was poised to open outward. It was only
that it was repressed by the Manchus.
***
Nobody believes in Marx anymore.
***
… the rise of New Confucianism is a necessity of the trends of history
and we must take up that responsibility. The Chinese nation is to take
up the responsibility of that necessity.
***
I am the sort of person who just quietly ploughs away. I have never
been a government official, never belonged to the KMT, and naturally I
have certainly never belonged to the Communist Party.
***
… This stuff takes time! It does not matter how smart you are unless
you have time.
***
It is not the life of traditional Chinese culture which is lacking; it
is the Communists and their Marxism-Leninism which are evil and
irrational. So in this great synthesis, it is the mainline of our very
own culture which will be the basis and which will merge with the
Western tradition of the Greeks. Western science and philosophy comes
from the Greeks. Modern liberal democracy has many components, with
contributions from Greek tradition, from Roman tradition, and from the
modern Industrial Revolution and the English Magna Carta. Western
liberal democracy is also a modern product, coming in the last three
hundred years, rather than something that existed from the beginning.
And in the Western tradition, apart from Greece and Rome, there is also
the Hebrew tradition, which is religious (Christian). These are the
contours of Western culture.
What we want is a great synthesis based on the mainline of the life of
our own culture, a great merger with the science and philosophy
developed out of the Greek tradition and with the liberal politics
developed by the West out of various causal conditions, but we do not
want a great synthesis with Christianity. The relationship with
Christianity is not a matter of synthesis but of “classifying the
teachings.” We do not oppose Christianity. Western people’s faith and
prayer is fine; that is their way, though it is not ours. But we can
critically examine teachings, as Buddhists of the past did. We can
distinguish what is the same and different in them, what is high or low,
and what is perfect or imperfect.
***
What is a “true mind-only theory?” There is nothing wrong with using
the phrase “mind-only theory,” but within Western philosophy there is no
mind-only theory, only idealism. This has to be clarified. Neither
Plato’s idealism nor Kant’s idealism nor Berkeley’s idealism can be
regarded as a mind-only theory. Idealism is not mind, so Western
philosophy only has idealism, not a mind-only theory. What the
Communists call “mind-only” or “idealism” is for them just an
indiscriminate term of opprobrium. They use “idealist” and “materialist”
as value labels, but they are clueless about Western idealism. Idealism
is about ideas, but an idea itself is not mind. Plato’s idealism is a
theory of Forms. Kant’s is a transcendental idealism (chaoyue de linianlun
超越的理念論). What are these ideas? For Kant, they are concepts of
reason, which are different from concepts of the understanding. Concepts
of the understanding are categories, which are the conditions for
accomplishing knowledge, whereas concepts of reason cannot represent
knowledge. Therefore, Kant’s thought can only be called a transcendental
idealism. For Berkeley, an idea is a perceived phenomenon, not a mind
but an object of mind, a particular, real object. Berkeley’s saying,
that “to be is to be perceived” [esse est percipi]
[means that his so-called subjective idealism] is a subjective percept
theory (zhuguan de juexianglun 主觀的覺象論). It is
completely wrong to translate it as a “subjective idealism” (zhuguan de guannian lun
主觀的觀念論) or “subjective mind-only theory” (zhuguan de weixin lun 主觀的唯心論). In the West, ideas are always regarded as objects, and
though objects are related to the mind, in particular to the cognitive
mind, nonetheless they are not themselves the mind. Therefore only China
has true mind-only philosophy.
***
Where philosophical systems are concerned, we would do best to use
Kant’s philosophy as our bridge. Kant is the best go-between for
absorbing Western culture to remint Chinese philosophy and support
Chinese doctrines. Kant’s framework opens up two realms, the realm of
phenomena and the realm of noumena (benti 本體) or, if
we superimpose Buddhist terminology on it, it is “one mind opening
through two doors.” In the West, the noumenal dimension has not been
developed well. In Kant’s system, noumena has only a negative meaning. […]
Applied to Kant’s philosophy, “one mind with two gates” refers to
phenomena and noumena. But it must be understood in Chinese terms,
through the mainline cultural spirit of the three Eastern teachings of
Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism. Trying to understand the “one mind
with two gates” by means of Kant’s system does not work; it must be
through the Chinese tradition. This is why I say that if you want to get
a handle on what China has been doing for thousands of years, you must
delve deeply into the mainline of its cultural life. Thoroughly
immersing yourself is the only way to understand its strengths;
otherwise “cultural life” is just an empty phrase.
First we thoroughly understand China’s mind-only system, and then based
on the wisdom of that system, we digest Kant. For Kant’s cannot be
called a true mind-only theory, only a transcendental idealism, which
implies that it is negative. What is positive in Kant is his empirical
realism, which is limited to the phenomenal world, the empirical world.
Concerning this, please see my book
Phenomenon and Thing-in-Itself. The thing for us to do,
then, is to take Kant’s transcendental idealism and his empirical
realism and, building on Chinese wisdom, turn it into a two-tiered
ontology, of “attached ontology” and “non-attached ontology.” “Attached
ontology” is that of the cognitive mind (shixin 識心).
A “non-attached ontology” is that of the wisdom mind (zhixin
智心), and it is this which is a true mind-only theory. Mind-only theory
emerges from “non-attached ontology,” and it is something that cannot
come out of Western philosophy. The mind-only theory that emerges from
non-attached ontology can also be called thorough-going realism (shizai lun
實在論).
[If you can see why this line of thinking makes Mou Zongsan — despite his
very different topical concerns — a Chinese Mises (at the level of
abstract metaphysics), you’ve earned a patronizing
Outside in pat on the head.]
ADDED:
This
discussion of intellectual intuition (intellektuelle Anschauung),
despite going completely off the rails at the end, supplies some valuable
historical context.
ADDED: More Mou.
ADDED: Jason Clower’s
book
on Mou and Buddhism,
discussed
Buddhistically. Clower’s
introduction to Mou at the
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Mou
at
UF.
September 17, 2013Cultural Restoration and Mou Zongsan
After a difficult half millennium, China’s place in the world is adjusting
back towards its longer term norm, at a speed that continues to disconcert
even the most diligent observers. With this positive correction comes an
inevitable ‘spirit’ of revival, extending from the level of unreflective
mood, through partially articulate attitudes, to the loftiest peaks of
systematic cultural restoration. As this wave of revitalization
intensifies, and refines itself, it becomes increasingly involved in a
re-thinking of Confucianism and its historical meaning.
The philosopher most indispensable to this process is Mou Zongsan
(1909-1995), the most brilliant of China’s New Confucians, setting the
standards of intellectual rigor and audacity for the country’s third-wave
of Confucian inspiration, following those of the Pre-Qin and Song-Ming
periods. Describing the Confucian tradition as the “main artery” of
Chinese culture, responsible not only for its own perpetuation and
renewal, but also for the safe-keeping of the country’s Daoist and
Buddhist traditions, Mou considered its renaissance a “necessity”. It not
only should, but would return, assuming only that Chinese culture has a
future. It is due to this indestructible confidence that Mou’s own name is
inextricably bound to the wider prospects of Chinese national recovery.
Mou
recognizes
that the Confucian tradition is more than an arbitrary ethnic peculiarity,
to be retained out of some extrinsic commitment to cultural preservation.
Rather, the task of cultural restoration is inherent to it, as a core
feature, from the time of Confucius:
How did Confucius view the Zhou culture? His attitude was positive,
ritual being always necessary. Whatever the period, a society will
always need ritual. Confucius believed that the rituals instituted by
the Duke of Zhou were in his time still useful. Of course they could be
contracted or expanded with prudence but you ought not to radically
overturn them. So his attitude was positive. However, it was through his
re-vitalization of the Zhou rites that he came to develop what is called
Confucian thought. For it was not that the Zhou rituals were without
objective validity because of intrinsic flaws, but rather that they had
lost effectiveness because the nobles were corrupt and degenerate and
unable to carry the weight of the ritual and music. Corruption
undermined their ability to uphold these rituals, and if they could not
practice them, would not the Zhou rituals then become empty? Because
they became empty, they became mere form, became so-called formalism.
The Mohists and Daoists looked upon them as mere form and thus wanted to
negate them. Confucius knew that the corruption of the nobility made the
Zhou ritual empty, but he wanted to re-vitalize it. The Confucian
attitude was that to make the Zhou ritual valid, it had to be first
revivified.
Confucianism has undoubtedly undergone periods of victimization, but it
cannot afford to retreat into victimage, because it has inalienable
responsibility not only for its own restoration, but for Chinese cultural
restoration in general. This argument can be extended still further, since
Mou contends that even Western philosophy depends (unknowingly) upon the
revitalization of China’s Confucian tradition for the re-awakening of its
ultimate possibilities — as epitomized by the undeveloped potential of the
Kantian system, to supply a practical path into the cryptic realms of the
noumenon (following the thread of ‘intellectual intuition’). The
world-historical destiny of philosophy, and the self-restoration of
Confucianism, were conceived by Mou as a single cultural necessity.
Urban Future has no doubt that over the course of proceeding
decades Mou Zongsan’s international reputation will be immensely enhanced,
as he is recognized — in Jason Clower’s words — as “a philosopher of the
first rank” with the intellectual stature of a Heidegger or Wittgenstein.
It is thrilling to witness such a figure at the stage of early ascent,
extracted from relative obscurity and projected into global consciousness
as a cultural treasure of inestimable value.
For English readers, Clower’s contribution to the discovery of Mou Zongsan
deserves special mention. He has already released a
book
on Mou and Buddhism, with an edited collection of Mou’s writings
forthcoming (Late Works of Mou Zongsan: Selected Essays in Chinese Philosophy). As China’s cultural restoration unfolds, and Mou’s star rises, these
volumes will eventually find their way onto a million bookshelves, as
invaluable guides to a new world, and an old one.
(See also Clower’s
introduction to Mou at the
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.)
September 18, 2013Exploration of the Outside
Mou Zongsan opens a gate into the Chinese cultural interior by
unswervingly directing his work at its most radically indigenous
characteristics, uncompromised by ulterior elements, and therefore
undistracted by any seductions of otherness or exoticism that fall short
of its inherent destination — connection with the absolute Outside. That
alone is authentically Chinese, Mou insists, which originates and
culminates in the Way (道), cultivating an unsegregated mutual involvement
of thought and being which corresponds closely to the Occidental
philosophical concept of intellectual intuition. Whether
approached through the Daoist, Buddhist, or Confucian strains of the
Chinese cultural complex, the consistent ethnic characteristic is an
interior path to exterior reality, continuous with the way of ‘heaven’
(天), or cosmic necessity. The inner voyage is the way out, but more
importantly — for the Confucian current at least — it is the way to let
the Outside in, making culture a conduit for the cultivation of the world.
From Mou Zongsan’s summit of philosophical intensity, therefore, no true
boundary can be drawn between a project marked by extreme cultural
‘nationalism’ and an ontologically-grounded cosmopolitanism, or between a
diligent restoration of
tradition
and a venture beyond the horizon of time. The inward path reaches out (as
it fuses with the tendrils of Outsideness, which reach in).
In his essay on the
Meeting at Goose Lake, Mou seeks to explain the singularity of the
Chinese tradition in terms intelligible to Western philosophy:
… Kant attached only a negative meaning to noumena. Applied to Kant’s
philosophy, “one mind with two gates” refers to phenomena and noumena.
But it must be understood in Chinese terms, through the mainline
cultural spirit of the three Eastern teachings of Confucianism,
Buddhism, and Daoism. Trying to understand the “one mind with two gates”
by means of Kant’s system does not work; it must be through the Chinese
tradition. This is why I say that if you want to get a handle on what
China has been doing for thousands of years, you must delve deeply into
the mainline of its cultural life. Thoroughly immersing yourself is the
only way to understand its strengths; otherwise “cultural life” is just
an empty phrase.
Metaphysical traditionalism attains extroversion through introversion, so
that its “perfect teaching” is announced as a culmination of paradox. It
is only at the limit of psychological and cultural inwardness that the
gate of deep connection is opened, enabling cultural encounters in
profundity, rather than a confusion of comparisons, facile commonalities
and contrasts. Chinese and Western philosophy meet at the summit, and
through the Outside, whose brink each discovers on its own distinctive
path.
The paradoxical signs of the ‘perfect teaching’ guide Mou’s restoration of
Chinese intellectual tradition, as it homes — or strays — to the root of
acceptance and correction. In order
to turn Confucianism into itself, he cultivates (discovers /
invents) a third strand of orthodoxy upon which to train the luxuriant but
disordered growth of Cheng-Zhu lixue and Lu-Wang xinxue:
a lineage passing through the comparatively obscure figures of Hu Wufeng
(or Hu Hong) and Liu Jishan (or Liu Zongzhou). It is this third thread of
the tradition, he contends, that most fully develops the essential
intellectual content of Confucianism, making it the true inheritor of the
Northern Song ruxue legacy (Zhou Dunyi, Zhang Zai, and Cheng
Mingda), which is itself the uncontested conveyor of the ancient canon. It
alone consistently refuses the delusive separation of intelligence from
the Way, and thus preserves the understanding of human conduct as cosmic
self-realization. Within the (correctable) Lu-Wang line, this insight
tends to slide into eclipse, but on the mainstream Cheng-Zhu line the
slippage has become an assertive deviation — hardened into “fundamental
error”.
Mou’s metaphysical traditionalism coaxes Chinese intellectual history into
an immanent correction, through which its proper inwardness is
reinforced as a resilient — or fusional — connection to the Outside. What
is most its own is spiral immersion within the Way, where the second gate
opens.
October 30, 2013The Great Convergence
Every great philosopher has a single thought, Martin Heidegger asserted.
However questionable this claim might be, it applies without qualification
to Mou Zongsan, China’s greatest modern philosopher (and perhaps also the
world’s).
While the breadth of Mou’s scholarship is intimidating, it was made
possible only by conformity to a methodical life-long study schedule,
organized by a single idea. His one thought, which he translated
into the language of Western Philosophy as ‘intellectual intuition’
(νοῦς, intellektuelle Anschauung), integrates not only
his own thinking, but also — he consistently maintains — the entire
Chinese philosophical tradition, of which it is the cap-stone, or guiding
thread. Each of China’s three teachings (三教), Confucian, Daoist, and
Buddhist, tends to a principle of intellectual intuition in which it finds
consummation as a “perfect teaching” and through which it adheres by inner
necessity (rather than extrinsic cultural and historical accident) to the
integral Chinese canon.
If any single concept has a density of
significance sufficient to define the essence of a vast and
highly-ramified world culture, it can be expected to resist casual
comprehension. To understand it, as Mou painstakingly demonstrates, is not
a preparatory step to thinking within the tradition, but the ultimate
cultural task posed by the tradition, in each of its main constitutive
strands. If Chinese culture shares an initiatory insight, it is not a
readily concluded realization, but an integrative
aspiration, which orients its various parts towards the same
destination, or final achievement. Cognitive resolution is subordinated to
practical development, through self-cultivation.
In the West, intellectual intuition is notoriously a
difficult concept, to such an extent that it is widely dismissed
as an example of philosophical extravagance, beyond all possibility of
rigorous formulation, or theoretical use. Designating the direct
self-apprehension of intelligence, it was associated from the earliest
times with the process of divine mind. Aristotle’s God, whose
self-contemplative thought is the turning of the highest action upon the
highest object, epitomized the notion.
Kant determined intellectual intuition to lie beyond any possible human
understanding, strictly exiling it to the outer sphere of divine
intelligences. Henceforth, appeals to the concept would be the mark of
romantic or ‘mystical’ philosophical undertakings (represented primarily
by the thinkers of German ‘Objective Idealism’ and those influenced by
them). As techno-scientific rationality incrementally supplanted
speculative metaphysics, and divinities shriveled to implausible
hypotheses, the significance of intellectual intuition contracted towards
a vanishing point — whether discreditable eccentricity, or historical
curiosity. In Mou Zongsan’s terms, Western philosophy, in keeping with its
own cultural fatality, had become almost perfectly non-Chinese.
The ‘Great Divergence‘ familiar from discussions of world economic history, therefore, had a
rigorously-determinable high-cultural counterpart, which explains why,
when East and West experienced their hard encounter within modernity, they
would be bound together through profound mutual estrangement. The idea
identified by Mou Zongsan as the basic principle of Oriental Intelligence,
through which — alone — Chinese culture makes sense, had been shelved by
the Occident centuries before, as an oddity of speculative theology, and
now lay buried in dust, barely recollected, let alone even tentatively
understood.
If the idea of directly self-apprehending intelligence were to remain the
preserve of 19th century German metaphysics, it is scarcely imaginable
that the gulf between East and West — as Mou Zongsan understands it —
could ever be more than tenuously bridged. Either the East would remain
entirely inscrutable to all West, excepting only a cultural fringe of
Orientalists, devoted to the pursuit of radical exoticism, or the East
would depart fundamentally from its own cultural path, Westernizing itself
until commensurable thinking was reached. Both of these prospects were
explicitly deplored in the influential
text
“A Manifesto for a Re-appraisal of Sinology and Reconstruction of Chinese
Culture” (为中国文化敬告世界人士宣言), signed by Mou Zongsan and three
other ‘New Confucian’ students of Xiong Shili (Zhang Junmai, Tang Junyi,
and Xu Fuguan), originally published in 1958.
That the tide of the economic and geostrategic Great Divergence turned in
the final decades of the last century is a matter of indisputable fact,
confirmed by a deluge of quantitative performance indicators. The cultural
aspect of this reversal is necessarily more complicated, and contentious.
In the West, there are no doubt very many who would account for the
transition in terms of Chinese Westernization, beginning with the adoption
of European ‘scientific socialism’ in the late 1940s, and maturing through
liberalization — or economic-technological globalization — until reaching
the
moon.
A very different narrative, and one in which the emerging status of Mou
Zongsan could be far more positively limned — would adhere tightly to the
problem of intellectual intuition, or self-apprehending intelligence. The
most significant reference would be I J Good, and his path-breaking
essay
‘Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine’, composed in
the early 1960s and first published in 1965. In this paper, Good writes:
Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far
surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since
the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an
ultra-intelligent machine could design even better machines; there would
then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion,” and the intelligence
of man would be left far behind … Thus the first ultraintelligent
machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the
machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control. It is
curious that this point is made so seldom outside of science fiction. It
is sometimes worthwhile to take science fiction seriously.
The techno-scientific horizon is described by a reflexive intelligence,
practically apprehending itself, and in doing so marking the final human
purpose. This is quite evidently ‘intellectual intuition’ as it emerges at
the outer-edge of modernity, rather than among the jumbled curiosities of
its philosophical ancestry. If it corresponds to the Chinese cultural core
— as Mou Zongsan doggedly maintains — it is as an anticipated destination,
rather than an abandoned legacy. Advanced modernization heads
towards it.
While, superficially, the tale of Chinese modernity might be construed as
the replacement of Confucius by robotics, careful attention to the problem
of intellectual intuition suggests something very different.
Self-cultivation or self-improving intelligence — what sort of
choice is that?
December 3, 2013Legalism
The real core of the Chinese tradition?
Chinese Friend: Nobody in this country believes in
anything anymore.
Foreign Devil: So what do you think they should believe
in?
Chinese Friend: Unless people are punished more
severely, they won’t behave themselves.
February 15, 2015
TOME II - THE DARK ENLIGHTENMENT: Neoreactionaries Head for the Exit
BLOCK 1 - DARK ENLIGHTENMENT
The Dark Enlightenment (Part 1)
Enlightenment is not only a state, but an event, and a process. As the
designation for an historical episode, concentrated in northern Europe
during the 18th century, it is a leading candidate for the ‘true name’ of
modernity, capturing its origin and essence (‘Renaissance’ and ‘Industrial
Revolution’ are others). Between ‘enlightenment’ and ‘progressive
enlightenment’ there is only an elusive difference, because illumination
takes time – and feeds on itself, because enlightenment is
self-confirming, its revelations ‘self-evident’, and because a retrograde,
or reactionary, ‘dark enlightenment’ amounts almost to intrinsic
contradiction. To become enlightened, in this historical sense, is to
recognize, and then to pursue, a guiding light.
There were ages of darkness, and then enlightenment came. Clearly, advance
has demonstrated itself, offering not only improvement, but also a model.
Furthermore, unlike a renaissance, there is no need for an enlightenment
to recall what was lost, or to emphasize the attractions of return. The
elementary acknowledgement of enlightenment is already
Whig history in miniature.
Once certain enlightened truths have been found self-evident, there can be
no turning back, and conservatism is pre-emptively condemned – predestined
— to paradox. F. A. Hayek, who refused to describe himself as a
conservative, famously settled instead upon the term ‘Old Whig’, which –
like ‘classical liberal’ (or the still more melancholy ‘remnant’) –
accepts that progress isn’t what it used to be. What could an Old Whig be,
if not a reactionary progressive? And what on earth is that?
Of course, plenty of people already think they know what reactionary
modernism looks like, and amidst the current collapse back into the 1930s
their concerns are only likely to grow. Basically, it’s what the ‘F’ word
is for, at least in its progressive usage. A flight from democracy under
these circumstances conforms so perfectly to expectations that it eludes
specific recognition, appearing merely as an atavism, or confirmation of
dire repetition.
Still, something is happening, and it is – at least in part – something
else. One milestone was the April 2009
discussion
hosted at Cato Unbound among libertarian thinkers (including Patri
Friedman and Peter Thiel) in which disillusionment with the direction and
possibilities of democratic politics was expressed with unusual
forthrightness. Thiel
summarized
the trend bluntly: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are
compatible.”
In August 2011, Michael Lind posted a democratic
riposte
at Salon, digging up some impressively malodorous dirt, and concluding:
Lind and the ‘neo-reactionaries’ seem to be in broad agreement that
democracy is not only (or even) a system, but rather a
vector, with an unmistakable direction. Democracy and
‘progressive democracy’ are synonymous, and indistinguishable from the
expansion of the state. Whilst ‘extreme right wing’ governments have, on
rare occasions, momentarily arrested this process, its reversal lies
beyond the bounds of democratic possibility. Since winning elections is
overwhelmingly a matter of vote buying, and society’s informational organs
(education and media) are no more resistant to bribery than the
electorate, a thrifty politician is simply an incompetent politician, and
the democratic variant of Darwinism quickly eliminates such misfits from
the gene pool. This is a reality that the left applauds, the establishment
right grumpily accepts, and the libertarian right has ineffectively railed
against. Increasingly, however, libertarians have ceased to care whether
anyone is ‘pay[ing them] attention’ – they have been looking for something
else entirely: an exit.
It is a structural inevitability that the libertarian voice is drowned out
in democracy, and according to Lind it should be. Ever more libertarians
are likely to agree. ‘Voice’ is democracy itself, in its historically
dominant, Rousseauistic strain. It models the state as a representation of
popular will, and making oneself heard means more politics. If voting as
the mass self-expression of politically empowered peoples is a nightmare
engulfing the world, adding to the hubbub doesn’t help. Even more than
Equality-vs-Liberty, Voice-vs-Exit is the rising alternative, and
libertarians are opting for voiceless flight. Patri Friedman
remarks: “we think that free exit is so important that we’ve called it the only
Universal Human Right.”
For the hardcore neo-reactionaries, democracy is not merely doomed, it is
doom itself. Fleeing it approaches an ultimate imperative. The
subterranean current that propels such anti-politics is recognizably
Hobbesian, a coherent dark enlightenment, devoid from its beginning of any
Rousseauistic enthusiasm for popular expression. Predisposed, in any case,
to perceive the politically awakened masses as a howling irrational mob,
it conceives the dynamics of democratization as fundamentally
degenerative: systematically consolidating and exacerbating private vices,
resentments, and deficiencies until they reach the level of collective
criminality and comprehensive social corruption. The democratic politician
and the electorate are bound together by a circuit of reciprocal
incitement, in which each side drives the other to ever more shameless
extremities of hooting, prancing cannibalism, until the only alternative
to shouting is being eaten.
Where the progressive enlightenment sees political ideals, the dark
enlightenment sees appetites. It accepts that governments are made out of
people, and that they will eat well. Setting its expectations as low as
reasonably possible, it seeks only to spare civilization from frenzied,
ruinous, gluttonous debauch. From Thomas Hobbes to Hans-Hermann Hoppe and
beyond, it asks: How can the sovereign power be prevented – or at least
dissuaded — from devouring society? It consistently finds democratic
‘solutions’ to this problem risible, at best.
Hoppe advocates an anarcho-capitalist ‘private law society’, but between
monarchy and democracy he does not hesitate (and his
argument
is strictly Hobbesian):
Political agents invested with transient authority by multi-party
democratic systems have an overwhelming (and demonstrably irresistible)
incentive to plunder society with the greatest possible rapidity and
comprehensiveness. Anything they neglect to steal – or ‘leave on the
table’ – is likely to be inherited by political successors who are not
only unconnected, but actually opposed, and who can therefore be expected
to utilize all available resources to the detriment of their foes.
Whatever is left behind becomes a weapon in your enemy’s hand. Best, then,
to destroy what cannot be stolen. From the perspective of a democratic
politician, any type of social good that is neither directly appropriable
nor attributable to (their own) partisan policy is sheer waste, and counts
for nothing, whilst even the most grievous social misfortune – so long as
it can be assigned to a prior administration or postponed until a
subsequent one – figures in rational calculations as an obvious blessing.
The long-range techno-economic improvements and associated accumulation of
cultural capital that constituted social progress in its old (Whig) sense
are in nobody’s political interest. Once democracy flourishes, they face
the immediate threat of extinction.
Civilization, as a process, is indistinguishable from diminishing
time-preference (or declining concern for the present in comparison to the
future). Democracy, which both in theory and evident historical fact
accentuates time-preference to the point of convulsive feeding-frenzy, is
thus as close to a precise negation of civilization as anything could be,
short of instantaneous social collapse into murderous barbarism or zombie
apocalypse (which it eventually leads to). As the democratic virus burns
through society, painstakingly accumulated habits and attitudes of
forward-thinking, prudential, human and industrial investment, are
replaced by a sterile, orgiastic consumerism, financial incontinence, and
a ‘reality television’ political circus. Tomorrow might belong to the
other team, so it’s best to eat it all now.
Winston Churchill, who remarked in neo-reactionary style that “the best
argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average
voter“ is better known for suggesting “that democracy is the worst form of
government except all the others that have been tried.” Whilst never
exactly conceding that “OK, democracy sucks (in fact, it
really sucks), but what’s the alternative?” the implication is
obvious. The general tenor of this sensibility is attractive to modern
conservatives, because it resonates with their wry, disillusioned
acceptance of relentless civilizational deterioration, and with the
associated intellectual apprehension of capitalism as an unappetizing but
ineliminable default social arrangement, which remains after all
catastrophic or merely impractical alternatives have been discarded. The
market economy, on this understanding, is no more than a spontaneous
survival strategy that stitches itself together amidst the ruins of a
politically devastated world. Things will probably just get worse forever.
So it goes.
So, what is the alternative? (There’s certainly no point trawling through
the 1930s for one.) “Can you imagine a 21st-century post-demotist society?
One that saw itself as recovering from democracy, much as Eastern Europe
sees itself as recovering from Communism?” asks supreme Sith Lord of the
neo-reactionaries,
Mencius Moldbug. “Well, I suppose that makes one of us.”
Moldbug’s formative influences are Austro-libertarian, but that’s all
over. As he explains:
His awakening into neo-reaction comes with the (Hobbesian) recognition
that sovereignty cannot be eliminated, caged, or controlled.
Anarcho-capitalist utopias can never condense out of science fiction,
divided powers flow back together like a shattered Terminator, and
constitutions have exactly as much real authority as a sovereign
interpretative power allows them to have. The state isn’t going anywhere
because — to those who run it — it’s worth far too much to give up, and as
the concentrated instantiation of sovereignty in society, nobody can make
it do anything. If the state cannot be eliminated, Moldbug argues, at
least it can be cured of democracy (or systematic and
degenerative bad government), and the way to do that is to
formalize it. This is an approach he calls ‘neo-cameralism’.
Firstly, it is essential to squash the democratic myth that a state
‘belongs’ to the citizenry. The point of neo-cameralism is to buy out the
real stakeholders in sovereign power, not to perpetuate sentimental lies
about mass enfranchisement. Unless ownership of the state is formally
transferred into the hands of its actual rulers, the neo-cameral
transition will simply not take place, power will remain in the shadows,
and the democratic farce will continue.
So, secondly, the ruling class must be plausibly identified. It should be
noted immediately, in contradistinction to Marxist principles of social
analysis, that this is not the ‘capitalist bourgeoisie’. Logically, it
cannot be. The power of the business class is already clearly formalized,
in monetary terms, so the identification of capital with political power
is perfectly redundant. It is necessary to ask, rather,
who do capitalists pay for political favors, how much these
favors are potentially worth, and how the authority to grant them is
distributed. This requires, with a minimum of moral irritation, that the
entire social landscape of political bribery (‘lobbying’) is exactly
mapped, and the administrative, legislative, judicial, media, and academic
privileges accessed by such bribes are converted into fungible shares.
Insofar as voters are worth bribing, there is no need to entirely exclude
them from this calculation, although their portion of sovereignty will be
estimated with appropriate derision. The conclusion of this exercise is
the mapping of a ruling entity that is the truly dominant instance of the
democratic polity. Moldbug calls it the Cathedral.
The formalization of political powers, thirdly, allows for the possibility
of effective government. Once the universe of democratic corruption is
converted into a (freely transferable) shareholding in
gov-corp. the owners of the state can initiate rational corporate
governance, beginning with the appointment of a CEO. As with any business,
the interests of the state are now precisely formalized as the
maximization of long-term shareholder value. There is no longer any need
for residents (clients) to take any interest in politics whatsoever. In
fact, to do so would be to exhibit semi-criminal proclivities. If
gov-corp doesn’t deliver acceptable value for its taxes
(sovereign rent), they can notify its customer service function, and if
necessary take their custom elsewhere. Gov-corp would concentrate
upon running an efficient, attractive, vital, clean, and secure country,
of a kind that is able to draw customers. No voice, free exit.
In European classical antiquity, democracy was recognized as a familiar
phase of cyclical political development, fundamentally decadent in nature,
and preliminary to a slide into tyranny. Today this classical
understanding is thoroughly lost, and replaced by a global democratic
ideology, entirely lacking in critical self-reflection, that is asserted
not as a credible social-scientific thesis, or even as a spontaneous
popular aspiration, but rather as a religious creed, of a specific,
historically identifiable kind:
To comprehend the emergence of our contemporary predicament, characterized
by relentless,
totalizing, state expansion, the proliferation of spurious positive ‘human rights’
(claims on the resources of others backed by coercive bureaucracies),
politicized money, reckless evangelical ‘wars
for democracy’, and comprehensive thought control arrayed in defense of
universalistic dogma (accompanied by the degradation of science into a
government public relations function), it is necessary to ask how
Massachusetts came to conquer the world, as Moldbug does. With every year
that passes, the international ideal of sound governance finds itself
approximating more closely and rigidly to the standards set by the
Grievance Studies departments of New England universities. This is the
divine providence of the ranters and levelers, elevated to a planetary
teleology, and consolidated as the reign of
the Cathedral.
The Cathedral has substituted its gospel for everything we ever knew.
Consider just the concerns expressed by America’s founding fathers
(compiled by ‘Liberty-clinger’, comment #1,
here):
More on voting with your feet (and the incandescent genius of Moldbug),
next …
Added Note (March 7):
Don’t trust the attribution of the ‘Benjamin Franklin’ quote, above.
According to
Barry Popik, the saying was probably invented by James Bovard, in 1992. (Bovard
remarks
elsewhere: “There are few more dangerous errors in political thinking than to
equate democracy with liberty.”)
March 2, 2012The Dark Enlightenment (Part 2)
Googling ‘democracy’ and ‘liberty’ together is highly enlightening, in a
dark way. In cyberspace, at least, it is clear that only a distinct
minority think of these terms as positively coupled. If opinion is to be
judged in terms of the Google spider and its digital prey, by far the most
prevalent association is disjunctive, or antagonistic, drawing upon the
reactionary insight that democracy poses a lethal menace to liberty, all
but ensuring its eventual eradication. Democracy is to liberty as
Gargantua to a pie (“Surely you can see that we love liberty, to the point
of gut-rumbling and salivation …”).
Steve H. Hanke lays out the case authoritatively in his short
essay
On Democracy Versus Liberty, focused upon the American
experience:
He elaborates:
As the spirit of reaction digs its Sith-tentacles into the brain, it
becomes difficult to remember how the classical (or non-communist)
progressive narrative could once have made sense. What were people
thinking? What were they expecting from the emerging super-empowered,
populist, cannibalistic state? Wasn’t the eventual calamity entirely
predictable? How was it ever possible to be a Whig?
The ideological credibility of radical democratization is not, of course,
in question. As thinkers ranging from (Christian progressive) Walter
Russell Mead to (atheistic reactionary) Mencius Moldbug have exhaustively
detailed, it conforms so exactly to ultra-protestant religious enthusiasm
that its power to animate the revolutionary soul should surprise nobody.
Within just a few years of Martin Luther’s challenge to the papal
establishment, peasant insurrectionists were stringing up their class
enemies all over Germany.
The empirical credibility of democratic advancement is far more
perplexing, and also genuinely complex (which is to say controversial, or
more precisely, worthy of a data-based, rigorously-argued controversy). In
part, that is because the modern configuration of democracy emerges within
the sweep of a far broader modernistic trend, whose techno-scientific,
economic, social and political strands are obscurely interrelated, knitted
together by misleading correlations, and subsequent false causalities. If,
as Schumpeter argues, industrial capitalism tends to engender a
democratic-bureaucratic culture that concludes in stagnation, it might
nevertheless seem as though democracy was ‘associated’ with material
progress. It is easy to misconstrue a lagging indicator as a positive
causal factor, especially when ideological zeal lends its bias to the
misapprehension. In similar vein, since cancer only afflicts living
beings, it might – with apparent reason — be associated with vitality.
Robin Hanson (gently)
notes:
Simple historical chronology suggests that industrialization supports
progressive democratization, rather than being derived from it. This
observation has even given rise to a widely accepted school of pop social
science theorizing, according to which the ‘maturation’ of societies in a
democratic direction is determined by thresholds of affluence, or
middle-class formation. The strict logical correlate of such ideas, that
democracy is fundamentally non-productive in relation to material
progress, is typically under-emphasized. Democracy
consumes progress. When perceived from the perspective of the
dark enlightenment, the appropriate mode of analysis for studying the
democratic phenomenon is general parasitology.
Quasi-libertarian responses to the outbreak accept this implicitly. Given
a population deeply infected by the zombie virus and shambling into
cannibalistic social collapse, the preferred option is quarantine. It is
not communicative isolation that is essential, but a functional
dis-solidarization of society that tightens feedback loops and exposes
people with maximum intensity to the consequences of their own actions.
Social solidarity, in precise contrast, is the parasite’s friend. By
cropping out all high-frequency feedback mechanisms (such as market
signals), and replacing them with sluggish, infra-red loops that pass
through a centralized forum of ‘general will’, a radically democratized
society insulates parasitism from what it does, transforming local,
painfully dysfunctional, intolerable, and thus urgently corrected behavior
patterns into global, numbed, and chronic socio-political pathologies.
Gnaw off other people’s body parts and it might be hard to get a
job– that’s the kind of lesson a tight-feedback, cybernetically intense,
laissez faire order would allow to be learned. It’s also exactly
the kind of insensitive zombiphobic discrimination that any compassionate
democracy would denounce as thought crime, whilst boosting the public
budget for the vitally-challenged, undertaking consciousness raising
campaigns on behalf of those suffering from involuntary cannibalistic
impulse syndrome, affirming the dignity of the zombie lifestyle in
higher-education curriculums, and rigorously regulating workspaces to
ensure that the shuffling undead are not victimized by profit-obsessed,
performance-centric, or even unreconstructed animationist employers.
As enlightened zombie-tolerance flourishes in the shelter of the
democratic mega-parasite, a small remnant of reactionaries, attentive to
the effects of real incentives, raise the formulaic question: “You do
realize that these policies lead inevitably to a massive expansion of the
zombie population?” The dominant vector of history presupposes that such
nuisance objections are marginalized, ignored, and — wherever possible –
silenced through social ostracism. The remnant either fortifies the
basement, whilst stocking up on dried food, ammunition, and silver coins,
or accelerates the application process for a second passport, and starts
packing its bags.
If all of this seems to be coming unmoored from historical concreteness,
there’s a conveniently topical remedy: a little digressive channel-hopping
over to Greece. As a microcosmic model for the death of the West, playing
out in real time, the Greek story is hypnotic. It describes a 2,500 year
arc that is far from neat, but irresistibly dramatic, from proto-democracy
to accomplished zombie apocalypse. Its pre-eminent virtue is that it
perfectly illustrates the democratic mechanism in extremis,
separating individuals and local populations from the consequences of
their decisions by scrambling their behavior through large-scale,
centralized re-distribution systems. You decide what you do, but then vote
on the consequences. How could anyone say ‘no’ to that?
No surprise that over 30 years of EU membership Greeks have been eagerly
cooperating with a social-engineering mega-project that strips out all
short-wave social signals and re-routes feedback through the grandiose
circuitry of European solidarity, ensuring that all economically-relevant
information is red-shifted through the heat-death sump of the
European Central Bank. Most specifically, it has conspired with ‘Europe’ to obliterate all
information that might be contained in Greek interest rates, thus
effectively disabling all financial feedback on domestic policy choices.
This is democracy in a consummate form that defies further perfection,
since nothing conforms more exactly to the ‘general will’ than the
legislative abolition of reality, and nothing delivers the hemlock to
reality more definitively than the coupling of Teutonic interest rates
with East Mediterranean spending decisions.
Live like Hellenes and pay like Germans — any political party
that failed to rise to power on that platform deserves to scrabble for
vulture-picked scraps in the wilderness. It’s the ultimate
no-brainer, in just about every imaginable sense of that
expression. What could possibly go wrong?
More to the point, what did go wrong? Mencius Moldbug begins his
Unqualified Reservations series
How Dawkins got pwned (or taken over through an “exploitable
vulnerability”) with the
outlining
of design rules for a hypothetical “optimal memetic parasite” that would
be “as virulent as possible. It will be highly contagious, highly morbid,
and highly persistent. A really ugly bug.” In comparison to this
ideological super-plague, the vestigial monotheism derided in
The God Delusion would figure as nothing worse than a moderately
unpleasant head cold. What begins as abstract meme tinkering concludes as
grand-sweep history, in the dark enlightenment
mode:
Given the rise of this “really ugly bug” to world dominion, it might seem
strange to pick on tangential figure such as Dawkins, but Moldbug selects
his target for exquisitely-judged strategic reasons. Moldbug identifies
with Dawkins’ Darwinism, with his intellectual repudiation of Abrahamic
theism, and with his broad commitment to scientific rationality. Yet he
recognizes, crucially, that Dawkins’ critical faculties shut off –
abruptly and often comically – at the point where they might endanger a
still broader commitment to hegemonic progressivism. In this way, Dawkins
is powerfully indicative. Militant secularism is itself a modernized
variant of the Abrahamic meta-meme, on its Anglo-Protestant, radical
democratic taxonomic branch,
whose specific tradition is anti-traditionalism. The clamorous
atheism of The God Delusion represents a protective feint, and a
consistent upgrade of religious reformation, guided by a spirit of
progressive enthusiasm that trumps empiricism and reason, whilst
exemplifying an irritable dogmatism that rivals anything to be found in
earlier God-themed strains.
Dawkins isn’t merely an enlightened modern progressive and implicit
radical democrat, he’s an impressively credentialed scientist, more
specifically a biologist, and (thus) a Darwinian evolutionist. The point
at which he touches the limit of acceptable thinking as defined by the
memetic super-bug is therefore quite easy to anticipate. His inherited
tradition of low-church ultra-protestantism has replaced God with Man as
the locus of spiritual investment, and ‘Man’ has been in the process of
Darwinian research dissolution for over 150 years. (As the sound, decent
person I know you are, having gotten this far with Moldbug you’re probably
already muttering under your breath,
don’t mention race, don’t mention race, don’t mention race, please, oh
please, in the name of the Zeitgeist and the dear sweet non-god of
progress, don’t mention race …) … but Moldbug is
already
citing Dawkins, citing Thomas Huxley “…in a contest which is to be carried
out by thoughts and not by bites. The highest places in the hierarchy of
civilization will assuredly not be within the reach of our dusky cousins.”
Which Dawkins frames by remarking: “Had Huxley… been born and educated in
our time, [he] would have been the first to cringe with us at [his]
Victorian sentiments and unctuous tone. I quote them only to illustrate
how the Zeitgeist moves on.”
It gets worse. Moldbug seems to be holding Huxley’s hand, and … (ewww!)
doing that palm-stroking thing with his finger. This sure ain’t
vanilla-libertarian reaction anymore — it’s getting seriously dark, and
scary. “In all seriousness, what is the evidence for fraternism? Why,
exactly, does Professor Dawkins believe that all neohominids are born with
identical potential for neurological development? He doesn’t say. Perhaps
he thinks it’s obvious.”
Whatever one’s opinion on the respective scientific merits of human
biological diversity or uniformity, it is surely beyond contention that
the latter assumption, alone, is tolerated. Even if
progressive-universalistic beliefs about human nature are true, they are
not held because they are true, or arrived at through any process
that passes the laugh test for critical scientific rationality. They are
received as religious tenets, with all of the passionate intensity that
characterizes essential items of faith, and to question them is not a
matter of scientific inaccuracy, but of what we now call
political incorrectness, and once knew as heresy.
To sustain this transcendent moral posture in relation to
racism is no more rational than subscription to the doctrine of
original sin, of which it is, in any case, the unmistakable
modern substitute. The difference, of course, is that ‘original sin’ is a
traditional doctrine, subscribed to by an embattled social cohort,
significantly under-represented among public intellectuals and media
figures, deeply unfashionable in the dominant world culture, and widely
criticized – if not derided – without any immediate assumption that the
critic is advocating murder, theft, or adultery. To question the status of
racism as the supreme and defining social sin, on the other hand, is to
court universal condemnation from social elites, and to arouse suspicions
of thought crimes that range from pro-slavery apologetics to
genocide fantasies. Racism is pure or absolute evil, whose proper
sphere is the infinite and the eternal, or the incendiary sinful depths of
the hyper-protestant soul, rather than the mundane confines of civil
interaction, social scientific realism, or efficient and proportional
legality. The dissymmetry of affect, sanction, and raw social power
attending old heresies and their replacements, once noticed, is a nagging
indicator. A new sect reigns, and it is not even especially well hidden.
Yet even among the most hardened HBD constituencies, hysterical
sanctification of plus-good race-think hardly suffices to lend radical
democracy the aura of profound morbidity that Moldbug detects. That
requires a devotional relation to the State.
March 9, 2012The Dark Enlightenment (Part 3)
The previous installment of this series ended with our hero Mencius
Moldbug, up to his waist (or worse) in the mephitic swamp of political
incorrectness, approaching the dark heart of his politico-religious
meditation on How Dawkins Got Pwned. Moldbug has caught Dawkins
in the midst of a symptomatically significant, and excruciatingly
sanctimonious, denunciation of Thomas Huxley’s racist “Victorian
sentiments” – a sermon which concludes with the strange declaration that
he is quoting Huxley’s words, despite their self-evident and wholly
intolerable ghastliness, “only to illustrate how the
Zeitgeist moves on.”
Moldbug
pounces, asking pointedly: “What, exactly, is this Zeitgeist thing?” It
is, indisputably, an extraordinary catch. Here is a thinker (Dawkins),
trained as a biologist, and especially fascinated by the (disjunctively)
twinned topics of naturalistic evolution and Abrahamic religion, stumbling
upon what he apprehends as a one-way trend of world-historical spiritual
development, which he then – emphatically, but without the slightest
appeal to disciplined reason or evidence – denies has any serious
connection to the advance of science, human biology, or religious
tradition. The stammering nonsense that results is a thing of wonder, but
for Moldbug it all makes sense:
What, exactly, is this Zeitgeist thing? The question bears
repeating. Is it not astounding, to begin with, that when one English
Darwinian reaches for a weapon to club another, the most convenient cudgel
to hand should be a German word — associated with an abstruse lineage of
state-worshipping idealistic philosophy — explicitly referencing a
conception of historical time that has no discernible connection to the
process of naturalistic evolution? It is as if, scarcely imaginably,
during a comparable contention among physicists (on the topic of quantum
indeterminacy), one should suddenly hear it shouted that “God does not
play dice with the universe.” In fact, the two examples are intimately
entangled, since Dawkins’ faith in the Zeitgeist is combined with
adherence to the dogmatic progressivism of ‘Einsteinian Religion’
(meticulously
dissected, of course, by Moldbug).
The shamelessness is remarkable, or at least it would be, were it naively
believed that the protocols of scientific rationality occupied sovereign
position in such disputation, if only in principle. In fact – and here
irony is amplified to the very brink of howling psychosis – Einstein’s Old
One still reigns. The criteria of judgment owe everything to neo-puritan
spiritual hygiene, and nothing whatsoever to testable reality. Scientific
utterance is screened for conformity to a progressive social agenda, whose
authority seems to be unaffected by its complete indifference to
scientific integrity. It reminds Moldbug of Lysenko, for understandable
reasons.
“If the facts do not agree with the theory, so much worse for the facts”
Hegel asserted. It is the Zeitgeist that is God, historically
incarnated in the state, trampling mere data back into the dirt. By now,
everybody knows where this ends. An egalitarian moral ideal, hardened into
a universal axiom or increasingly incontestable dogma, completes
modernity’s supreme historical irony by making ‘tolerance’ the iron
criterion for the limits of (cultural) toleration. Once it is accepted
universally, or, speaking more practically, by all social forces wielding
significant cultural power, that intolerance is intolerable,
political authority has legitimated anything and everything convenient to
itself, without restraint.
That is the magic of the dialectic, or of logical perversity. When only
tolerance is tolerable, and everyone (who matters) accepts this
manifestly nonsensical formula as not only rationally intelligible, but as
the universally-affirmed principle of modern democratic faith, nothing
except politics remains. Perfect tolerance and absolute intolerance have
become logically indistinguishable, with either equally interpretable as
the other, A = not-A, or the inverse, and in the nakedly Orwellian world
that results, power alone holds the keys of articulation. Tolerance has
progressed to such a degree that it has become a social police function,
providing the existential pretext for new inquisitional institutions. (“We
must remember that those who tolerate intolerance abuse tolerance itself,
and an enemy of tolerance is an enemy of democracy,” Moldbug
ironizes.)
The spontaneous tolerance that characterized classical liberalism, rooted
in a modest set of strictly negative rights that restricted the domain of
politics, or government intolerance, surrenders during the democratic
surge-tide to a positive right to be tolerated, defined ever more
expansively as substantial entitlement, encompassing public affirmations
of dignity, state-enforced guarantees of equal treatment by all agents
(public and private), government protections against non-physical slights
and humiliations, economic subsidies, and – ultimately – statistically
proportional representation within all fields of employment, achievement,
and recognition. That the eschatological culmination of this trend is
simply impossible matters not at all to the dialectic. On the contrary, it
energizes the political process, combusting any threat of policy satiation
in the fuel of infinite grievance. “I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand: Till we have built Jerusalem, In
England’s green and pleasant land.” Somewhere before Jerusalem is reached,
the inarticulate pluralism of a free society has been transformed into the
assertive multiculturalism of a soft-totalitarian democracy.
The Jews of 17th century Amsterdam, or the Huguenots of 18th century
London, enjoyed the right to be left alone, and enriched their host
societies in return. The democratically-empowered grievance groups of
later modern times are incited by political leaders to demand a
(fundamentally illiberal) right to be heard, with social
consequences that are predominantly malignant. For politicians, however,
who identify and promote themselves as the voice of the unheard and the
ignored, the self-interest at stake could hardly be more obvious.
Tolerance, which once presupposed neglect, now decries it, and in so doing
becomes its opposite. Were this a partisan development, partisan politics
of a democratic kind might sustain the possibility of reversion, but it is
nothing of the kind. “When someone is hurting, government has got to move”
declared ‘compassionate conservative’ US President George W. Bush, in a
futile effort to channel the Cathedral. When the ‘right’ sounds like this
it is not only dead, but unmistakably reeking of advanced decomposition.
‘Progress’ has won, but is that bad? Moldbug
approaches
the question rigorously:
Behaviorally considered, the Misesian and Darwinian systems are clusters
of ‘selfish’ incentives, oriented respectively to property accumulation
and gene propagation. Whilst the Darwinians conceive the ‘Misesian’ sphere
as a special case of genetically self-interested motivation, the Austrian
tradition, rooted in highly rationalized neo-kantian anti-naturalism, is
pre-disposed to resist such reductionism. Whilst the ultimate implications
of this contest are considerable, under current conditions it is a
squabble of minor urgency, since both formations are united in ‘hate’,
which is to say, in their reactionary tolerance for incentive structures
that punish the maladapted.
‘Hate’ is a word to pause over. It testifies with special clarity to the
religious orthodoxy of the Cathedral, and its peculiarities merit careful
notice. Perhaps its most remarkable feature is its perfect redundancy,
when evaluated from the perspective of any analysis of legal and cultural
norms that is not enflamed by neo-puritan evangelical enthusiasm.
A ‘hate crime’, if it is anything at all, is just a crime, plus ‘hate’,
and what the ‘hate’ adds is telling. To restrict ourselves, momentarily,
to examples of uncontroversial criminality, one might ask: what is it
exactly that aggravates a murder, or assault, if the motivation
is attributed to ‘hate’? Two factors seem especially prominent, and
neither has any obvious connection to common legal norms.
Firstly, the crime is augmented by a purely ideational, ideological, or
even ‘spiritual’ element, attesting not only to a violation of civilized
conduct, but also to a heretical intention. This facilitates the complete
abstraction of hate from criminality, whereupon it takes the form of
‘hate-speech’ or simply ‘hate’ (which is always to be contrasted with the
‘passion’, ‘outrage’, or righteous ‘anger’ represented by critical,
controversial, or merely abusive language directed against unprotected
groups, social categories, or individuals). ‘Hate’ is an offense against
the Cathedral itself, a refusal of its spiritual guidance, and a mental
act of defiance against the manifest religious destiny of the world.
Secondly, and relatedly, ‘hate’ is deliberately and even strategically
asymmetrical in respect to the equilibrium political polarity of advanced
democratic societies. Between the relentless march of progress and the
ineffective grouching of conservatism it does not vacillate. As we have
seen, only the right can ‘hate’. As the doxological immunity system of
‘hate’ suppression is consolidated within elite educational and media
systems, the highly selective distribution of protections ensures that
‘discourse’ – especially empowered discourse – is ratcheted consistently
to the left, which is to say, in the direction of an ever more
comprehensively radicalized Universalism. The morbidity of this trend is
extreme.
Because grievance status is awarded as political compensation for economic
incompetence, it constructs an automatic cultural mechanism that advocates
for dysfunction. The Universalist creed, with its reflex identification of
inequality with injustice, can conceive no alternative to the proposition
that the lower one’s situation or status, the more compelling is one’s
claim upon society, the purer and nobler one’s cause. Temporal failure is
the sign of spiritual election (Marxo-Calvinism), and to dispute any of
this is clearly ‘hate’.
This does not compel even the most hard-hearted neo-reactionary to
suggest, in a caricature of the high Victorian cultural style, that social
disadvantage, as manifested in political violence, criminality,
homelessness, insolvency, and welfare dependency, is a simple index of
moral culpability. In large part – perhaps overwhelmingly large part – it
reflects sheer misfortune. Dim, impulsive, unhealthy, and unattractive
people, reared chaotically in abusive families, and stranded in broken,
crime-wracked communities, have every reason to curse the gods before
themselves. Besides, disaster can strike anyone.
In regards to effective incentive structures, however, none of this is of
the slightest importance. Behavioral reality knows only one iron law:
Whatever is subsidized is promoted. With a necessity no weaker than that
of entropy itself, insofar as social democracy seeks to soften bad
consequences – for major corporations no less than for struggling
individuals or hapless cultures — things get worse. There is no way
around, or beyond this formula, only wishful thinking, and complicity with
degeneration. Of course, this defining reactionary insight is doomed to
inconsequence, since it amounts to the supremely unpalatable conclusion
that every attempt at ‘progressive’ improvement is fated to reverse
itself, ‘perversely’, into horrible failure. No democracy could accept
this, which means that every democracy will fail.
The excited spiral of Misesian-Darwinian degenerative runaway is neatly
captured in the
words
of the world’s fluffiest Beltway libertarian, Megan McArdle, writing in
core Cathedral-mouthpiece The Atlantic:
Despite McArdle’s ridiculous suggestion that the United States of America
has in some way exempted itself from Europe’s mortuary path, the broad
outline of the diagnosis is clear, and increasingly accepted as
commonsensical (although best ignored). According to the rising creed,
welfare attained through progeny and savings is non-universal, and thus
morally-benighted. It should be supplanted, as widely and rapidly as
possible, by universal benefits or ‘positive rights’ distributed
universally to the democratic citizen and thus, inevitably, routed through
the altruistic State. If as a result, due to the irredeemable political
incorrectness of reality, economies and populations should collapse in
concert, at least it will not damage our souls. Oh democracy! You
saccharine-sweet dying idiot, what do you think the zombie hordes will
care for your soul?
Moldbug
comments:
As a bonus, here’s the Urban Feature guide to the main sequence
of modern political regimes:
Regime (1) Communist Tyranny
Typical Growth: ~0%
Voice / Exit: Low / Low
Cultural climate: Pyschotic utopianism
Life is … hard but ‘fair’
Transition mechanism: Re-discovers markets at economic
degree-zero
Regime (2) Authoritarian Capitalism
Typical Growth: 5-10%
Voice / Exit: Low / High
Cultural climate: Flinty realism
Life is … hard but productive
Transition mechanism: Pressurized by the Cathedral to
democratize
Regime (3) Social Democracy
Typical Growth: 0-3%
Voice / Exit: High / High
Cultural climate: Sanctimonious dishonesty
Life is … soft and unsustainable
Transition mechanism: Can-kicking runs out of road
Regime (4) Zombie Apocalypse
Typical Growth: N/A
Voice / Exit: High (mostly useless screaming) / High
(with fuel, ammo, dried food, precious metal coins)
Cultural climate: Survivalism
Life is … hard-to-impossible
Transition mechanism: Unknown
For all regimes, growth expectations assume moderately competent
population, otherwise go straight to (4)
March 19, 2012The Dark Enlightenment (Part 4)
Without a taste for irony, Mencius Moldbug is all but unendurable, and
certainly unintelligible. Vast structures of historical irony shape his
writings, at times even engulfing them. How otherwise could a proponent of
traditional configurations of social order – a self-proclaimed Jacobite –
compose a body of work that is stubbornly dedicated to subversion?
Irony is Moldbug’s method, as well as his milieu. This can be seen, most
tellingly, in his chosen name for the usurped enlightenment, the dominant
faith of the modern world: Universalism. This is a word that he
appropriates (and capitalizes) within a reactionary diagnosis whose entire
force lies in its exposure of an exorbitant particularity.
Moldbug turns continually to history (or, more rigorously,
cladistics), to accurately specify that which asserts its own
universal significance whilst ascending to a state of general dominance
that approaches the universal. Under this examination, what counts as
Universal reason, determining the direction and meaning of modernity, is
revealed as the minutely determined branch or sub-species of a cultic
tradition, descended from ‘ranters’, ‘levelers’, and closely related
variants of dissident, ultra-protestant fanaticism, and owing vanishingly
little to the conclusions of logicians.
Ironically, then, the world’s regnant
Universalist democratic-egalitarian faith is a particular or
peculiar cult that has broken out, along identifiable historical
and geographical pathways, with an epidemic virulence that is disguised as
progressive global enlightenment. The route that it has taken, through
England and New England, Reformation and Revolution, is recorded by an
accumulation of traits that provide abundant material for irony, and for
lower varieties of comedy. The unmasking of the modern ‘liberal’
intellectual or ‘open-minded’ media ‘truth-teller’ as a pale, fervent,
narrowly doctrinaire puritan, recognizably descended from the species of
witch-burning zealots, is reliably – and irresistibly – entertaining.
Yet, as the Cathedral extends and tightens its grip upon everything,
everywhere, in accordance with its divine mandate, the response it
triggers is only atypically humorous. More commonly, when unable to exact
humble compliance, it encounters inarticulate rage, or at least
uncomprehending, smoldering resentment, as befits the imposition of
parochial cultural dogmas, still wrapped in the trappings of a specific,
alien pedigree, even as they earnestly confess to universal rationality.
Consider, for instance, the most famous words of America’s
Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created
equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
Rights …” Could it be honestly maintained that to submit, scrupulously and
sincerely, to such ‘self-evident’ truths amounts to anything other than an
act of religious re-confirmation or conversion? Or denied that, in these
words, reason and evidence are explicitly set aside, to make room
for principles of faith? Could anything be less scientific than such a
declaration, or more indifferent to the criteria of genuinely universal
reasoning? How could anybody who was not already a believer be
expected to consent to such assumptions?
That the founding statement of the democratic-republican creed should be
formulated as a statement of pure (and doctrinally recognizable) faith is
information of sorts, but it is not yet irony. The irony begins with the
fact that among the elites of today’s Cathedral, these words of the
Declaration of Independence (as well as many others) would be found –
almost universally – to be quaintly suggestive at best, perhaps vaguely
embarrassing, and most certainly incapable of supporting literal assent.
Even amongst libertarian-slanted conservatives, a firm commitment to
‘natural rights’ is unlikely to proceed confidently and emphatically to
their divine origination. For modern ‘liberals’, believers in the
rights-bestowing (or entitlement) State, such archaic ideas are not only
absurdly dated, but positively obstructive. For that reason, they are
associated less with revered predecessors than with the retarded,
fundamentalist thinking of political enemies. Sophisticates of the
Cathedral core understand, as Hegel did, that God is no more than deep
government apprehended by infants, and as such a waste of faith (that
bureaucrats could put to better use).
Since the Cathedral has ascended to global supremacy, it no longer has
need for Founding Fathers, who awkwardly recall its parochial ancestry,
and impede its transnational public relations. Rather, it seeks perpetual
re-invigoration through their denigration. The phenomenon of the ‘New
Atheism’, with its transparent progressive affiliations, attests
abundantly to this. Paleo-puritanism must be derided in order for
neo-puritanism to flourish –
the meme is dead, long live the meme!
At the limit of self-parody, neo-puritan parricide takes the form of the
ludicrous ‘War on Christmas’, in which the allies of the Cathedral
sanctify the (radically unthreatened) separation of Church and State
through nuisance agitation against public expressions of traditional
Christian piety, and their ‘Red State’ dupes respond with dyspeptic
outrage on cable TV shows. Like every other war against fuzzy nouns
(whether ‘poverty’, ‘drugs’, or ‘terror’), the outcome is predictably
perverse. If resistance to the War on Christmas is not yet established as
the solid center of Yuletide festivities, it can be confidently expected
to become so in the future. The purposes of the Cathedral are served
nonetheless, through promotion of a synthetic secularism that separates
the progressive faith from its religious foundations, whilst directing
attention away from the ethnically specific, dogmatic creedal content at
its core.
As reactionaries go, traditional Christians are generally considered to be
quite cuddly. Even the most wild-eyed fanatics of the neo-puritan
orthodoxy have trouble getting genuinely excited about them (although
abortion activists get close). For some real red meat, with the nerves
exposed and writhing to jolts of hard stimulation, it makes far more sense
to turn to another discarded and ceremonially abominated block on the
progressive lineage: White Identity Politics, or (the term Moldbug
opts for) ‘white nationalism’.
Just as the ratchet progress of neo-puritan social democracy is radically
facilitated by the orchestrated pillorying of its embryonic religious
forms, so is its trend to consistently neo-fascist political economy
smoothed by the concerted repudiation of a ‘neo-nazi’ (or paleo-fascist)
threat. It is extremely convenient, when constructing ever more nakedly
corporatist or ‘third position’ structures of state-directed
pseudo-capitalism, to be able to divert attention to angry expressions of
white racial paranoia, especially when these are ornamented by clumsily
modified nazi insignia, horned helmets, Leni Riefenstahl aesthetics, and
slogans borrowed freely from
Mein Kampf. In the United States (and thus, with shrinking
time-lag, internationally) the icons of the Ku Klux Klan, from white
bed-sheets, quasi-Masonic titles, and burning crosses, to lynching ropes,
have acquired comparable theatrical value.
Moldbug offers a sanitized white nationalist blog reading list, consisting
of writers who – to varying degrees of success – avoid immediate reversion
to paleo-fascist self-parody. The first step beyond the boundary of
respectable opinion is represented by
Lawrence Auster, a Christian, anti-Darwinist, and ‘Traditionalist Conservative’ who
defends ‘substantial’ (ethno-racial) national identity and opposes the
liberal master-principle of nondiscrimination. By the time we reach ‘Tanstaafl’, at the ripped outer edge of Moldbug’s carefully truncated spectrum, we
have entered a decaying orbit, spiraling into the great black hole that is
hidden at the dead center of modern political possibility.
Before following the Tanstaafl-types into the crushing abyss where light
dies, there are some preliminary remarks to make about the white
nationalist perspective, and its implications. Even more than the
Christian traditionalists (who, even in their cultural mid-winter, can
bask in the warmth of supernatural endorsement), white identity politics
considers itself besieged. Moderate or measured concern offers no
equilibrium for those who cross the line, and begin to self-identify in
these terms. Instead, the path of involvement demands rapid acceleration
to a state of extreme alarm, or racial panic, conforming to an analysis
focused upon malicious population replacement at the hands of a government
which, in the oft-cited words of Bertolt Brecht, “has decided to dissolve
the people, and to appoint another one.” ‘Whiteness’ (whether conceived
biologically, mystically, or both) is associated with vulnerability,
fragility, and persecution. This theme is so basic, and so multifarious,
that it is difficult to adequately address succinctly. It encompasses
everything from criminal predation (especially racially-charged murders,
rapes, and beatings), economic exactions and inverse discrimination,
cultural aggression by hostile academic and media systems, and ultimately
‘genocide’ – or definitive racial destruction.
Typically, the prospective annihilation of the white race is attributed to
its own systematic vulnerability, whether due to characteristic cultural
traits (excessive altruism, susceptibility to moral manipulation,
excessive hospitality, trust, universal reciprocity, guilt, or
individualistic disdain for group identity), or more immediate biological
factors (recessive genes supporting fragile Aryan phenotypes). Whilst it
is unlikely that this sense of unique endangerment is reducible to the
chromatic formula ‘White + Color = Color’, the fundamental structure is of
this kind. In its abstract depiction of non-reciprocal vulnerability, it
reflects the ‘one drop rule’ (and Mendelian recessive / dominant gene
combination). It depicts mixture as essentially anti-white.
Because ‘whiteness’ is a limit (pure absence of color), it slips smoothly
from the biological factuality of the Caucasian sub-species into
metaphysical and mystical ideas. Rather than accumulating genetic
variation, a white race is contaminated or polluted by admixtures that
compromise its defining negativity – to darken it is to destroy it. The
mythological density of these — predominantly subliminal – associations
invests white identity politics with a resilience that frustrates
enlightened efforts at rationalistic denunciation, whilst contradicting
its own paranoid self-representation. It also undermines recent white
nationalist promotions of a racial threat that is strictly comparable to
that facing indigenous peoples, universally, and depicting whites as
‘natives’ cruelly deprived of equal protection against extinction. There
is no route back to tribal innocence, or flat, biological diversity.
Whiteness has been compacted indissolubly with ideology, whichever the
road taken.
“If Blacks can have it, and Hispanics can have it, and Jews can have it,
why can’t we have it?” – That’s the final building block of white
nationalist grievance, the werewolf curse that means it can only ever be a
monster. There’s exactly one way out for persecuted palefaces, and it
leads straight into a black hole. We promised to get back to Tanstaafl,
and
here
we are, in late Summer 2007, shortly after he got ‘the Jew thing’. There isn’t anything very original about his epiphany, which is
exactly the point. He quotes himself:
That’s the labyrinth, the trap, with its pitifully constricted,
stereotypical circuit. “Why can’t we be cuddly racial preservationists,
like Amazonian Indians? How come we always turn into Neo-Nazis? It’s some
kind of conspiracy, which means it has to be the Jews.” Since the
mid-20th century, the political intensity of the globalized world has
streamed, almost exclusively, out of the cratered ash-pile of the Third
Reich. Until you get the pattern, it seems mysterious that there’s no
getting away from it. After listing some blogs falling under the
relatively genteel category of ‘white nationalism’, Moldbug
cautions:
Google is overkill. A little link-trawling will get you there. It’s a ‘six
degrees of separation’ problem (and more like two, or less). Start digging
into the actually existing ‘reactosphere’, and things get quite
astoundingly ugly very quickly. Yes, there really is ‘hate’, panic, and
disgust, as well as a morbidly addictive abundance of very grim, vitriolic
wit, and a disconcertingly impressive weight of credible fact (these guys
just love statistics to death). Most of all, just beyond the
horizon, there’s the black hole. If reaction ever became a popular
movement, its few slender threads of bourgeois (or perhaps dreamily
‘aristocratic’) civility wouldn’t hold back the beast for long.
As liberal decency has severed itself from intellectual integrity, and
exiled harsh truths, these truths have found new allies, and become
considerably harsher. The outcome is mechanically, and monotonously,
predictable. Every liberal democratic ‘cause war’ strengthens and
feralizes what it fights. The war on poverty creates a chronically
dysfunctional underclass. The war on drugs creates crystallized
super-drugs and mega-mafias. Guess what? The war on political
incorrectness creates data-empowered, web-coordinated, paranoid and
poly-conspiratorial werewolves, superbly positioned to take advantage of
liberal democracy’s impending rendezvous with ruinous reality, and to then
play their part in the unleashing of unpleasantnesses that are scarcely
imaginable (except by disturbing historical analogy). When a sane,
pragmatic, and fact-based negotiation of human differences is
forbidden by ideological fiat, the alternative is not a reign of perpetual peace, but a festering of
increasingly self-conscious and militantantly defiant
thoughtcrime, nourished by publicly unavowable realities, and
energized by powerful, atavistic, and palpably dissident mythologies.
That’s obvious, on the ‘Net.
Moldbug considers the danger of white nationalism to be both over- and
understated. On the one hand, the ‘menace’ is simply ridiculous, and
merely reflects neo-puritan spiritual dogma in its most hysterically
oppressive and stubbornly mindless form. “It should be obvious that,
although I am not a white nationalist, I am not exactly allergic to the
stuff,” Moldbug remarks, before describing it as “the most marginalized
and socially excluded belief system in the history of the world … an
obnoxious social irritant in any circle which does not include tattooed
speedfreak bikers.”
Yet the danger remains, or rather, is under construction.
There’s far more to Moldbug’s essay, as there always is. Eventually it
explains why he rejects white nationalism, on grounds that owe nothing to
conventional reflexes. But the dark heart of the essay, lifting it beyond
brilliance to the brink of genius, is found early on, at the edge of a
black hole:
Any attempt to be nuanced, balanced, or proportional in the moral case
against Hitler is to entirely misconstrue the nature of the phenomenon.
This can be noted, quite regularly, in Asian societies, for instance,
because the ghost of the Third Reich does not occupy central position in
their history, or rather, their religion, although – as the inner
sanctum of the Cathedral — it is determined to (and shows almost every
sign of succeeding). A brief digression on cross-cultural misunderstanding
and reciprocal blindness might be merited at this point. When Westerners
pay attention to the ‘God-Emperor’ style of political devotion that has
accompanied modern totalitarianism in East Asia, the conclusion typically
drawn is that this pattern of political feeling is exotically alien,
morbidly amusing, and ultimately – chillingly — incomprehensible.
Contemporary comparisons with laughably non-numinous Western democratic
leaders only deepen the confusion, as do clumsy quasi-Marxist references
to ‘feudal’ sensibilities (as if absolute monarchy was not an
alternative to feudalism, and as if absolute monarchs were
worshipped).
How could a historical and political figure ever be invested with the
transcendent dignity of absolute religious meaning?
It seems absurd …
“Look, I’m not saying that Hitler was a particularly nice guy …” – to
imagine such word is already to see many things. It might even provoke the
question: Does anybody within the (Cathedral’s) globalized world still
think that Adolf Hitler was less evil than the Prince of Darkness himself?
Perhaps only a few scattered paleo-Christians (who stubbornly insist that
Satan is really, really bad), and an even smaller number of
Neo-Nazi ultras (who think Hitler was kind of cool). For pretty much
everybody else, Hitler perfectly personifies demonic monstrosity,
transcending history and politics to attain the stature of a metaphysical
absolute: evil incarnate. Beyond Hitler it is impossible to go, or think.
This is surely interesting, since it indicates an irruption of the
infinite within history – a religious revelation, of inverted, yet
structurally familiar, Abrahamic type. (‘Holocaust Theology’ already
implies as much.)
In this regard, rather than Satan, it might be more helpful to compare
Hitler to the Antichrist, which is to say: to a mirror Messiah, of
reversed moral polarity. There was even an empty tomb.
Hitlerism, neutrally conceived, therefore, is less a pro-Nazi
ideology than a universal faith, speciated within the Abrahamic
super-family, and united in acknowledging the coming of pure evil on
earth. Whilst not exactly worshipped (outside the extraordinarily
disreputable circles already ventured into), Hitler is sacramentally
abhorred, in a way that touches upon theological ‘first things’. If to
embrace Hitler as God is a sign of highly lamentable politico-spiritual
confusion (at best), to recognize his historical singularity and sacred
meaning is near-mandatory, since he is affirmed by all men of sound faith
as the exact complement of the incarnate God (the revealed anti-Messiah,
or Adversary), and this identification has the force of ‘self-evident
truth’. (Did anybody ever need to ask why the
reductio ad Hitlerum works?)
Conveniently, like the secularized neo-puritanism that it swallows,
(aversive) Hitlerism can be safely taught in American schools, at a
remarkably high level of religious intensity. Insofar as progressive or
programmatic history continues, this suggests that the Church of Sacred
Hitlerite Abomination will eventually supplant its Abrahamic predecessors,
to become the world’s triumphant ecumenical faith. How could it not? After
all, unlike vanilla deism, this is a faith that fully reconciles religious
enthusiasm with enlightened opinion, equally adapted, with consummate
amphibious capability, to the convulsive ecstasies of popular ritual and
the letter pages of the
New York Times. “Absolute evil once walked amongst us, and lives
still …” How is this not, already, the principal religious message of our
time? All that remains unfinished is the mythological consolidation, and
that has long been underway.
There’s still some bone-fragment picking to do among the ashes and debris
[in Part 5], before turning to healthier things …
April 1, 2012The Dark Enlightenment (Part 4a)
There is no part of Singapore, Hong Kong, Taipei, Shanghai, or very many
other East Asian cities where it is impossible to wander, safely, late at
night. Women, whether young or old, on their own or with small children,
can be comfortably oblivious to the details of space and time, at least
insofar as the threat of assault is concerned. Whilst this might not be
quite sufficient to define a civilized society, it comes extremely close.
It is certainly necessary to any such definition. The contrary
case is barbarism.
These lucky cities of the western Pacific Rim are typified by geographical
locations and demographic profiles that conspicuously echo the
embarrassingly well-behaved ‘model minorities’ of Occidental countries.
They are (non-obnoxiously) dominated by populations that – due to
biological heredity, deep cultural traditions, or some inextricable
entanglement of the two – find polite, prudent, and pacific social
interactions comparatively effortless, and worthy of continuous
reinforcement. They are also, importantly, open, cosmopolitan societies,
remarkably devoid of chauvinistic boorishness or paranoid
ethno-nationalist sentiment. Their citizens are disinclined to emphasize
their own virtues. On the contrary, they will typically be modest about
their individual and collective attributes and achievements, abnormally
sensitive to their failures and shortcomings, and constantly alert to
opportunities for improvement. Complacency is almost as rare as
delinquency. In these cities an entire — and massively consequential —
dimension of social terror is simply absent.
In much of the Western world, in stark contrast, barbarism has been
normalized. It is considered simply obvious that cities have ‘bad areas’
that are not merely impoverished, but lethally menacing to outsiders and
residents alike. Visitors are warned to stay away, whilst locals do their
best to transform their homes into fortresses, avoid venturing onto the
streets after dark, and – especially if young and male — turn to criminal
gangs for protection, which further degrades the security of everybody
else. Predators control public space, parks are death traps, aggressive
menace is celebrated as ‘attitude’, property acquisition is for mugs (or
muggers), educational aspiration is ridiculed, and non-criminal business
activity is despised as a violation of cultural norms. Every significant
mechanism of socio-cultural pressure, from interpreted heritage and peer
influences to political rhetoric and economic incentives, is aligned to
the deepening of complacent depravity and the ruthless extirpation of
every impulse to self-improvement. Quite clearly, these are places where
civilization has fundamentally collapsed, and a society that includes them
has to some substantial extent failed.
Within the most influential countries of the English-speaking world, the
disintegration of urban civilization has profoundly shaped the structure
and development of cities. In many cases, the ‘natural’ (one might now say
‘Asian’) pattern, in which intensive urbanization and corresponding real
estate values are greatest in the downtown core, has been shattered, or at
least deeply deformed. Social disintegration of the urban center has
driven an exodus of the (even moderately) prosperous to suburban and
exurban refuges, producing a grotesque and historically unprecedented
pattern of ‘donut’-style development, with cities tolerating – or merely
accommodating themselves to – ruined and rotting interiors, where sane
people fear to tread. ‘Inner city’ has come to mean almost exactly the
opposite of what an undistorted course of urban development would produce.
This is the geographical expression of a Western – and especially American
– social problem that is at once basically unmentionable and visible from
outer space.
Surprisingly, the core-crashed donut syndrome has a notably insensitive
yet commonly accepted name, which captures it in broad outlines – at least
according to its secondary characteristics – and to a reasonable degree of
statistical approximation: White Flight. This is an arresting
term, for a variety of reasons. It is stamped, first of all, by the racial
bi-polarity that – as a vital archaism – resonates with America’s
chronic social crisis at a number of levels. Whilst superficially outdated
in an age of many-hued multicultural and immigration issues, it reverts to
the undead code inherited from slavery and segregation, perpetually
identified with Faulkner’s words: “The past is not dead. It isn’t even
past.” Yet even in this untypical moment of racial candor, blackness is
elided, and implicitly disconnected from agency. It is denoted only by
allusion, as a residue, concentrated passively and derivatively by the
sifting function of a highly-adrenalized white panic. What
cannot be said is indicated even as it is unmentioned. A
distinctive silence accompanies the broken, half-expression of a mute tide
of racial separatism, driven by civilizationally disabling terrors and
animosities, whose depths, and structures of reciprocity, remain
unavowable.
What the puritan exodus from Old to New World was to the foundation of
Anglophone global modernity, white flight is to its fraying and
dissolution. As with the pre-founding migration, what gives white flight
ineluctable relevance here is its sub-political character:
all exit and no voice. It is the subtle, non-argumentative,
non-demanding ‘other’ of social democracy and its dreams – the spontaneous
impulse of dark enlightenment, as it is initially glimpsed, at once
disillusioning and implacable.
The core-crashed donut is not the only model of sick city syndrome (the
shanty fringe phenomenon emphasized in Mike Davis’
Planet of Slums
is very different). Nor is donut-disaster urbanism reducible to racial
crisis, at least in its origins. Technological factors have played a
crucial role (most prominently, automobile geography) as have quite other,
long-standing cultural traditions (such as the construction of suburbia as
a bourgeois idyll). Yet all such lineages have been in very large measure
supplanted by, or at least subordinated to, the inherited, and still
emerging, ‘race problem.’
So what is this ‘problem’? How is it developing? Why should anybody
outside America be concerned about it? Why raise the topic now (if ever)?
– If your heart is sinking under the gloomy suspicion this is going to be
huge, meandering, nerve-wracking, and torturous, you’re right. We’ve got
weeks in this chamber of horrors to look forward to.
The two simplest, quite widely held, and basically incompatible answers to
the first question deserve to be considered as important
parts of the problem.
Question: What is America’s race problem?
Answer-1: Black people.
Answer-2: White people.
The combined popularity of these options is significantly expanded, most
probably to encompass a large majority of all Americans, when is taken to
include those who assume that one of these two answers dominates the
thinking of the other side. Between them, the propositions “The
problem would be over if we could just rid ourselves of black hoodlums /
white racists” and / or “They think we’re all hoodlums / racists and want
to get rid of us” consume an impressive proportion of the political
spectrum, establishing a solid foundation of reciprocal terror and
aversion. When defensive projections are added (“We’re not hoodlums,
you’re racists” or “We’re not racists, you’re hoodlums”), the potential
for super-heated, non-synthesizing dialectics approaches the infinite.
Not that these ‘sides’ are racial (except in black or white
tribal-nationalist fantasy). For crude stereotypes, it is far more useful to turn to the
principal political dimension, and its categories of ‘liberal’
and ‘conservative’ in the contemporary, American sense. To identify
America’s race problem with white racism is the stereotypical
liberal position, whilst identifying it with black social
dysfunction is the exact conservative complement. Although these
stances are formally symmetrical, it is their actual political
asymmentry that charges the American race problem with its
extraordinary historical dynamism and universal significance.
That American whites and blacks – considered crudely as statistical
aggregates — co-exist in a relation of reciprocal fear and perceived
victimization, is attested by the manifest patterns of urban development
and navigation, school choice, gun ownership, policing and incarceration,
and just about every other expression of
revealed (as opposed to stated) preference that is
related to voluntary social distribution and security. An objective
balance of terror reigns, erased from visibility by complementary yet
incompatible perspectives of victimological supremacism and denial. Yet
between the
liberal and conservative positions on race there is no balance
whatsoever, but something closer to a rout. Conservatives are utterly
terrified of the issue, whilst for liberals it is a garden of earthly
delight, whose pleasures transcend the limits of human understanding. When
any political discussion firmly and clearly arrives at the topic of race,
liberalism wins. That is the fundamental law of ideological effectiveness
in the shadow fragrant shade of the Cathedral. In certain
respects, this dynamic political imbalance is even the primary phenomenon
under consideration (and much more needs to be said about it, down the
road).
The regular, excruciating, soul-crushing humiliation of conservatism on
the race issue should come as no surprise to anybody. After all, the
principal role of conservatism in modern politics is to be humiliated.
That is what a perpetual loyal opposition, or court jester, is for. The
essential character of liberalism, as guardian and proponent of
neo-puritan spiritual truth, invests it with supreme mastery over the
dialectic, or invulnerability to contradiction.
That which it is impossible to think must necessarily be embraced,
through faith. Consider only the fundamental doctrine or first article of the liberal
creed, as promulgated through every public discussion, academic
articulation, and legislative initiative relevant to the topic:
Race doesn’t exist, except as a social construct employed by one race
to exploit and oppress another. Merely to entertain it is to shudder before the awesome majesty of the
absolute, where everything is simultaneously its precise opposite, and
reason evaporates ecstatically at the brink of the sublime.
If the world was built out of ideology, this story would already be over,
or at least predictably programmed. Beyond the apparent zig-zag of the
dialectic there is a dominant trend, heading in a single, unambiguous
direction. Yet the liberal-progressive solution to the race problem –
open-endedly escalating, comprehensively systematic, dynamically
paradoxical ‘anti-racism’ – confronts a real obstacle that is only very
partially reflected in conservative attitudes, rhetoric, and ideology. The
real enemy, glacial, inchoate, and non-argumentative, is ‘white flight’.
At this point, explicit reference to the Derbyshire Case becomes
irresistible. There is a very considerable amount of complex, recent
historical context that cries out for introduction – the cultural
convulsion attending the Trayvon Martin incident in particular – but
there’ll be time for that later (oh yes, I’m afraid so). Derbyshire’s
intervention, and the explosion of words it provoked, while to some extent
illuminated by such context, far exceeds it. That is because the crucial
unspoken term, both in Derbyshire’s now-notorious
short article, and also — apparently — in the responses it generated, is ‘white
flight’. By publishing paternal advice to his (Eurasian) children that has
been — not entirely unreasonably — summarized as ‘avoid black people’, he
converted white flight from a much-lamented but seemingly inexorable fact
into an explicit imperative, even a cause.
Don’t argue, flee.
The word Derbyshire emphasizes, in his own penumbra of commentary, and in
antecedent writings, is not ‘flight’ or ‘panic’, but
despair. When asked by blogger Vox Day whether he agreed that the
‘race card’ had become less intimidating over the past two decades,
Derbyshire
replies:
This is a version of reality that few want to hear. As Derbyshire
recognizes, Americans are a predominantly Christian, optimistic, ‘can-do’
people, whose ‘collective heart’ is unusually maladapted to an
abandonment of hope. This is a country culturally hard-wired to
interpret despair not merely as error or weakness, but as sin.
Nobody who understands this could be remotely surprised to find bleak
hereditarian fatalism being rejected — typically with vehement hostility —
not only by progressives, but also by the overwhelming majority of
conservatives. At NRO, Andrew C. McCarthy no doubt spoke for many in
remarking:
Others went much further. At the Examiner, James Gibson
seized
upon “John Derbyshire’s vile racist screed” as the opportunity to teach a
wider lesson – “the danger of conservatism divorced from Christianity”:
It was, of course, on the left that the fireworks truly ignited. Elspeth
Reeve at the Atlantic Wire
contended
that Derbyshire had clung on to his relation with the National Review
because he was offering the magazine’s “less enlightened readers” what
they wanted: “dated racial stereotypes.” Like Gibson on the right, she was
keen for people to learn a wider lesson:
don’t think for a minute this stops with Derbyshire. (The
stunningly uncooperative comments thread to her article is worth noting.)
At Gawker, Louis Peitzman
jumped the shark
(in the approved direction) by describing Derbyshire’s “horrifying
diatribe” as the “most racist article possible,” a judgment that betrays
extreme historical ignorance, a sheltered life, unusual innocence, and a
lack of imagination, as well as making the piece sound far more
interesting than it actually is. Peitzman’s commentators are impeccably
liberal, and of course uniformly, utterly, shatteringly appalled (to the
point of orgasm). Beyond the emoting, Peitzman doesn’t offer much content,
excepting only a little extra emoting – this time mild satisfaction mixed
with residual rage – at the news that Derbyshire’s punishment has at least
begun (“a step in the right direction”) with his “canning” from the
National Review.
Joanna Schroeder (writing
at something called the Good Feed Blog) sought to extend the purge beyond
Derbyshire, to include anybody who had not yet erupted into sufficiently
melodramatic paroxysms of indignation, starting with David Weigel
at
Slate (who she doesn’t know “in real life, but in reading this piece, it
seems you just might be a racist, pal”). “There are so many … racist,
dehumanizing references to black people in Derbyshire’s article that I
have to just stop myself here before I recount the entire thing point by
point with fuming rage,” she shares. Unlike Peitzman, however, at least
Schroeder has a point – the racial terror dialectic — “… propagating the
idea that we should be afraid of black men, of black people in general,
makes this world dangerous for innocent Americans.”
Your fear makes you scary (although apparently not with
legitimate reciprocity).
As for Weigel, he gets the terror good and hard. Within hours he’s
back
at the keyboard, apologizing for his previous insouciance, and for the
fact he “never ended up saying the obvious: People, the essay was
disgusting.”
So what did Derbyshire actually say, where did it come from, and what does
it mean to American politics (and beyond)? This sub-series will comb
through the spectrum from left to right in search of suggestions, with
socio-geographically manifested ‘white’ panic / despair as a guiding
thread …
Coming next: The Liberal Ecstasy
April 19, 2012The Dark Enlightenment (Part 4b)
“In brief, dialectics can be defined as the doctrine of the unity of
opposites. This embodies the essence of dialectics,” Lenin
notes, “but it requires explanations and development.” That is to say: further
discussion.
The sublimation (Aufhebung) of Marxism into Leninism is an
eventuality that is best grasped crudely. By forging a revolutionary
communist politics of broad application, almost entirely divorced from the
mature material conditions or advanced social contradictions that had been
previously anticipated, Lenin demonstrated that dialectical tension
coincided, exhaustively, with its politicization (and that all reference
to a ‘dialectics of nature’ is no more than retrospective subordination of
the scientific domain to a political model). Dialectics are as real as
they are made to be.
The dialectic begins with political agitation, and extends no further than
its practical, antagonistic, factional and coalitional ‘logic’. It is the
‘superstructure’ for itself, or against natural limitation,
practically appropriating the political sphere in its broadest graspable
extension as a platform for social domination. Everywhere that there is
argument, there is an unresolved opportunity to rule.
The Cathedral incarnates these lessons. It has no need to espouse
Leninism, or operational communist dialectics, because it recognizes
nothing else. There is scarcely a fragment of the social ‘superstructure’
that has escaped dialectical reconstruction, through articulate
antagonism, polarization, binary structuring, and reversal. Within the
academy, the media, even the fine arts, political super-saturation has
prevailed, identifying even the most minuscule elements of apprehension
with conflictual ‘social critique’ and egalitarian teleology. Communism is
the universal implication.
More dialectics is more politics, and more politics means ‘progress’ – or
social migration to the left. The production of public agreement only
leads in one direction, and within public disagreement, such impetus
already exists in embryo. It is only in the absence of agreement
and of publicly articulated disagreement, which is to say, in
non-dialectics, non-argument, sub-political diversity, or politically
uncoordinated initiative, that the ‘right-wing’ refuge of ‘the economy’
(and civil society more widely) is to be found.
When no agreement is necessary, or coercively demanded, negative (or
‘libertarian’) liberty is still possible, and this non-argumentative
‘other’ of dialectics is easily formulated (even if, in a free society, it
doesn’t need to be): Do your own thing. Quite clearly, this
irresponsible and negligent imperative is
politically intolerable. It coincides exactly with leftist
depression, retrogression, or depoliticization. Nothing cries out more
urgently to be argued against.
At the opposite extreme lies the dialectical ecstasy of theatrical
justice, in which the argumentative structure of legal proceedings is
coupled with publicization through the media. Dialectical enthusiasm finds
its definitive expression in a courtroom drama that combines lawyers,
journalists, community activists, and other agents of the revolutionary
superstructure in the production of a show trial. Social
contradictions are staged, antagonistic cases articulated, and resolution
institutionally expected. This is Hegel for prime-time television (and now
for the Internet). It is the way that the Cathedral shares its message
with the people.
Sometimes, in its impatient passion for progress, this message can trip
over itself, because even though the agents of the Cathedral are
infinitely reasonable, they are ever less sensible, often
strikingly incompetent, and prone to making mistakes. This is to be
expected on theological grounds. As the state becomes God, it degenerates
into imbecility, on the model of the holy fool. The media-politics of the
Trayvon Martin spectacle provides a pertinent example.
In the United States, as in any other large country, lots of things happen
every day, exhibiting innumerable patterns of varying obscurity. For
instance, on an average day, there are roughly 3,400 violent crimes, including 40
murders, 230 rapes, 1,000 robberies, and 2,100 aggravated assaults,
alongside 25,000 non-violent property crimes (burglaries and thefts). Very
few of these will be widely publicized, or seized upon as educational,
exemplary, and representative. Even were the media not inclined towards a
narrative-based selection of ‘good stories’, the sheer volume of incidents
would compel something of the kind. Given this situation, it is all but
inevitable that people will ask:
Why are they telling us this?
Almost everything about the death of Trayvon Martin is controversial,
except for media motivation. On that topic there is near unanimity. The
meaning or intended message of the story of the case could scarcely have
been more transparent:
White racist paranoia makes America dangerous for black people.
It would thus rehearse the dialectic of racial terror (your fear is scary), designed – as always — to convert America’s reciprocal social
nightmare into a unilateral morality play, allocating legitimate dread
exclusively to one side of the country’s principal racial divide. It
seemed perfect. A malignantly deluded white vigilante guns down an
innocent black child, justifying black fear (‘the talk’) whilst exposing
white panic as a murderous psychosis. This is a story of such archetypal
progressive meaning that it cannot be told too many times. In fact, it was
just too good to be true.
It soon became evident, however, that media selection – even when
reinforced by the celebrity / ‘community activist’ rage-machine – hadn’t
sufficed to keep the story on script, and both of the main actors were
drifting from their assigned roles. If progressively-endorsed stereotypes
were to be even remotely preserved, vigorous
editing
would be required. This was especially necessary because certain evil,
racist, bigoted readers of the
Miami Herald
were beginning to forge a narrative-wrecking mental connection between
‘Trayvon Martin’ and ‘burglary tool’.
As for the killer, George Zimmerman, the name said it all. He was clearly
going to be a hulking, pasty-faced, storm-trooper look-alike, hopefully
some kind of Christian gun-nut, and maybe – if they really hit pay-dirt –
a militia movement type with a history of homophobia and anti-abortion
activism. He started off ‘white’ – for no obvious reason beyond media
incompetence and narrative programming – then found himself transformed
into a ‘white Hispanic’ (a category that seems to have been rapidly
innovated on the spot), before gradually shifted through a series of ever
more reality-compliant ethnic complications, culminating in the discovery
of his Afro-Peruvian great grandfather.
In the heart of the Cathedral it was well into head-scratching time. Here
was the great Amerikkkan defendant being prepped for his show trial, the
President had pitched in emotionally on behalf of the sacred victim, and
the coordinated ground game had been advanced to the simmering brink of
race riots, when the message began falling apart, to such an extent that
it now threatened to decay into an annoyingly irrelevant case of
black-on-black violence. It was not only that George Zimmerman had black
ancestry – making him simply ‘black’ by the left’s own social
constructivist standards – he had also grown up amicably among black
people, with two African-American girls as “part of the household for
years,” had entered into joint business venture with a black partner, he
was a registered Democrat, and even some kind of ‘community organizer’ …
So why did Martin die? Was it for carrying iced tea and a bag of Skittles
while black (the media and community activist approved, ‘son Obama might
have had’ version), for scoping out burglary targets (the Kluxer racial
profiling version), or for breaking Zimmerman’s nose, knocking him over,
sitting on top of him, and smashing his head repeatedly against the
sidewalk (to be decided in court)? Was he a martyr to racial injustice, a
low-level social predator, or a human symptom of American urban crisis?
The only thing that was really clear when legal proceedings began, beyond
the squalid sadness of the episode, was that it was not resolving
anything.
For a sense of just how disconcertingly the approved lesson had
disintegrated by the time Zimmerman was charged with second degree murder,
it is only necessary to read
this post
by HBD-blogger oneSTDV, describing the dialectical derangements of the
race-warrior right:
The pop PC police were ready to move on. With the great show trial
collapsing into narrative disorder, it was time to refocus on the Message,
facts be damned (and double damned). ‘Jezebel’ best exemplifies the hectoring, vaguely hysterical tone:
Does anyone “really believe that people are born equal,” in the way it is
understood here? Believe, that is, not only that a formal expectation of
equal treatment is a prerequisite for civilized interaction, but that any
revealed deviation from substantial equality of outcome is an obvious,
unambiguous indication of oppression? That’s “the only thing you could
possibly conclude”?
At the very least, Jezebel should be congratulated for expressing the
progressive faith in its purest form, entirely uncontaminated by
sensitivity to evidence or uncertainty of any kind, casually contemptuous
of any relevant research – whether existent or merely conceivable – and
supremely confident about its own moral invincibility. If the facts are
morally wrong, so much worse for the facts – that’s the only
position that could possibly be adopted, even if it’s based upon
a mixture of wishful thinking, deliberate ignorance, and insultingly
childish lies.
To call the belief in substantial human equality a superstition is to
insult superstition. It might be unwarranted to believe in leprechauns,
but at least the person who holds to such a belief isn’t
watching them not exist, for every waking hour of the day. Human
inequality, in contrast, and in all of its abundant multiplicity, is
constantly on display, as people exhibit their variations in gender,
ethnicity, physical attractiveness, size and shape, strength, health,
agility, charm, humor, wit, industriousness, and sociability, among
countless other features, traits, abilities, and aspects of their
personality, some immediately and conspicuously, some only slowly, over
time. To absorb even the slightest fraction of all this and to conclude,
in the only way possible, that it is either nothing at all, or a
‘social construct’ and index of oppression, is sheer Gnostic delirium: a
commitment beyond all evidence to the existence of a true and good world
veiled by appearances. People are not equal, they do not develop equally,
their goals and achievements are not equal, and nothing can make them
equal. Substantial equality has no relation to reality, except as its
systematic negation. Violence on a genocidal scale is required to even
approximate to a practical egalitarian program, and if anything less
ambitious is attempted, people get around it (some more competently than
others).
To take only the most obvious example, anybody with more than one child
knows that nobody is born equal (monozygotic twins and clones
perhaps excepted). In fact, everybody is born different, in
innumerable ways. Even when – as is normally the case – the implications
of these differences for life outcomes are difficult to confidently
predict, their existence is undeniable, or at least:
sincerely undeniable. Of course sincerity, or even minimal
cognitive coherence, is not remotely the issue here. Jezebel’s position,
whilst impeccable in its political correctness, is not only factually
dubious, but rather laughably absurd, and actually – strictly speaking —
insane. It dogmatizes a denial of reality so extreme that nobody could
genuinely maintain, or even entertain it, let alone plausible explain or
defend it. It is a tenet of faith that cannot be understood, but only
asserted, or submitted to, as madness made law, or authoritarian religion.
The political commandment of this religion is transparent: Accept
progressive social policy as the only possible solution to the
sin problem of inequality. This commandment is a ‘categorical
imperative’ – no possible fact could ever undermine, complicate, or revise
it. If progressive social policy actually results in an exacerbation of
the problem, ‘fallen’ reality is to blame, since the social malady is
obviously worse than had been originally envisaged, and only
redoubled efforts in the same direction can hope to remedy it. There can
be nothing to learn in matters of faith. Eventually, systematic social
collapse teaches the lesson that chronic failure and incremental
deterioration could not communicate. (That’s macro-scale social Darwinism
for dummies, and it’s the way that civilizations end.)
Due to it’s exceptional correlation with substantial variation in social
outcomes in modern societies, by far the most troublesome dimension of
human bio-diversity is intelligence or general problem solving ability,
quantified as IQ (measuring Spearman’s ‘g’). When ‘statistical common
sense’ or profiling is applied to the proponents of Human Bio-Diversity,
however, another significant trait is rapidly exposed: a remarkably
consistent deficit of agreeableness. Indeed, it is widely
accepted within the accursed ‘community’ itself that most of those
stubborn and awkward enough to educate themselves on the topic of human
biological variation are significantly ‘socially retarded’, with low verbal inhibition, low empathy, and low social integration,
resulting in chronic maladaptation to group expectations. The typical EQs
of this group can be extracted as the approximate square-root of their
IQs. Mild autism is typical, sufficient to approach their fellow beings in
a spirit of detached, natural-scientific curiosity, but not so advanced as
to compel total cosmic disengagement. These traits, which they themselves
consider – on the basis of copious technical information — to be
substantially heritable, have manifest social consequences, reducing
employment opportunities, incomes, and even reproductive potential.
Despite all the free therapeutic advice available in the progressive
environment, this obnoxiousness shows no sign of diminishing, and might
even be intensifying. As Jezebel shows so clearly, this can only
possibly be a sign of structural oppression. Why can’t obnoxious
people get a break?
The history is damning. ‘Sociables’ have always had it in for the
obnoxious, often declining to marry or do business with them, excluding
them from group activities and political office, labeling them with slurs,
ostracizing and avoiding them. ‘Obnoxiousness’ has been stigmatized and
stereotyped in extremely negative terms, to such an extent that many of
the obnoxious have sought out more sensitive labels, such as
‘socially-challenged’, or ‘differently socially abled’. Not uncommonly,
people have been verbally or even physically assaulted for no other reason
than their radical obnoxiousness. Most tragically of all, due to their
complete inability to get on with one another, the obnoxious have never
been able to politically mobilize against the structural social oppression
they face, or to enter into coalitions with their natural allies, such as
cynics, debunkers, contrarians, and Tourette Syndrome sufferers.
Obnoxiousness has yet to be liberated, although it’s probable that the
Internet will ‘help’ …
Consider John Derbyshire’s essay in infamy
The Talk: Nonblack Version, focusing initially on its relentless obnoxiousness, and attentive to
the negative correlation between sociability and objective reason. As
Derbyshire notes elsewhere, people are generally incapable of
differentiating themselves from group identities, or properly applying
statistical generalizations about groups to individual cases, including
their own. A rationally indefensible, but socially inevitable, reification
of group profiles is psychologically normal – even ‘human’ – with the
result that noisy, non-specific, statistical information is erroneously
accepted as a contribution to self-understanding, even when specific
information is available.
From the perspective of socially autistic, low-EQ, rational analysis, this
is simply mistaken. If an individual has certain characteristics,
the fact of belonging to a group that has similar or dissimilar average
characteristics is of no relevance whatsoever. Direct and determinate
information about the individual is not to any degree enriched by indirect
and indeterminate (probabilistic) information about the groups to which
the individual belongs. If an individual’s test results are known, for
instance, no additional insight is provided by statistical inferences
about the test results that might have been expected based on
group profiling. An Ashkenazi Jewish moron is no less moronic because he
is an Ashkenazi Jew. Elderly Chinese nuns are unlikely to be murderers,
but a murderer who happens to be an elderly Chinese nun is neither more
nor less murderous than one who is not. This is all extremely obvious, to
obnoxious people.
To normal people, however, it is not obvious at all. In part this is
because rational intelligence is scarce and abnormal among humans, and in
part because social ‘intelligence’ works with what everyone else is
thinking, which is to say, with irrational groupish sentiment, meager
information, prejudices, stereotypes, and heuristics. Since (almost)
everybody else is taking short-cuts, or ‘economizing’ on reason, it is
only rational to react defensively to generalizations that are likely to
be reified or inappropriately applied — over-riding or substituting for
specific perceptions. Anybody who anticipates being pre-defined through a
group identity has an expanded ego-investment in that group and the way it
is perceived. A generic assessment, however objectively arrived at, will
immediately become personal, under (even quite remotely) normal
conditions.
Obnoxious reason can stubbornly insist that
anything average cannot be about you, but the message will not be
generally received. Human social ‘intelligence’ is not built that way.
Even supposedly sophisticated commentators blunder repeatedly into the
most jarring exhibitions of basic statistical incomprehension without the
slightest embarrassment, because embarrassment was designed for something
else (and for almost exactly the opposite). The failure to understand
stereotypes in their scientific, or probabilistic application, is a
functional prerequisite of sociability, since the sole alternative to
idiocy in this respect is obnoxiousness.
Derbyshire’s article is noteworthy because it succeeds in being
definitively obnoxious, and has been recognized as such, despite
the spluttering incoherence of most rejoinders. Among the things that ‘the
talk’ and ‘the counter-talk’ share is a theatrical structure of
pseudo-private conversation designed to be overheard. In both
cases, a message that parents are compelled to deliver to their children
is staged as the vehicle for a wider social lesson, aimed at those who,
through action or inaction, have created a world that is intolerably
hazardous to them.
This form is intrinsically manipulative, making even the ‘original’ talk a
tempting target of parody. In the original, however, a tone of anguished
sincerity is engineered through a deliberate performance of innocence (or
ignorance).
Listen son, I know this will be difficult to understand … (Oh why, oh why are they doing this to us?). The counter-talk, in stark contrast, melds its micro-social drama with
the clinically non-sociable discourse of “methodical inquiries in the
human sciences” – treating populations as fuzzy bio-geographical units
with quantifiable characteristics, rather than as legal-political subjects
in communication. It derides innocence, and – by implication – the
criterion of sociability itself. Agreement, agreeableness, count for
nothing. The rigorously and redundantly compiled statistics say what they
say, and if we cannot live with that, so much the worse for us.
Yet even to a reasonably sympathetic, or scrupulously obnoxious, reading,
Derbyshire’s article provides grounds for criticism. For instance, and
from the beginning, it is notable that the racial reciprocal of “nonblack
Americans” is ‘black Americans’, not “American blacks” (the term
Derbyshire selects). This reversal of word order, switching nouns and
adjectives, quickly settles into a pattern. Does it matter that Derbyshire
requests the extension of civility to any “individual black” (rather than
to ‘black individuals’)? It certainly makes a difference. To say that
someone is ‘black’ is to say something
about them, but to say that someone is ‘a black’ is to say who
they are. The effect is subtly, yet distinctly, menacing, and
Derbyshire is too well-trained, algebraically, to be excused from noticing
it. After all, ‘John Derbyshire is a white’ sounds equally
off, as does any analogous formulation, submerging the individual
in the genus, to be retrieved as a mere instance, or example.
The more intellectually substantive aspect of this over-reach into
gratuitous incivility have been examined by
William Saletan
and
Noah Millman, who make very similar points, from the two sides of the
liberal/conservative divide. Both writers identify a fissure or methodical
incongruity in Derbyshire’s article, stemming from its commitment to the
micro-social application of macro-social statistical generalizations.
Stereotypes, however rigorously confirmed, are
essentially inferior to specific knowledge in any concrete social
situation, because nobody ever encounters a population.
As a liberal of
problematic standing, Saletan has no choice but to recoil melodramatically from Derbyshire’s
“stomach-turning conclusions,” but his reasons for doing so are not
consumed by his gastro-emotional crisis. “But what exactly is a
statistical truth?” he asks. “It’s a probability estimate you might fall
back on if you know nothing about [a particular individual]. It’s an
ignorant person’s weak substitute for knowledge.” Derbyshire, with his
Aspergery attention to the absence of black Fields Medal winners, is “…a
math nerd who substitutes statistical intelligence for social
intelligence. He recommends group calculations instead of taking the
trouble to learn about the person standing in front of you.”
Millman emphasizes the ironic reversal that switches (obnoxious) social
scientific knowledge into imperative ignorance:
Millman’s conclusion is also instructive:
[Brief intermission …]
May 3, 2012The Dark Enlightenment (Part 4c)
America’s racial ‘original sin’ was foundational, dating back before the
birth of the United States to the clearing of aboriginal peoples by
European settlers, and – still more saliently – to the institution of
chattel slavery. This is the Old Testament history of American black-white
relations, set down in a providential narrative of escape from bondage, in
which factual documentation and moral exhortation are indissolubly fused.
The combination of prolonged and intense social abuse in a pattern set by
the Torah, recapitulating the primordial moral-political myth of the
Western tradition, has installed the story of slavery and emancipation as
the unsurpassable frame of the American historical experience:
let my people go.
‘Practically Historical’ (cited above), quotes Lincoln on the Civil War:
The New Testament of race in America was written in the 1960s, revising
and specifying the template. The combination of the Civil Rights Movement,
the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, and the Republican Southern
Strategy (appealing to disaffected whites in the states of the old
Confederacy) forged a partisan identification between Blacks and the
Democratic Party that amounted to a liberal-progressive rebirth, setting
the terms for partisan racial polarization that have endured – and even
strengthened – over subsequent decades. For a progressive movement
compromised by a history of systematic eugenicist racism, and a Democratic
Party traditionally aligned with white southern obduracy and the Ku Klux
Klan, the civil rights era presented an opportunity for atonement, ritual
purification, and redemption.
Reciprocally, for American conservatism (and its increasingly
directionless Republican Party vehicle), this progression spelt protracted
death, for reasons that continue to elude it. The Idea of America was now
inextricable from a vehement renunciation of the past, and even of the
present, insofar as the past still shaped it. Only an ‘ever more perfect
union’ could conform to it. At the most superficial level, the broad
partisan implications of the new order were unmistakable in a country that
was becoming ever more democratic, and ever less republican, with
effective sovereignty nationally concentrated in the executive, and the
moral urgency of activist government installed as a principle of faith.
For what had already become the ‘Old Right’ there was no way out, or back,
because the path backwards crossed the event horizon of the civil rights
movement, into tracts of political impossibility whose ultimate meaning
was slavery.
The left thrives on dialectics, the right perishes through them. Insofar
as there is a pure logic of politics, it is that. One immediate
consequence (repeatedly emphasized by Mencius Moldbug) is that
progressivism has no enemies to the left. It recognizes only idealists,
whose time has not yet come. Factional conflicts on the left are
politically dynamic, celebrated for their motive potential. Conservatism,
in contrast, is caught between a rock and a hard place: bludgeoned from
the left by the juggernaut of post-constitutional statism, and agitated
from ‘the right’ by inchoate tendencies which are both unassimilable (to
the mainstream) and often mutually incompatible, ranging from extreme
(Austro-libertarian) varieties of
laissez-faire capitalist advocacy to strains of obstinate,
theologically-grounded social traditionalism, ultra-nationalism, or white
identity politics.
‘The right’ has no unity, actual or prospective, and thus has no
definition symmetrical to that of the left. It is for this reason that
political dialectics (a tautology) ratchets only in one direction,
predictably, towards state expansion and an increasingly coercive
substantial-egalitarian ideal. The right moves to the center, and the
center moves to the left.
Regardless of mainstream conservative fantasies, liberal-progressive
mastery of American providence has become uncontestable, dominated by a
racial dialectic that absorbs unlimited contradiction, whilst positioning
the Afro-American underclass as the incarnate critique of the existing
social order, the criterion of emancipation, and the sole path to
collective salvation. No alternative structure of historical
intelligibility is politically tolerable, or even – strictly speaking –
imaginable, since resistance to the narrative is un-American, anti-social,
and (of course) racist, serving only to confirm the existence of
systematic racial oppression through the symbolic violence manifested in
its negation. To argue against it is already to prove it correct, by
concretely demonstrating the same benighted forces of social retardation
that are being verbally denied. By resisting the demand for orchestrated
social re-education, knuckle-dragging ‘bitter clingers’ only show how much
there still is to do.
At its most abstract and all-encompassing, the liberal-progressive racial
dialectic abolishes its outside, along with any possibility of principled
consistency. It asserts — at one and the same time — that race does not
exist, and that its socially-constructed pseudo-existence is an instrument
of inter-racial violence. Racial recognition is both mandatory, and
forbidden. Racial identities are meticulously catalogued for purposes of
social remedy, hate crime detection, and disparate impact studies,
targeting groups for ‘positive discrimination’, ‘affirmative action’, or
‘diversity promotion’ (to list these terms in their rough order of
historical substitution), even as they are denounced as meaningless (by
the United Nations, no less), and dismissed as malicious stereotypes,
corresponding to nothing real. Extreme racial sensitivity and absolute
racial desensitization are demanded simultaneously. Race is everything and
nothing. There is no way out.
Conservatism is dialectically incompetent by definition, and so abjectly
clueless that it imagines itself being able to exploit these
contradictions, or – in its deluded
formulation
– liberal cognitive dissonance. The conservatives who
triumphantly point out such inconsistencies seem never to have skimmed the
output of a contemporary humanities program, in which thick rafts of
internally conflicted victimage are lovingly woven out of incompatible
grievances, in order to exult in the radical progressive promise of their
discordant lamentations. Inconsistency is fuel for the Cathedral,
demanding activist argumentation, and ever heightened realizations of
unity.
Integrative public debate always moves things to the left — that
might not seem an especially difficult point to grasp, but to understand
it is to expose the fundamental futility of mainstream conservatism, and
that is in almost nobody’s interest, so it will not be understood.
Conservatism is incapable of working dialectics, or simultaneous
contradiction, but that does not prevent it from serving progress (on the
contrary). Rather than celebrating the power of inconsistency, it stumbles
through contradictions, decompressed, in succession, in the manner of a
fossil exhibition, and a foil. After “standing athwart history, yelling
‘Stop!’” during the Civil Rights Era, and thus banishing itself eternally
to racial damnation, the conservative (and Republican) mainstream reversed
course, seizing upon Martin Luther King Jr. as an integral part of its
canon, and seeking to harmonize itself
with
“a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.”
Captivated by King’s appeal to constitutional and biblical traditionalism,
by his rejection of political violence, and by his uninhibited paeans to
freedom, American conservatism gradually came to identify with his dream
of racial reconciliation and race blindness, and to accept it as the true,
providential meaning of its own most sacred documents. At least, this
became the mainstream, public, conservative orthodoxy, even though it was
consolidated far too late to neutralize suspicions of insincerity, failed
almost entirely to convince the black demographic itself, and would remain
open to escalating derision from the left for its empty formalism.
So compelling was King’s restatement of the American Creed that,
retrospectively, its triumph over the political mainstream seems simply
inevitable. The further American conservatism departed from the Masonic
rationalism of the founders, in the direction of biblical religiosity, the
more indistinguishable its faith became from a Black American experience,
mythically articulated through Exodus, in which the basic
framework of history was an escape from bondage, borne towards a future in
which “all of God’s children — black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles,
Protestants and Catholics — will be able to join hands and sing in the
words of the old Negro spiritual: ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God
Almighty, we are free at last!’”
The genius of King’s message lay in its extraordinary power of
integration. The flight of the Hebrews from Egypt, the American War of
Independence, the abolition of chattel slavery in the wake of the American
Civil War, and the aspirations of the civil rights era were mythically
compressed into a single archetypal episode, perfectly consonant with the
American Creed, and driven forwards not only by irresistible moral force,
but even by divine decree. The measure of this integrative genius,
however, is the complexity it masters. A century after the “joyous
daybreak” of emancipation from slavery, King declares, “the Negro still is
not free.”
The story of Exodus is exit, the War of Independence is exit, and
the emancipation from slavery is exit, especially when this is exemplified
by the Underground Railroad and the model of self-liberation, escape, or
flight. To be ‘manacled’ by segregation, ‘chained’ by discrimination,
trapped on a ‘lonely island of poverty’, or ‘exiled’ in one’s ‘own land’,
in contrast, has no relation to exit whatsoever, beyond that
which spell-binding metaphor can achieve. There is no exit into
social integration and acceptance, equitably distributed prosperity,
public participation, or assimilation, but only an aspiration, or a dream,
hostage to fact and fortune. As the left and the reactionary right were
equally quick to notice, insofar as this dream ventures significantly
beyond a right to formal equality and into the realm of substantial
political remedy, it is one that the right has no right to.
In the immediate wake of the John Derbyshire affair, Jessica Valenti at
The Nation blog
makes
the point clearly:
The ‘conservative agenda’ cannot ever be dreamy (hopeful and inconsistent)
enough to escape accusations of racism – that’s intrinsic to the way the
racial dialectic works. Policies broadly compatible with capitalistic
development, oriented to the rewarding of low time-preference, and thus
punishing impulsivity, will reliably have a disparate impact upon the
least economically functional social groups. Of course, the dialectic
demands that the racial aspect of this disparate impact can and must be
strongly emphasized (for the purpose of condemning incentives to human
capital formation as racist), and at the same time forcefully denied (in
order to denounce
exactly the same observation as racist stereotyping). Anyone who
expects conservatives to navigate this double-bind with political agility
and grace must somehow have missed the late 20th century. For instance,
the doomed loser idiots conservatives at the
Washington Examiner,
noticing
with alarm that:
There are no alternative versions of an ever more perfect union, because
union is the alternative to alternatives. Searching for where the
alternatives might once have been found, where liberty still meant
exit, and where dialectics were dissolved in space, leads into a
clown-house of horrors, fabricated as the shadow, or significant other, of
the Cathedral. Since the right never had a unity of its own, it was given
one. Call it the Cracker Factory.
When James C. Bennett, in The Anglosphere Challenge, sought to
identify the principal cultural characteristics of the English-speaking
world, the resulting list was generally familiar. It included, besides the
language itself, common law traditions, individualism, comparatively
high-levels of economic and technological openness, and distinctively
emphatic reservations about centralized political power. Perhaps the most
striking feature, however, was a marked cultural tendency to settle
disagreements in space, rather than time, opting for territorial schism,
separatism, independence, and flight, in place of revolutionary
transformation within an integrated territory. When Anglophones disagree,
they have often sought to dissociate in space. Instead of an integral
resolution (regime change), they pursue a plural irresolution (through
regime division), proliferating polities, localizing power, and
diversifying systems of government. Even in its present, highly attenuated
form, this anti-dialectical, de-synthesizing predisposition to social
disaggregation finds expression in a stubborn, sussurous hostility to
globalist political projects, and in a vestigial attraction to federalism
(in its fissional sense).
Splitting, or fleeing, is all exit, and (non-recuperable)
anti-dialectics. It is the basic well-spring of liberty within the
Anglophone tradition. If the function of a Cracker Factory is to block off
all the exits, there’s only one place to build it – right here.
Like Hell, or Auschwitz, the Cracker Factory has a simple slogan inscribed
upon its gate: Escape is racist. That is why the expression
‘white flight’ – which says exactly the same thing – has never been
denounced for its political incorrectness, despite the fact that it draws
upon an ethnic statistical generalization of the kind that would, in any
other case, provoke paroxysms of outrage. ‘White flight’ is no more
‘white’ than low time-preference is, but this broad-brush insensitivity is
deemed acceptable, because it structurally supports the Cracker Factory,
and the indispensable confusion of ancient (or negative) liberty with
original (racial) sin.
You absolutely, definitely, mustn’t go
there
… so, of course, we will … [next]
May 17, 2012The Dark Enlightenment (Part 4d)
The origins of the word ‘cracker’ as a term of ethnic derision are distant
and obscure. It seems to have already circulated, as a slur targeting poor
southern whites of predominantly Celtic ancestry, in the mid-18th century,
derived perhaps from ‘corn-cracker’ or the Scots-Irish ‘crack’ (banter).
The rich semantic complexion of the term, inextricable from the
identification of elaborate racial, cultural, and class characteristics,
is comparable to that of its unmentionable dusky cousin – “the ‘N-‘word” – and draws from the same well of generally recognized but forbidden
truths. In particular, and emphatically, it testifies to the
illicit truism that people are more excited and animated by their
differences than by their commonalities, ‘clinging bitterly’ – or at least
tenaciously – to their non-uniformity, and obstinately resisting the
universal categories of enlightened population management. Crackers are
grit in the clockwork of progress.
The most delectable features of the slur, however, are entirely fortuitous
(or Qabbalistic). ‘Crackers’ break codes, safes, organic chemicals –
sealed or bonded systems of all kinds – with eventual geopolitical
implication. They anticipate a crack-up, schism or secession,
confirming their association with the anathematized disintegrative
undercurrent of Anglophone history. No surprise, then – despite the
linguistic jumps and glitching – that the figure of the recalcitrant
cracker evokes a still-unpacified South, insubordinate to the manifest
destiny of Union. This returns it, by short-circuit, to the most
problematic depths of its meaning.
Contradictions demand resolution, but cracks can
continue to widen, deepen, and spread. According to the cracker ethos,
when things can fall apart – it’s OK. There’s no need to reach agreement,
when it’s possible to split. This cussedness, pursued to its
limit, tends to a hill-billy stereotype set in a shack or rusting trailer
at the end of an Appalachian mountain path, where all economic
transactions are conducted in cash (or moonshine), interactions with
government agents are conducted across the barrel of a loaded shotgun, and
timeless anti-political wisdom is summed in the don’t-tread-on-me reflex:
“Get off my porch.” Naturally, this disdain for integrative debate
(dialectics) is coded within the mainstream of Anglocentric global history
– which is to say, Yankee evangelical Puritanism – as a deficiency not
only of cultural sophistication, but also of basic intelligence, and even
the most scrupulous adherent of social constructivist righteousness
immediately reverts to hard-hereditarian psychometrics when confronted by
cracker obstreperousness. To those for whom a broad trend of
socio-political progress seems like a simple, incontestable fact, the
refusal to recognize anything of the kind is perceived as clear evidence
of retardation.
Since stereotypes generally have high statistical truth-value, it’s more
than possible that crackers are clustered heavily on the left of the white
IQ bell-curve, concentrated there by generations of dysgenic pressure. If,
as Charles Murray argues, the efficiency of meritocratic selection within
American society has steadily risen and conspired with assortative mating
to transform class differences into genetic castes, it would be passing
strange if the cracker stratum were to be characterized by conspicuous
cognitive elevation. Yet some awkwardly intriguing questions intervene at
this point, as long as one diligently pursues the stereotype. Assortative
mating? How can that work, when crackers marry their cousins? Oh yes,
there’s that. Drawing on population groups beyond the
north-western
Hajnal
Line, traditional cracker kinship patterns are notably atypical of the
exogamous Anglo (WASP) norm.
The tireless ‘hbdchick’ is the crucial resource on this topic. Over the course of a truly
monumental series of blog
posts, she employs
Hamiltonian
conceptual tools to investigate the borderland where nature and culture
intersect, comprising kinship structures, the differentiations they
require in the calculus of inclusive fitness, and the distinctive ethnic
profiles in the evolutionary psychology of altruism that result. In
particular, she directs attention to the abnormality of (North-West)
European history, where obligatory exogamy – through rigorous proscription
of cousin marriage – has prevailed for 1,600 years. This distinctive
orientation towards outbreeding, she suggests, plausibly accounts for a
variety of bio-cultural peculiarities, the most historically significant
of which is a unique pre-eminence of reciprocal (over familial) altruism,
as indicated by emphatic individualism, nuclear families, an affinity with
‘corporate’ (kinship-free) institutions, highly-developed contractual
relationships among strangers, relatively low levels of nepotism /
corruption, and robust forms of social cohesion independent of tribal
bonds.
Inbreeding, in contrast, creates a selective environment favoring tribal
collectivism, extended systems of family loyalty and honor, distrust of
non-relatives and impersonal institutions, and – in general – those
‘clannish’ traits which mesh uncomfortably with the leading values of
(Eurocentric) modernity, and are thus denounced for their primitive
‘xenophobia’ and ‘corruption’. Clannish values, of course, are bred in
clans, such as those populating Britain’s Celtic fringe and borderlands,
where cousin marriage persisted, along with its associated socio-economic
and cultural forms, especially herding (rather than farming), and a
disposition towards extreme, vendetta-style
violence.
This analysis introduces the central paradox of ‘white identity’, since
the specifically European ethnic traits that have structured the moral
order of modernity, slanting it away from tribalism and towards reciprocal
altruism, are inseparable from a unique heritage of outbreeding that is
intrinsically corrosive of ethnocentric solidarity. In other words: it is
almost exactly weak ethnic groupishness that makes a group ethnically
modernistic, competent at ‘corporate’ (non-familial) institution building,
and thus objectively privileged / advantaged within the dynamic of
modernity.
This paradox is most fully expressed in the radical forms of European
ethnocentric revivalism exemplified by paleo- and neo-Nazism, confounding
its proponents and antagonists alike. When exceptionally advanced
‘race-treachery’ is your quintessential racial feature, the opportunity
for viable ethno-supremacist politics disappears into a logical abyss –
even if occasions for large-scale trouble-making no doubt remain.
Admittedly, a Nazi, by definition, is willing (and eager) to sacrifice
modernity upon the altar of racial purity, but this is either not to
understand, or to tragically affirm, the inevitable consequence – which is
to be out-modernized (and thus defeated). Identity politics is for losers,
inherently and unalterably, due to an essentially parasitical character
that only works from the left. Because inbreeding systematically
contra-indicates for modern power, racial
Übermenschen make no real sense.
In any case, however endlessly fascinating Nazis may be, they are not any
kind of reliable key to the history or direction of
cracker culture, beyond setting a logical limit to the programmatic construction and
usage of white identity politics. Tattooing swastikas on their foreheads
does nothing to change that. (Hatfields vs McCoys
is more Pushtun than Teuton.)
The conjunction taking place in the Cracker Factory is quite different,
and far more perplexing, entangling the urbane, cosmopolitan advocates of
hyper-contractarian marketization with romantic traditionalists,
ethno-particularists, and nostalgics of the ‘Lost Cause’. It is first
necessary to understand this entanglement in its full, mind-melting
weirdness, before exploring its lessons. For that, some semi-random
stripped-down data-points might be helpful:
* The
Mises Institute
was founded in Auburn, Alabama.
* Ron Paul newsletters from the 1980s contain
remarks
of a decidedly Derbyshirean hue.
* Derbyshire
hearts
Ron Paul.
* Murray Rothbard has
written
in defense of HBD.
* lewrockwell.com contributors include
Thomas J. DiLorenzo
and
Thomas Woods
* Tom Palmer
doesn’t
heart Lew Rockwell or Hans-Hermann Hoppe because “Together They Have
Opened the Gates of Hell and Welcomed the Most Extreme Right-Wing Racists,
Nationalists, and Assorted Cranks”
* Libertarians / constitutionalists account for 20% of the SPLC ‘Radical
Right’ watch
list
(Chuck Baldwin, Michael Boldin, Tom DeWeese, Alex Jones, Cliff Kincaid,
and Elmer Stewart Rhodes)
… perhaps that’s enough to be going on with (although there’s plenty more
within easy reach). These points have been selected, questionably,
crudely, and prejudicially, to lend impressionistic support to a single
basic thesis:
fundamental socio-historical forces are crackerizing libertarianism.
If the tentative research conclusions drawn by hbdchick are accepted as a
frame, the oddity of this marriage between libertarian and neo-confederate
themes is immediately apparent. When positioned on a bio-cultural axis,
defined by degrees of outbreeding, the absence of overlap – or even
proximity – is dramatically exposed. One pole is occupied by a radically
individualistic doctrine, focused near-exclusively upon mutable networks
of voluntary interchange of an economic type (and notoriously insensitive
to the very existence of non-negotiable social bonds). Close to the other
pole lies a rich culture of local attachment, extended family, honor,
contempt for commercial values, and distrust of strangers. The distilled
rationality of fluid capitalism is juxtaposed to traditional hierarchy and
non-alienable value. The absolute prioritization of exit is
jumbled amongst folkways from which no exit is even imaginable.
Stapling the two together, however, is a simple, ever more irresistible
conclusion: liberty has no future in the Anglophone world outside the
prospect of secession. The coming crack-up is the only way out.
June 15, 2012The Dark Enlightenment (Part 4e)
Conceived generically, modernity is a social condition defined by an
integral trend, summarized as sustained economic growth rates that exceed
population increases, and thus mark an escape from normal history, caged
within the Malthusian trap. When, in the interest of dispassionate
appraisal, analysis is restricted to the terms of this basic quantitative
pattern, it supports sub-division into the (growth) positive and negative
components of the trend: techno-industrial (scientific and commercial)
contributions to accelerating development on the one hand, and
socio-political counter-tendencies towards the capture of economic product
by democratically empowered rent-seeking special interests on the other
(demosclerosis). What classical liberalism gives (industrial revolution) mature
liberalism takes away (via the cancerous entitlement state). In abstract
geometry, it describes an S-curve of self-limiting runaway. As a drama of
liberation, it is a broken promise.
Conceived particularly, as a singularity, or real thing,
modernity has ethno-geographical characteristics that complicate and
qualify its mathematical purity. It came from somewhere, imposed itself
more widely, and brought the world’s various peoples into an extraordinary
range of novel relations. These relations were characteristically ‘modern’
if they involved an overflowing of previous Malthusian limits, enabling
capital accumulation, and initiating new demographic trends, but they
conjoined concrete groups rather than abstract economic functions. At
least in appearance, therefore, modernity was something done by people of
a certain kind with, and not uncommonly to (or even against), other
people, who were conspicuously unlike them. By the time it was faltering
on the fading slope of the S-curve, in the early 20th century, resistance
to its generic features (‘capitalistic alienation’) had become almost
entirely indistinguishable from opposition to its particularity (‘European
imperialism’ and ‘white supremacy’). As an inevitable consequence, the
modernistic self-consciousness of the system’s ethno-geographical core
slid
towards
racial
panic, in a process that was only arrested by the rise and immolation of the
Third Reich.
Given modernity’s inherent trend to degeneration or self-cancellation,
three broad prospects open. These are not strictly exclusive, and are
therefore not true alternatives, but for schematic purposes it is helpful
to present them as such.
(1) Modernity 2.0. Global modernization is re-invigorated from a new
ethno-geographical core, liberated from the degenerate structures of its
Eurocentric predecessor, but no doubt confronting long range trends of an
equally mortuary character. This is by far the most encouraging and
plausible scenario (from a pro-modernist perspective), and if China
remains even approximately on its current track it will be assuredly
realized. (India, sadly, seems to be too far gone in its native version of
demosclerosis to seriously compete.)
(2) Postmodernity. Amounting essentially to a new dark age, in which
Malthusian limits brutally re-impose themselves, this scenario assumes
that Modernity 1.0 has so radically globalized its own morbidity that the
entire future of the world collapses around it. If the Cathedral ‘wins’
this is what we have coming.
(3) Western Renaissance. To be reborn it is first necessary to die, so the
harder the ‘hard reboot’ the better. Comprehensive crisis and
disintegration offers the best odds (most realistically as a sub-theme of
option #1).
Because competition is good, a pinch of Western Renaissance would spice
things up, even if – as is overwhelmingly probable — Modernity 2.0 is the
world’s principal highway to the future. That depends upon the West
stopping and reversing pretty much everything it has been doing for over a
century, excepting only scientific, technological, and business
innovation. It is advisable to maintain rhetorical discipline within a
strictly hypothetical mode, because the possibility of any of these things
is deeply colored by incredibility:
(1) Replacement of representational democracy by constitutional
republicanism (or still more
extreme
anti-political governmental mechanisms).
(2) Massive downsizing of government and its rigorous confinement to core
functions (at most).
(3) Restoration of hard money (precious metal coins and bullion deposit
notes) and abolition of central banking.
(4) Dismantling of state monetary and fiscal discretion, thus abolishing
practical macroeconomics and liberating the autonomous (or ‘catallactic’)
economy. (This point is redundant, since it follows rigorously from 2
& 3 above, but it’s the real prize, so worth emphasizing.)
There’s more – which is to say, less politics – but it’s already
absolutely clear that none of this is going to happen short of an
existential civilizational cataclysm. Asking politicians to limit their
own powers is a non-starter, but nothing less heads even remotely in the
right direction. This, however, isn’t even the widest or deepest problem.
Democracy might begin as a defensible procedural mechanism for limiting
government power, but it quickly and inexorably develops into something
quite different: a culture of systematic thievery. As soon as politicians
have learnt to buy political support from the ‘public purse’, and
conditioned electorates to embrace looting and bribery, the democratic
process reduces itself to the formation of (Mancur Olson’s)
‘distributional coalitions’ – electoral majorities mortared together by
common interest in a collectively advantageous pattern of theft. Worse
still, since people are, on average, not very bright, the scale of
depredation available to the political establishment far exceeds even the
demented sacking that is open to public scrutiny. Looting the future,
through currency debauchment, debt accumulation, growth destruction, and
techno-industrial retardation is especially easy to conceal, and thus
reliably popular. Democracy is essentially tragic because it provides the
populace with a weapon to destroy itself, one that is always eagerly
seized, and used. Nobody ever says ‘no’ to free stuff. Scarcely anybody
even sees that there is no free stuff. Utter cultural ruination is the
necessary conclusion.
Within the final phase of Modernity 1.0, American history becomes the
master narrative of the world. It is there that the great Abrahamic
cultural conveyor culminates in the secularized neo-puritanism of the
Cathedral, as it establishes the New Jerusalem in Washington DC. The
apparatus of Messianic-revolutionary purpose is consolidated in the
evangelical state, which is authorized by any means necessary to install a
new world order of universal fraternity, in the name of equality, human
rights, social justice, and – above all – democracy. The absolute
moral confidence of the Cathedral underwrites the enthusiastic pursuit of
unrestrained centralized power, optimally unlimited in its intensive
penetration and its extensive scope.
With an irony altogether hidden from the witch-burners’ spawn themselves,
the ascent of this squinting cohort of grim moral fanatics to previously
unscaled heights of global power coincides with the descent of
mass-democracy to previously unimagined depths of gluttonous corruption.
Every five years America steals itself from itself again, and fences
itself back in exchange for political support.
This democracy thing is easy – you just vote for the guy who promises
you the most stuff. An idiot could do it.
Actually, it likes idiots, treats them with apparent kindness, and does
everything it can to manufacture more of them.
Democracy’s relentless trend to degeneration presents an implicit case for
reaction. Since every major threshold of socio-political ‘progress’ has
ratcheted Western civilization towards comprehensive ruin, a retracing of
its steps suggests a reversion from the society of pillage to an older
order of self-reliance, honest industry and exchange, pre-propagandistic
learning, and civic self-organization. The attractions of this reactionary
vision are evidenced by the vogue for 18th century attire, symbols, and
constitutional documents among the substantial (Tea Party) minority who
clearly see the disastrous course of American political history.
Has the ‘race’ alarm sounded in your head yet? It would be amazing if it
hadn’t. Stagger back in imagination before 2008, and the fraught whisper
of conscience is already questioning your prejudices against Kenyan
revolutionaries and black Marxist professors. Remain in reverse until the
Great Society / Civil Rights era and the warnings reach hysterical pitch.
It’s perfectly obvious by this point that American political history has
progressed along twin, interlocking tracks, corresponding to the
capacity and the legitimation of the state. To cast
doubt upon its scale and scope is to simultaneously dispute the sanctity
of its purpose, and the moral-spiritual necessity that it command whatever
resources, and impose whatever legal restraints, may be required to
effectively fulfill it. More specifically, to recoil from the magnitude of
Leviathan is to demonstrate insensitivity to the immensity – indeed, near
infinity – of inherited racial guilt, and the sole surviving categorical
imperative of senescent modernity – government needs to do more.
The possibility, indeed near certainty, that the pathological consequences
of chronic government activism have long ago supplanted the problems they
originally targeted, is a contention so utterly maladapted to the epoch of
democratic religion that its practical insignificance is assured.
Even on the left, it would be extraordinary to find many who genuinely
believe, after sustained reflection, that the primary driver of government
expansion and centralization has been the burning desire
to do good (not that intentions matter). Yet, as the twin tracks
cross, such is the electric jolt of moral drama, leaping the gap from
racial Golgotha to intrusive Leviathan, that skepticism is suspended, and
the great progressive myth installed.
The alternative to more government, doing ever more, was to stand
there, negligently, whilst they lynched another Negro. This proposition contains the entire essential content of American
progressive education.
The twin historical tracks of state capability and purpose can be
conceived as a translation protocol, enabling any recommended restraint
upon government power to be ‘decoded’ as malign obstruction of racial
justice. This system of substitutions functions so smoothly that it
provides an entire vocabulary of (bipartisan) ‘code-words’ or
‘dog-whistles’ – ‘welfare’, ‘freedom of association’, ‘states rights’ –
ensuring that any intelligible utterance on the Principal (left-right)
Political Dimension occupies a double registry, semi-saturated by racial
evocations. Reactionary regression smells of strange fruit.
… and that is before backing out of the calamitous 20th century. It was
not the Civil Rights Era, but the ‘American Civil War’ (in the terms of
the victors) or ‘War between the States’ (in those of the vanquished) that
first indissolubly cross-coded the practical question of Leviathan with
(black/white) racial dialectics, laying down the central junction yard of
subsequent political antagonism and rhetoric. The indispensable primary
step in comprehending this fatality snakes along an awkward diagonal
between mainstream statist and revisionist accounts, because the
conflagration that consumed the American nation in the early 1860s was
wholly but non-exclusively about emancipation from slavery
and about
states rights, with neither ‘cause’ reducible to the other, or sufficient to suppress
the war’s enduring ambiguities. Whilst there are any number of ‘liberals’
happy to celebrate the consolidation of centralized government power in
the triumphant Union, and, symmetrically, a (far smaller) number of
neo-confederate apologists for the institution of chattel slavery in the
southern states, neither of these unconflicted stances capture the dynamic
cultural legacy of a war across the codes.
The war is a knot. By practically dissociating liberty into
emancipation and independence, then hurling each against
the other in a half-decade of carnage, blue against gray, it was settled
that freedom would be broken on the battlefield, whatever the outcome of
the conflict. Union victory determined that the emancipatory sense of
liberty would prevail, not only in America, but throughout the world, and
the eventual reign of the Cathedral was assured. Nevertheless, the
crushing of American’s second war of secession made a mockery of the
first. If the institution of slavery de-legitimated a war of independence,
what survived of 1776? The moral coherence of the Union cause required
that the founders were reconceived as politically illegitimate white
patriarchal slave-owners, and American history combusted in progressive
education and the culture wars.
If independence is the ideology of slave-holders, emancipation requires
the programmatic destruction of independence. Within a cross-coded
history, the realization of freedom is indistinguishable from its
abolition.
July 3, 2012The Dark Enlightenment (Part 4f(inal))
It’s time to bring this long digression to a conclusion, by reaching out
impatiently towards the end. The basic theme has been mind control, or
thought-suppression, as demonstrated by the Media-Academic complex that
dominates contemporary Western societies, and which Mencius Moldbug names
the Cathedral. When things are squashed they rarely disappear. Instead,
they are displaced, fleeing into sheltering shadows, and sometimes turning
into monsters. Today, as the suppressive orthodoxy of the Cathedral comes
unstrung, in various ways, and numerous senses, a time of monsters is
approaching.
The central dogma of the Cathedral
has
been
formalized as the Standard Social Scientific Model (SSSM) or ‘blank slate
theory’. It is the belief, completed in its essentials by the anthropology
of
Franz Boas, that every legitimate question about mankind is restricted to the
sphere of culture. Nature permits that ‘man’ is, but never
determines what man is. Questions directed towards natural
characteristics and variations between humans are themselves properly
understood as cultural peculiarities, or even pathologies. Failures of
‘nurture’ are the only thing we are allowed to see.
Because the Cathedral has a consistent ideological orientation, and sifts
its enemies accordingly, comparatively detached scientific appraisal of
the SSSM easily veers into raw antagonism. As Simon Blackburn
remarks
(in a thoughtful review of Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate), “The
dichotomy between nature and nurture rapidly acquires political and
emotional implications. To put it crudely, the right likes genes and the
left likes culture …”
At the limit of reciprocal loathing, hereditarian determinism confronts
social constructivism, with each committed to a radically pared-back model
of causality. Either nature expresses itself as culture,
or culture expresses itself in its images (‘constructions’) of
nature. Both of these positions are trapped at opposite sides of an
incomplete circuit, structurally blinded to
the culture of practical naturalism, which is to say: the
techno-scientific / industrial manipulation of the world.
Acquiring knowledge and using tools is a single dynamic circuit, producing
techno-science as an integral system, without real divisibility into
theoretical and practical aspects. Science develops in loops, through
experimental technique and the production of ever more
sophisticated instrumentation, whilst embedded within a broader industrial
process. Its advance is the improvement of a machine. This intrinsically
technological character of (modern) science demonstrates the
efficiency of culture as a complex natural force. It neither
expresses a pre-existing natural circumstance, nor does it merely
construct social representations. Instead, nature and culture compose a
dynamic circuit, at the edge of nature, where fate is decided.
According to the self-reinforcing presupposition of modernization, to be
understood is to be modifiable. It is to be expected, therefore, that
biology and medicine co-evolve. The same historical dynamic that
comprehensively subverts the SSSM through inundating waves of scientific
discovery simultaneously volatilizes human biological identity through
biotechnology. There is no essential difference between learning what we
really are and re-defining ourselves as technological
contingencies, or technoplastic beings, susceptible to precise,
scientifically-informed transformations. ‘Humanity’ becomes intelligible
as it is subsumed into the technosphere, where information processing of
the genome – for instance — brings reading and editing into perfect
coincidence.
To describe this circuit, as it consumes the human species, is to define
our bionic horizon: the threshold of conclusive nature-culture
fusion at which a population becomes indistinguishable from its
technology. This is neither hereditarian determinism, nor social
constructivism, but it is what both would have referred to, had they
indicated anything real. It is a syndrome vividly anticipated by Octavia
Butler, whose
Xenogenesis
trilogy is devoted to the examination of a population beyond the bionic
horizon. Her Oankali ‘gene traders’ have no identity separable from the
biotechnological program that they perpetually implement upon themselves,
as they commercially acquire, industrially produce, and sexually reproduce
their population within a single, integral process. Between what the
Oankali are, and the way they live, or behave, there is no firm
difference. Because they make themselves, their nature is their culture
and (of course) reciprocally. What they are is exactly what they
do.
Religious traditionalists of the Western Orthosphere are right to identify
the looming bionic horizon with a (negative) theological event.
Techno-scientific auto-production specifically supplants the fixed and
sacralized essence of man as a created being, amidst the greatest upheaval
in the natural order since the emergence of eukaryotic life, half a
billion years ago. It is not merely an evolutionary event, but the
threshold of a new evolutionary phase. John H. Campbell heralds
the emergence of Homo autocatalyticus, whilst
arguing:
“In point of fact, it is hard to imagine how a system of inheritance could
be more ideal for engineering than ours is.”
John H. Campbell? – a prophet of monstrosity, and the perfect excuse for a
monster quote:
For racial nationalists, concerned that their grandchildren should look
like them, Campbell is the abyss. Miscegenation doesn’t get close to the
issue. Think face tentacles.
Campbell is also a secessionist, although entirely undistracted by the
concerns of identity politics (racial purity) or traditional cognitive
elitism (eugenics). Approaching the bionic horizon, secessionism takes on
an altogether wilder and more monstrous bearing – towards
speciation. The folks at euvolution
capture
the scenario well:
When seen from the bionic horizon, whatever emerges from the dialectics of
racial terror remains trapped in trivialities. It’s time to move on.
July 20, 2012Malthusian Horror
The post is pitched like this because it’s Friday night, but it works. A
more dutiful post might have been entitled simply ‘Malthus’ and involved a
lot of work. That’s going to be needed at some point. (Here‘s the 6th edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population,
for anyone who wants to get started now.) A more thoroughly technical
approach would have been flagged ‘Neo-Malthusianism’. While sympathizing
with groans about another ‘neo-‘ prefix, in this case it would have been
solidly justified. It’s only through expansion of the Malthusian insight
in accordance with a more general conservation law that its full current
relevance can be appreciated. Classic Malthus still does far more work
than it is credited with, but it contains a principle of far more
penetrating application.
‘Neo-‘ at its most frivolous is merely a mark of fashion. When employed
more seriously, it notes an element of innovation. Its most significant
sense includes not only novelty, but also abstraction. Something is
carried forwards in such a way that its conceptual core is distilled
through extraction from a specific context, achieving a higher generality,
and more exact formality. Malthus partially anticipates this in a phrase
that points beyond any excessively constrictive concreteness:
The qualification “in some shape or other” might have been drawn from
abstract horror, and “premature death” only loosely binds it. Even so,
this formulation remains too narrow, since it tends to exclude the
dysgenic
outcome, which we have since
learnt
is a dimension of Malthusian expression scarcely less imposing than
resource crisis. A Neo-Malthusian account of the “X” which
in some shape or other makes a grim perversity of all humanity’s
efforts to improve its condition grasps it as a mathematically conserved,
plastic, or abstract destiny, working as remorselessly through reductions
of mortality (Malthusian ‘relaxations’) as through increases (Malthusian
‘pressures’). Both would count equally as “checks on population” — each
convertible, through a complex calculus, into the terms of the other. A
population dysgenically deteriorated through ‘enlightened’ Malthusian
relaxation learns, once again, how to starve.
The Dark Enlightenment (essay) was clearly catalyzed by the work of Mencius Moldbug, but it was to
have had two Anglo-Thomistic or Doubting Thomas intellectual-historical
pillars (and neither were Thomas Carlyle). The first was Thomas Hobbes,
who was at least touched upon. The second was to have been Thomas Malthus,
but the series was diverted into the foaming current of the Derbyshire
affair and the outrages of
Leftist race politics. The integrity of conception was lost. Had it not
been, it might have been less tempting to read the
333-current as an
Anti-Enlightenment, rather than a Counter-Enlightenment, in the sense of
an eclipsed, alternative to the Rousseauistic calamity that prevailed. It
would certainly attach the Scottish Enlightenment, but only under the
definite condition that it is lashed securely to the harsh realist
scaffolding of the Dark Enlightenment (Hobbes and Malthus), disillusioned
of all idealism. Pretty stories are for little children (being raised by
liberals).
Malthus subtracts all utopianism from enlightenment. He shows that history
is put together — necessarily — in a butcher’s yard. Through Malthus,
Ricardo discovered the Iron Law of Wages, disconnecting the ideas of
economic advance and humanitarian redemption. Darwin effected a comparable
(and more consequential) revision in biology, also on Malthusian grounds,
dispelling all sentimentality from notions of evolutionary ‘progression’.
It is from Malthus that we know, when anything seems to move forward, it
is through being ground up against a cutting edge. It is when Marx
attempts to put Malthus into history, rather than history into Malthus,
that utopian dementia was resuscitated within economics. The
anti-Malthusianism of Libertarians stigmatizes them as dreamy fools.
With NRx, the matter is perhaps more unsettled, but the Dark Enlightenment
is unambiguously Mathusian. If you find your eye becoming dewy, pluck it
out.
November 14, 2014
BLOCK 2 - SOCIAL DARWINISM
Reality Rules
Urban Future somehow missed the
excited
side-track
discussion
that bolted to the conclusion: America voted in November 2012 to spare
itself from Social Darwinism. Yet, sadly belated as it may be, our
rejoinder is unchanged: nothing ever gets spared from Darwinism. That’s
what Darwinism is.
The fact that the term Social Darwinism survives only as a slur is
abundantly telling, and suffices on its own to explain the ideological
‘evolution’ of recent times. In a nutshell, the dominant usage of ‘social
Darwinism’ says “markets are a kind of Nazi thing.” Checkmate in one move.
Markets implement a Darwinian process by eliminating failure. Schumpeter
called it ‘creative destruction’. The principle
unit of selection is the business enterprise, which is able to
innovate, adapt, propagate, and evolve precisely insofar as it is also
exposed to the risk of perishing. None of this is especially complicated,
or even controversial. In a sane world it is what ‘social Darwinism’ would
mean. It is certainly what Herbert Spencer was really talking about
(although he never adopted the label).
The fundamental tenet of Social Darwinism would then be compressible into
a couple of words: reality rules. There’s more, of course, but
nothing especially challenging. The further additions are really
subtractions, or reservations – intellectual economies, negative
principles, and non-commitments. That’s because Darwinism – whether
‘social’ or otherwise – is built from subtractions. Deducting all
supernatural causality and transcendent agencies leaves Darwinism as the
way complex structures get designed. (Not constructed, but
designed, in conformity with a naturalistic theory of plans,
blueprints, recipes, or assembly codes, of the kind that have naturally
invited supernatural explanation. Darwinism only applies to practical
information.)
Subtractions put it together. For instance, remove the extravagant
hypothesis that something big and benevolent is looking after us, whether
God, the State, or some alternative Super-Dad, and the realistic residue
indicates that our mistakes kill us. It follows that anything still
hanging around has a history of avoiding serious mistakes, which it may or
may not be persisting with – and persistence will tell. If we’re
forgetting important lessons, we’ll pay (in the currency of survival).
If this is mere tautology, as has not infrequently been alleged, then
there’s not even any need for controversy. But of course, controversy
there is, plentifully, and so deeply entrenched that the most banal
expositions capture it best. Consider
this, from the self-assuredly pedestrian United States History site:
What is this supremely typical paragraph really saying? That some American
businesses survived, were thus seen as “the fittest” (= they had
survived), ‘justified’ (= they had survived), and ‘proven to be superior’
(= they had survived), in other words, a string of perfectly empty
identity statements that is in some way supposed to embody a radically
disreputable form of ruthless social extremism. This same systematic
logical error, seen with tedious insistence in all instance of commentary
on ‘social Darwinism’, was baptized by Schopenhauer ‘hypostasis of the
concept’. It seizes upon something, repeats it exactly but in different
terms, and then pretends to have added information. Once this error is
corrected for, substantial discussion of the topic is exposed in its full,
dazzling vacuity.
A writhing David Boaz cites the Encyclopedia Britannica
entry
on Social Darwinism, which describes it as:
It is immediately clear that this passage, too, follows the
already-familiar pattern, clocking ‘hypostasis of the concept’ to the edge
of spontaneous combustion. Worse still, it tries to put its hypostasized
‘information’ to work through the positive proposition — tacitly
insinuated rather than firmly stated – that “persons, groups, and races”
are something other than “animals in nature.” Nature, it seems, ceased to
apply at some threshold of human social development, when people stopped
being animals, and became something else. Man is not only doubled (as a
natural being and something else), but divided between incommensurable
kingdoms, whose re-integration is morally akin to “rationalization for
imperialist, colonialist, and racist policies” and – why not admit it? —
fascist genocide.
Define nature in such a way that we’re not part of it, or you’re engaged
in Nazi apologetics says Encyclopedia Britannica. There’s
obviously something about social Darwinism that gets people excited —
several things, actually. Plugging the spontaneous theory of
laissez faire capitalism into traumatic association with the
Third Reich is thrilling enough, especially because that’s the basic
platform for the epoch of actually existing fascism (which we still
inhabit), but there’s more.
The most obvious clue, from which the
Encyclopedia Britannica passage unravels like a piece of
incompetent knitting, is the magical appearance of ‘should’ – “The poor
were the ‘unfit’ and should not be aided.” This is another preposterous
hypostasis, naturally (and unnaturally), but equally typical. At the
evolution site talkorigins, John S. Wilkins
tells
us: “’Social Darwinism’ … holds that social policy should allow the weak
and unfit to fail and die, and that this is not only good policy but
morally right.” The intellectual perversity here is truly fascinating.
Any naturalistic social theory subtracts, or at least suspends, moral
evaluation. It says: this is the way things are (however we might want
them to be). Yet here, through hypostatic doubling, or redundancy, such
neutral realism is converted into a bizarre, morally-charged stance:
nature should happen. Social Darwinism is not attempting to
explain, but rather siding with reality (those Nazis!).
This is, quite simply and literally, madness. Left dissatisfied by mere
denial of the modest proposition that reality rules, the denunciation of
social Darwinism proceeds smoothly to the accusation that realists are
aiding and abetting the enemy. The unforgivable crime is to accept that
there are consequences, or results, other than those we have agreed to
allow.
The reality is that practical decisions have real consequences. If those
consequences are annulled by, or absorbed into, a more comprehensive
social entity, then that entity inherits them. What it incentivizes it
grows into. The failures it selects for become its own. When maladaptive
decisions are displaced, or aggregated, they are not dispelled, but
reinforced, generalized, and exacerbated. Whatever the scale of the social
being under consideration, it either finds a way to work, and to reward
what works, or it perishes, whether as a whole, or in pieces. That is the
‘social Darwinism’ that will return, eventually, because reality rules,
and rather than joining the clamor of denunciation, Boaz would have been
prescient to reclaim it.
November 20, 2012Discrimination
Bryan Caplan has
had
two epiphanies, which sum to the conclusion that — bad as tribalism is —
misanthropy is the real problem. His ineradicable universalism betrays him
once again.
It matters little whether people are uniformly judged good or
bad. Far more important is whether such judgment is
discriminating.
The central argument of Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals is
clarifying in this regard, not least because it explains how radical
mystification came to dominate the topic. How could there ever come to be
a moral quandary about the value of discrimination? Considered
superficially, it is extremely puzzling.
Differentiation between what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ requires discrimination.
This is a capability no younger than life itself, which it serves as an
indispensable function. As soon as there is behavior, there is
discrimination between alternatives. One way leads to survival, the other
way leads to death. There is nourishment, or not; reproduction, or not;
safety or predatory menace. Good and bad, or the discrimination between
them (which is the same thing), are etched primordially into any world
that life inhabits. Discrimination is needed to survive.
The very existence of archaic hominids attests
to billions of years of effective discrimination, between safety and
danger, wholesome and putrid or poisonous food, good mates and less good
(or worthless) ones. When these elevated apes differentiated between good
and bad, appetizing and rotten, attractive and repulsive, they found such
discriminations sufficiently similar in essence to be functionally
substitutable. When judging that some food item is ‘not good for us’, a
person is ‘rotten’, or the odor of a potential mate is ‘delicious’, we
recall such substitutions, and the primordial sense of discrimination that
they affirm. There can be no long-term deviation from the original
principle: discrimination is intelligence aligned with survival.
Two contrary developments now present themselves. Firstly, there is a
sublimation or sophistication of discrimination, which might be called
cultivation. Abstract concepts, modes of expression, artworks,
delicate culinary flavors, refined behaviors, and exotic elaborations of
sexual-selection stimuli, among innumerable other things, can all be
subtly discriminated on the ancient scale, supporting an ever more
intricate and extended hierarchy of judgments. The reflexive doubling of
this potential upon itself, as captured by the ‘higher’ judgment that
to discriminate well is good, produces a ‘natural aristocracy’. For
the first time, there is a self-conscious ‘Right’. This, at least, is its
logico-mythical ur-form. To divide the good from the bad is good.
Order, hierarchy, and distinction emerge from an affirmation of
discrimination.
Because the Left cannot create, it comes second. It presupposes an
existing hierarchy, or order of discriminations, which is subverted
through a ‘slave revolt in morality’. The formula is simple enough:
to discriminate is bad. Following from this leftist moral
perversion, as its second-order consequence, those who do not discriminate
(well), but are in fact discriminated against, must be the good. In the
new moral order, therefore, to be bad at discrimination is good — or
‘universalist’ — whilst the old (and now ‘evil’) quality of good judgment,
based on competent perception of patterns and differences, is the very
quintessence of sin.
Lawrence Auster’s thinking, which would not usually be described as
‘Nietzschean’,
conforms
to the conclusions of the Antichrist perfectly in this:
We thus arrive at our present system of mass nonwhite immigration,
multiculturalism, racial preferences for minorities, the symbolic
celebration of minorities, the covering up of black-on-white violence,
and antiracism crusades directed exclusively at whites.
Under this system, whites practice assiduous non-discrimination
toward the unassimilated, alien, or criminal behavior of racial
minorities, while practicing the most assiduous discrimination against
their fellow whites for the slightest failure to be
non-discriminatory.
This is the system that conservatives variously describe as “political
correctness” or the “double standard.” However, from the point of view
of the functioning of the liberal order itself, what conservatives call
the double standard is not a double standard at all, but a fundamental
and necessary articulation of the society into the “non-discriminators”
and the “non-discriminated against”—an articulation upon which the very
legitimacy and existence of the liberal society depends.
[Auster’s emphasis]
The racial pretext for this righteous diatribe is not incidental, given
the prevailing sense of ‘discrimination’ in Left-edited languages. Caution
is required, however, precisely because vulgar racism is
insufficiently discriminating. All generalization lurches towards
the universal. The abstract principle of Leftism is, in any case, far more
general. The trend towards the Left-absolute is entirely clear, and
pre-programmed:
no state of human existence can possibly be any better or worse than
any other, and only through recognition of this can we be saved. Do you sinfully
imagine that it is better to be a damned soul like Nietzsche than
an obese, leprous, slothful, communist, cretin? Or worse still, in Bryan
Caplan’s world, that one might design an immigration policy on this basis?
Then your path to the abyss is already marked out before you.
It does not take an exceptional mastery of logic to see the
inextinguishable contradiction in Leftist thought. If discrimination is
bad, and non-discrimination is good, how can discrimination be
discriminated from non-discrimination, without grave moral error? This is
an opportunity for Rightist entertainment, but not for solace. The Left
has power and absurdist mysticism on its side. Logic is for sinners.
Two hanging questions:
Can Left and Right be rigorously
distinguished
in any other way?
Isn’t
Christianity, as Nietzsche insisted, inextricable from this mess?
August 9, 2013Coldness
‘Coincidentally’ a number of seemingly unrelated social media stimuli have
conspired to recall
this today:
Note: “Politics closest to me” comes from the original creator of this
diagram (I’m still not sure who that is). The politics closest to me are
located in the top right corner of the gray box, where it disappears into
the blackness of the Outside.
For the record, these tweets were the
principal pincers:
(It took me a while to make the connection.)
There’s a further link — also to Twitter — concerning the accusation that
Anarcho-Capitalism and Neocameralism are ‘Utopian’. I won’t reproduce that
here, because it was longer, and more involved. The relevant point is that
both these ‘positions’ can be construed either as ideals, and therefore
indeed vulnerable to criticism for their Utopianism, or as
cold analytical frameworks that capture what is in a way
that enhances its theoretical tractability. Darwinism is no different, in
this respect.
Anybody who is a Cosmic Darwinist is certainly going to be a Social
Darwinist, unless they have a cognitive consistency problem. When a
Darwinist observes a maladaption it is not seen as a theoretical hole, but
rather as the basis for a prediction. Whatever cannot effectively
reproduce itself can be reliably expected not to successfully reproduce
itself. If adventures in policy recommendation then follow, they are
strictly secondly. What is primary is simple. Reality rules.
Outside in is, of course, utterly Social Darwinist in this sense
(and probably also in whatever others are available). Variation-selection
dynamics are unsurpassable. Whatever seeks to depart from them will fail.
Suppression of either variation or selection is intrinsically maladaptive
to the cosmos. Maximization of the interlocked functions of
experimentation and eradication of error is the only value to which the
ultimate nature of things subscribes. Anything that works picks up on
that, and goes with its grain. Anything that doesn’t is objectively
insane. It’s not especially difficult, except for the fact that it offers
us nothing but the (cold) truth.
Does Darwinism define the ultimate (transcendental) Right (in
this
sense, and
this)? Capitalism as Darwinian socio-economics, HBD as Darwinian
anthropology, the
Gods of the
Copybook Headings as Darwinian cultural history …? I cannot even imagine
how that might not be so.
February 13, 2015Scales
From a widely cited
defense
of the Black Lives Matter synthetic meme at Reddit:
… societally, we don’t pay as much attention to
certain people’s deaths as we do to others. So, currently, we don’t
treat all lives as though they matter equally.
Two points:
(1) Some lives (and deaths) do matter far more than others,
obviously. Everyone knows this, when they’re not high,
even if they usually feel compelled to lie about it. (Some lives, indeed,
characterized by criminality and parasitism, are worth less than nothing —
and even considerably less.) Only bizarre religious ideas could lead
anybody to think the opposite.
(2) Western societies are very rapidly losing the ability to make sane
calls on the point, as exceptional productivity loses its
capacity to inspire attention, and the merely piteous usurps its
central cultural position.
In the absence of adaptive sensibilities, life insurance premiums — or
some equivalent expression of undemonstrative, practical value-processing
— will have to serve as a default.
September 3, 2015How Communism Works
Really:
Naked mole rats are among the ugliest creatures in the animal kingdom,
and they engage in acts that seem repulsive — such as eating one
another’s, and their own, faeces. … Now researchers have found one
biological motivation for this behaviour. When a queen mole rat’s
subordinates feed on her hormone-filled faeces, the resulting oestrogen
boost causes the beta rats to take care of the queen’s pups … […] Like
bees, naked mole rats live in eusocial colonies, with only one queen rat
and a few males that can reproduce. The rest of the colony consists of
dozens of infertile subordinates that help with tasks such as foraging
and defending the nest. The subordinate rats also take care of the
queen’s pups as though the babies were their own: they build the nests,
lick the pups and keep them warm with their body heat.
We’re almost there. Hail the New Collectivist Man:
“Sue Carter, a behavioural neurobiologist at Indiana University in
Bloomington, says that the animals’ method of transferring parental
responsibility through faeces is interesting.”
(Don’t say you weren’t warned.)
October 22, 2015Twin Discoveries
Twin studies are the foundation of realism in all subjects pertaining to
human beings (although their implications are wider). They reveal two
crucial pieces of information:
(1) Heredity overwhelms environment in the (rigorous, statistical)
explanation of human psychology, and
(2) Humans are massively predisposed to under-emphasize hereditary factors
in the folk explanation of human psychology (including their own).
Both points emerge lucidly from Brian Boutwell’s
article
on twin research in Quillette:
Based on the results of classical twin studies, it just doesn’t appear
that parenting — whether mom and dad are permissive or not, read to
their kid or not, or whatever else — impacts development as much as we
might like to think. Regarding the cross-validation that I mentioned,
studies examining identical twins separated at birth and reared apart
have repeatedly revealed (in shocking ways) the same thing: these
individuals are remarkably similar when in fact they should be utterly
different (they have completely different environments, but the same
genes). Alternatively, non-biologically related adopted children (who
have no genetic commonalities) raised together are utterly dissimilar to
each other — despite in many cases having decades of exposure to the
same parents and home environments.
Without wanting to play down the importance of the parenting angle, it’s
worth bearing in mind that this is a rare zone where it remains
politically acceptable to bring hereditarian findings to the table.
Upsetting parents is still OK, and even vaguely commendable, so it
provides a doorway through which to introduce matters of far broader
significance. The truly critical point, from the perspective of this blog,
is that
we should expect a systematic cognitive bias against the influence of
heredity
and thus — intellectual integrity demands — we should lean against it.
There’s an important lesson here:
Children who are spanked (not abused, but spanked) often experience a
host of other problems in life, including psychological maladjustment
and behavioral problems. In a study led by my colleague J.C. Barnes, we
probed this issue in more detail and found some evidence suggesting that
spanking increased the occurrence of overt bad behavior in children. We
could have stopped there. Yet, we went one step further and attempted to
inspect the genetic influences that were rampant across the measures
included in our study. What we found was that much of the association
between the two variables (spanking and behavior) was attributable to
genetic effects that they had in common. The correlation between
spanking and behavior appeared to reflect the presence of shared genetic
influences cutting across both traits.
Parents are twin sources of influence. They “pass along two things to
their kids: genes and an environment” — which facilitates the
misattribution of genetic to environmental factors. If you find yourself
regularly spanking your kids, it’s very likely that you’ve
genetically-endowed them with the same spank-worthy characteristics you
have yourself (because you were spanked as a kid, too, right?). The
environmentalist delusion practically leaps out of this situation,
pre-packaged for credulous belief.
See original (of both quotes) for references.
(Don’t just read the whole of Boutwell’s article, read the whole of
Quillette.)
December 2, 2015Quote note (#266)
It is surely a crucial (and inadequately acknowledged) feature of Darwin’s
The Origin of Species that its point of departure is
artificial selection, which might also be described as primordial
technology, or the foundation of material civilization. Natural selection
acquires definition through comparison with the (predominantly
unconscious) process of domestication, or cultivation.
This is the transitional paragraph (from Chapter IV):
As man can produce, and certainly has produced, a great result by his
methodical and unconscious means of selection, what may not natural
selection effect? Man can act only on external and visible characters:
Nature, if I many be allowed to personify the natural preservation or
survival of the fittest, cares nothing for appearances, except in so far
as they are useful to any being. She can act on every internal organ, on
every shade of constitutional difference, on the whole machinery of
life. Man selects only for his own good: Nature only for that of the
being which she tends. Every selected character is fully exercised by
her, as is implied by the fact of their selection. Man keeps the natives
of many climates in the same country; he seldom exercises each selected
character in some peculiar and fitting manner; he feeds a long- and
short-beaked pigeon on the same food; he does not exercise a long-backed
or long-legged quadruped in any peculiar manner; he exposes sheep with
long and short wool to the same climate. He does not allow the most
vigorous males to struggle for the females. He does not rigidly destroy
all inferior animals, but protects during each varying season, as far as
lies in his power, all his productions. He often begins his selection
from some half-monstrous form; or at least by some modification
prominent enough to catch the eye or to be plainly useful to him. Under
Nature, the slightest difference of structure or constitution may well
turn the nicely balanced scale in the struggle for life, and so be
preserved. How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man! how short his
time! and consequently how poor will be his results, compared with those
accumulated by Nature during whole geological periods! Can we wonder,
then, that Natures productions should be far “truer” in character than
man’s productions; that they should be infinitely better adapted to the
most complex conditions of life, and should plainly bear the stamp of
far higher workmanship?
July 10, 2016
CHAPTER ONE - SELECTION
Edited Life
Leonard Eisenberg has
created
a striking new
visualization
of the tree of life.
It’s open about the skew: “All the major and many of the minor living
branches of life are shown on this diagram, but only a few of those that
have gone extinct are shown.”
Extinction is overwhelmingly the deep reality, compared to which the
survival of species — the selected phenomenon — is scarcely more
than a rounding error. Through a reflexive, lucid, secondary selection the
culled, blasted, and gnawed tree of terrestrial life is edited into the
attractive flowering shrub we see in the diagram. It shows us what our
illusion looks like in detail.
Survivor or selection
bias is a hugely
important frame. It absorbs the whole of
anthropic
reasoning in principle. To produce a display of life on earth that
realistically incorporated it would require overcoming a range of
psychological and epistemological obstacles so profound they reach the
very root of the biological enterprise and even human intelligence as
such, but only then would we truly see where we come from.
December 16, 2014Hell-Baked
There’s a potential prologue to this post that I’m reluctant to be
distracted by. It’s introvertedly about NRx, as a cultural mutation, and
the way this is defined by a strategic — or merely ornery — indifference
to deeply-settled modes of ethico-political condemnation. Terms designed
as pathblockers — ‘fascist’ or ‘racist’ most obviously — are stepped over,
perhaps laughed at, but in any case, and most importantly,
exposed as bearers of a religious terror. They are signs
of a control regime, marking the unthinkable wastes
where be dragons, effective precisely insofar as they cannot be
entertained. ‘Satanic’ was once such a word (before it became a joke).
These words cannot be understood except as invocations of the sacred, in
its negative, or limitative role.
Is NRx in fact fascist? Not remotely. It is probably, in reality rather
than self-estimation, the least fascistic current of political
philosophy presently in existence, although this requires a minimal
comprehension of what fascism actually is, which the word itself in its
contemporary usage is designed to obstruct. Is NRx racist? Probably. The
term is so entirely plastic in the service of those who utilize it that it
is difficult, with any real clarity, to say.
What NRx most definitely is, at least in the firm opinion of this blog, is
Social Darwinist. When this term is hurled at NRx as a negative
epithet, it is nor a cause for stoic resignation, stiffened by humor, but
rather for grim delight. Of course, this term is culturally processed —
thought through — no more competently than those previously
noted. It is our task to do this.
If ‘Social Darwinism’ is in any way an
unfortunate term, it is only because it is merely Darwinism, and more
exactly consistent Darwinism. It is equivalent to the proposition
that Darwinian processes have no limits relevant to us. Darwinism is
something we are inside. No part of what it is to be human can ever judge
its Darwinian inheritance from a position of transcendent leverage, as if
accessing principles of moral estimation with some alternative genesis, or
criterion.
This is easy to say. As far as this blog is concerned, it is also — beyond
all reasonable question — true. While very far from a dominant global
opinion, it is not uncommonly held — if only nominally — by a considerable
fraction of those among the educated segment of the world’s high-IQ
populations. It is also, however, scarcely bearable to think.
The logical consequence of Social Darwinism is that
everything of value has been built in Hell.
It is only due to a predominance of influences that are not only entirely
morally indifferent, but indeed — from a human perspective — indescribably
cruel, that nature has been capable of constructive action. Specifically,
it is solely by way of the relentless, brutal culling of populations that
any complex or adaptive traits have been sieved — with torturous
inefficiency — from the chaos of natural existence. All health, beauty,
intelligence, and social grace has been teased from a vast butcher’s yard
of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of massacre to draw
forth even the subtlest of advantages. This is not only a matter of the
bloody grinding mills of selection, either, but also of the innumerable
mutational abominations thrown up by the madness of chance, as it pursues
its directionless path to some negligible preservable trait, and then —
still further — of the unavowable horrors that ‘fitness’ (or sheer
survival) itself predominantly entails. We are a minuscule sample of
agonized matter, comprising genetic survival monsters, fished from a
cosmic ocean of vile mutants, by a pitiless killing machine of infinite
appetite. (This is still, perhaps, to put an irresponsibly positive spin
on the story, but it should suffice for our purposes here.)
Crucially, any attempt to escape this fatality — or, more realistically,
any mere accidental and temporary reprieve from it — leads inexorably to
the undoing of its work. Malthusian relaxation is the whole of
mercy, and it is the greatest engine of destruction our universe is able
to bring about. To the precise extent that we are spared, even for a
moment, we degenerate — and this Iron Law applies to every dimension and
scale of existence: phylogenetic and ontogenetic, individual, social, and
institutional, genomic, cellular, organic, and cultural. There is no
machinery extant, or even rigorously imaginable, that can sustain a single
iota of attained value outside the forges of Hell.
What is it that Neoreaction — perhaps I should say
The Dark Enlightenment — has to offer the world, if all goes
optimally (which, of course, it won’t)? Really, the honest answer to this
question is: Eternal Hell. It’s not an easy marketing brief. We
could perhaps try:
But it could be worse (and almost certainly will be).
July 17, 2015Malthus was Right
The global wealth distribution is predictably
spiky. That’s mostly because scarcely anyone owns anything:
… it does not take that much to get into the top 1% of wealth holders.
Once debts have been subtracted, a person needs only $3,650 to be among
the wealthiest half of the world’s citizens. However, about $77,000 is
required to be a member of the top 10% of global wealth holders and
$798,000 to belong to the top 1%. So if you own a home in any major city
in the rich North on your own and without a mortgage, you are part of
the top 1%.
This looks like what you’d expect if population — at the global level —
expanded approximately to the resource limit. (There are no doubt cuddlier
interpretations out there.)
November 28, 2016
CHAPTER TWO - DYSGENICS
Ruin
What does Dark Enlightenment see when it scrutinizes our world?
This. (Exactly this.)
December 12, 2013Charlton is Right …
… on
this
question, at least. The sole real puzzle is the precise quantity of
dysgenic deterioration that has taken place in Western societies over the
last 150 years, or more. Charlton estimates a one SD decline over this
period in the UK, which seems entirely credible. Due to the small sample
size, his argument from mathematical excellence has an inevitable
anecdotal quality, but it would be hard to contest its general direction.
A fascinating
paper
by Michael A. Woodley (via @intelligenceres) is able to be more
comprehensively persuasive. Its second table describes the innovation rate
per capita across a sample of European countries falling by almost
three-quarters over the period 1845-2005, and roughly halving from
1945-2005. (Great Stagnation anyone?)
It shouldn’t need adding that it’s impossible to read
this
often enough (it’s always there in my ‘Resources’ roll).
Two more, somewhat more
distantly
related
links.
(We’re so screwed.)
ADDED: More on this topic at Charlton’s place.
ADDED:
Gregory Cochran’s ‘outliers’ argument against this thesis has as its core:
“In another application – if the average genetic IQ potential had
decreased by a standard deviation since Victorian times, the number of
individuals with the ability to develop new, difficult, and interesting
results in higher mathematics would have crashed, bring such developments
to a screeching halt. Of course that has not happened.”
I would have found it profoundly confidence-crushing if Cochran had simply
said:
the collapse of a complex trait on this scale, in this time-span, is
inconsistent with everything we know about population genetics. The argument he relies upon instead, while far more elegant, is also
much less persuasive (see the excellent comment thread at his site). As
Dave Chamberlin
notes, the parallel increase in assortative mating over the period in question
means that assuming a stable standard distribution (variance) might not be
safe. An increasingly heterogeneous population would to some degree shield
its outliers from averaging effects.
Compared to the evidence mustered in support of the IQ collapse thesis, it
is hard to be impressed by the rather impressionistic claim “Of course
that has not happened.” Up to the mid-20th century — the era of Gödel, Von
Neumann, and Turing — this might indeed have been irresistible, but today?
Charlton’s counter-argument seems by no means risible. How sure are we
that mathematics has not “collapsed” — at least down to the level of
‘normal’ (rather than ‘revolutionary’) science? What was the last
mathematical break-through that mattered dazzlingly to the world?
ADDED: Mangan adds a significant complication.
March 7, 2014The Worst Question
At news aggregator
Real Clear World, Frank
Ching’s recent
article
comparing the economic performance of the earth’s two demographic giants
was given the tantalizing headline
Why India Keeps Falling Behind China. There’s no sign of the
“Why?” at the original, published in Taiwan’s China Post. No
surprise there.
As Ching notes:
While India and China are both being hailed as rapidly developing
emerging markets, the gap between the two countries is widening with
India being left behind as China continues to power ahead. China’s
growth in 2013 was 7.7 percent while that of India hit a low for the
decade of 4.5 percent in the 2012-13 fiscal year.
Despite being positioned for catch-up (i.e. being far poorer), India
simply doesn’t
grow as fast
as China. “The average estimated productivity growth rate of China (5.9%)
is more than double that of India (2.4%).” India hasn’t matched Chinese
growth rates in any single year since the end of the Mao-era in the late
1970s, even after launching its own much-heralded market-oriented economic
reform program in the early 1990s. Despite pulling itself from the dismal
3% “Hindu” growth rate, which was roughly doubled to a 5-6% range, China’s
average 9.8% growth rate, sustained over three decades, has remained far
out of reach.
The two most populous nations on earth — by a
huge margin — accounting between them for over a third of the ‘developing
world’ by headcount (and for a far larger proportion of the part that has
been in any serious way developing), would seem, superficially, like
obvious candidates for unrelenting comparison. How could this titanic
development race not be the most important socio-economic story on the
planet?
Adding drama to this competition is the ideological polarity it
represents. Pitting the most substantial and obstreperous antagonist to
liberal-democratic global manifest destiny against a regime that was
forged in Fabian social-democracy, and which continues to exult in its
status as “the world’s largest democracy®” — the narrative potential is …
oh wait.
For the forces of darkness, it only gets better. If India’s relative
development failure is not to be considered a conspicuous illustration of
democratic incapability, other explanatory factors have to be invoked.
Something like 5% GDP growth is going missing, chronically, every year
(and if alternative development indicators are preferred, the grim story
they tell is much the same). Either India’s Cathedral-approved political
orientation is responsible for this social morass, or something
else
has to be.
While wondering about this awkward conundrum, you’re quite likely to stop
being surprised about the paucity of China-India comparative news
coverage. Clearly, the “Why?” isn’t wanted, because it only goes to bad
places. In fact, it’s probably the worst question in the world.
March 27, 2014Dysgenic Reactions
Michael A. Woodley, Jan te Nijenhuis, and Raegan Murphy
respond
(in detail) to critics of their 2013 paper on the dysgenic implications of
Galton’s reaction time data. Their adjusted evidence indicates an increase
in reaction times among US/UK males over the period 1889-2004 from 187.1
ms to 237.1 ms (44.6 ms over 115 years), equivalent to a decline in
g of 13.9 points, or 1.21 points per decade. They propose that
68% of this decline is due to dysgenic selection, with the remaining 32%
attributed to increasing mutation load.
If these figures are even remotely accurate, they portray a phenomenon —
and indeed a catastrophe — that would have to be considered a fundamental
determinant of recent world history. Given the scale and rapidity of
dysgenic collapse suggested here, skepticism is natural, and indeed
all-but inevitable. (The proposed rate of decline seems incredible to
this, radically inexpert, blog.) It should nevertheless be reasonable to
expect counter-arguments to exhibit the same intellectual seriousness and
respect for evidence that this paper so impressively demonstrates.
June 12, 2014Counter-Dysgenics
Heartiste (finally)
discovers
Weiss.
Of Heartiste’s six proposed policy responses, #2 (introduce
counter-dysgenic incentives) is the only one this blog endorse without
reservation. High-IQ immigration, assortative mating, and open markets all
make a positive contribution to general social competitiveness, although
due theoretical deference to
IQ-Shredder
problems is required. His point #6 is valuable if it is inverted, to make
socio-political fragmentation a primary objective, rather than a
consequence, or subordinate instrumental goal. Point #5 (“Eliminate all
female-friendly public policies”) is unobjectionable because all
‘X-friendly’ public policies are objectionable, and its specific emphasis
is material for consideration within a disintegrated
oecumenon, where polities could experiment with all kinds of
things. Talented people will tend to flee a heavy-handed authoritarian
state, even if it’s social policies have impressive traditional
validation. Consequently, as a response to local dysgenics, the outcome of
any attempt to socially engineer a restored patriarchy from the top-down
is likely to be counter-productive.
Social Darwinism, seriously understood, is the theoretical default that
every attempt to neutralize spontaneous selection processes (entropy
dissipation) will be subverted by predictable perverse effects. It’s no
more possible to suppress Social Darwinism than it is to annul the Second
Law of Thermodynamics, and social philosophies which teach that this can
be achieved are the strict equivalent of plans for perpetual motion
machines. That’s what Weiss is explaining, as
Outside in understands it. Subsumption into an effective
competitive environment is the only possible response that could work to
reverse dysgenic trends, and this will eventually occur, whether human
politics cooperates or not. Patchwork is the gentlest way this could be
realized, since it enables a multitude of societies to decide on their own
levels of entropy-accumulation tolerance. (That is not, of course, to
suggest that a Patchworked-world is gentle in any sense we have grown
accustomed to.)
August 2, 2014Quote note (#168)
The level of apocalypticism to be found in scientific abstracts rarely
reaches the Dark Enlightenment threshold, but there are always exceptions.
Here’s Olav Albert Christophersen, on ‘Thematic Cluster: Focus on Autism
Spectrum Disorder’, originally published in
Microbial Ecology in Health & Disease (2012). Indicatively,
the
paper
is subtitled ‘Should autism be considered a canary bird telling that
Homo sapiens may be on its way to extinction?’ The full abstract:
There has been a dramatic enhancement of the reported incidence of
autism in different parts of the world over the last 30 years. This can
apparently not be explained only as a result of improved diagnosis and
reporting, but may also reflect a real change. The causes of this change
are unknown, but if we shall follow T.C. Chamberlin’s principle of
multiple working hypotheses, we need to take into consideration the
possibility that it partly may reflect an enhancement of the average
frequency of responsible alleles in large populations. If this
hypothesis is correct, it means that the average germline mutation rate
must now be much higher in the populations concerned, compared with the
natural mutation rate in hominid ancestors before the agricultural and
industrial revolutions. This is compatible with the high prevalence of
impaired human semen quality in several countries and also with what is
known about high levels of total exposure to several different unnatural
chemical mutagens, plus some natural ones at unnaturally high levels.
Moreover, dietary deficiency conditions that may lead to enhancement of
mutation rates are also very widespread, affecting billions of people.
However,
the natural mutation rate in hominids has been found to be so high
that there is apparently no tolerance for further enhancement of the
germline mutation rate before the Eigen error threshold will be
exceeded and our species will go extinct because of mutational
meltdown. This threat, if real, should be considered far more serious than any
disease causing the death only of individual patients.
It should therefore be considered the first and highest priority of
the best biomedical scientists in the world, of research-funding
agencies and of all medical doctors to try to stop the express train
carrying all humankind as passengers on board before it arrives at the
end station of our civilization.
[XS emphasis]
(Mutational load is, of course, genomic entropy — and the kind of ‘Social
Darwinian’ or eugenicist mechanisms that might dissipate it are all,
today, strictly unthinkable.)
(Via.)
June 13, 2015Crime Think
It doesn’t get much clearer than
this. Any policy decisions resulting in a reduction of mean IQ within a
society are implicit choices to raise the level of criminality. If there’s
wriggle room on the point, this blog isn’t seeing it.
The clearest takeaway from this research is that low intelligence is a
strong and consistent correlate of criminal offending. For example, the
risk of acquiring a felony conviction by age 21 is nearly four times
(3.6) higher among those in the three lowest categories (1–3) of total
intelligence as compared to those scoring in the top three categories
(7–9). We observed differences of similar magnitude across each
indicator of criminal offending and regardless of the measure of
intelligence.
(Via.)
June 25, 2015No-Brainer
“Getting rid of your brain sounds like a bad idea.”
It says a lot about the cosmos that evolution seems to
disagree.
The oldest known fossil with a complex brain
is about 520 million years old. This was a time when life became much more abundant and diverse,
often referred to as the Cambrian explosion. […] Discovered in China,
the animal looked like a woodlouse with claws. It seems to have had an
elaborate brain-like structure consisting of a fore-, mid- and
hind-brain, all of which had specialised neural circuits. […] This
suggests that complex brains were in place as early as 520 million years
ago. But they may not have stayed.
(Via.)
October 29, 2015Who needs an argument?
The kind of things 19th century English geniuses believed will set your
teeth
chattering:
Galton feared that the English race was degenerating, declining in both
mental and physical ability. (It remains a common fear; the French
thought they were degenerating, too.) Like others of his day, Galton
used the term ‘race’ loosely. He referred alternately to the English
race, the white race, the human race. But overall, English eugenics was
less about race than class. To Galton’s mind, the filthy working poor
were breeding like rabbits while the gentry were chastely dwindling. He
became convinced that unless something were done, the flower of English
manhood – not excluding specimens such as his cousin and, ahem, himself
– would soon vanish, swamped by a massive tide of Oliver Twists and Tiny
Tims.
Thank goodness that preposterous conviction has been rigorously debunked.
November 18, 2015Going Down
Yes, the United States is undergoing a triple-pronged dysgenic process.
The only serious questions are about speed.
May 9, 2017
CHAPTER THREE - EUGENICS AND SPECIATION
Quote notes (#71)
F. Roger Devlin
reviews
Gregory Clark’s latest
book
The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility
at American Renaissance:
China, which saw enormous social upheaval in the 20th century, provides
yet another perspective. Under Mao, much of the country’s elite was
killed or exiled. The rest were subject to discrimination and excluded
from the Communist Party. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao tried to
turn the social scale upside down by shipping prominent people to the
countryside to work in rice paddies. If political intervention can
create higher social mobility, it would have done so in China.
Yet once discrimination against “class enemies” was abolished shortly
after Mao’s death, those with surnames characteristic of the
pre-communist elite quickly began to rise again. Today, they are greatly
over-represented even in the Communist Party. Those descended from the
“workers and peasants” favored under Mao have quickly seen their status
erode. Recent social mobility in China has been no greater than it was
under the Emperors.
Anyone who doesn’t find their presuppositions shaken by Clark’s work is
probably not paying attention. If those out here in the NRx think it
conforms neatly to their expectations that heredity is strongly
determining of social outcomes — are they comfortable proceeding to
evidence-based acknowledgement that socio-economic regime-type seems
entirely irrelevant to the (uniformly low) level of social mobility? Clark
himself draws the curve-ball conclusion:
so why not be a social democrat? It’s not as if rational incentives
make any difference anyway.
(I’ll be looking for the opportunity to dig into this stuff at least a
little, as soon as I catch a moment.)
April 7, 2014Chinese Eugenics
A Shanghaiist
interview
with Leta Hong Fincher wanders into inspiring delicate
territory:
… in 2007, China’s State Council came out with a very important
population decision. They announced that China had a severe problem with
the so-called “low quality” of the population, that it’s going to cause
problems for China in the future, in the global marketplace, that it’s
going to affect China’s ability to compete with other nations, because
the quality of the population is too low. So they made it an urgent
priority to “upgrade population quality” (tigao renkou suzhi). And then they designated certain agencies to be the primary
implementers of the goal of upgrading population quality. One of the
agencies they named was the Women’s Federation. And they also named the
Public Security Bureau. Shortly after that population decision, the
state media suddenly came out with all these Leftover Women media
reports, news reports cartoons, commentaries, columns, and it was just
ubiquitous.
And then, the Women’s Federation defined the term and the Ministry of
Education adopted the term shengnü [or ‘leftover
woman’] as part of its official lexicon. And it’s just amazing when you
look at these reports and cartoons just how little they vary.
Fundamentally it’s the same message, kind of reworded. It’s the same
theme over and over again, year after year.
The basic message is targeting urban, educated, successful,
professional women. And it shows these women as being too picky. They’re
too focused on their careers. They’re overly ambitious. If they simply
lowered their sights, and made more compromises, then they would easily
find a man to marry. So it’s the woman’s fault that they are not getting
married, that their standards are too high. And then there are a wide
variety of insults hurled at these women: that they don’t like sex, that
they’re afraid of commitment.
And I noticed that they are evolving. The propaganda machine is
evolving now to include single, divorced mothers. Just a few months ago,
I noticed Xinhua News came out with something talking about how single,
divorced mothers also have an obligation to go out and get married again
and that they shouldn’t use their children as an excuse not to get
married. They also have a new category of so-called leftover women which
is single female homeowners. They say that single women lull themselves
into a false sense of security by buying a home of their own. In fact
this is going to make it even more difficult for them to find a
husband.
All of this is really tightening its hold on this group of urban,
educated, professional women. And why are they focusing on these women?
It’s because these women have, in the view of the government, higher
quality. The government has a tradition of eugenics. These educated
urban women are seen as having higher quality, but these are the very
women who are choosing to delay marriage because they want to pursue
their educations, because they want to pursue their careers. It’s a very
natural thing to do and that’s what women around China are doing. In
South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, and even Hong Kong, women are
delaying their age of first marriage and some of them are even rejecting
marriage altogether.
And so the Chinese government feels this urgency, I believe, that they
need to stop this trend. They have to get these educated women to get
married and have a child because they see this as the basic function of
a woman. Her duty to the nation is to have a child. But they are
focusing on educated women. They’re not encouraging the illiterate rural
woman to have children, because those women are considered to be of “low
quality”.
This elementary common sense is supposed to be appalling beyond
comprehension, of course.
ADDED: Bernard Harcourt on Michel Foucault on Gary Becker —
Now, Foucault refers to this … specific danger around page 228 of the
English translation of his lectures when he talks about eugenics, the
problem of eugenics. And he says, “as soon as a society poses itself the
problem of the improvement of its human capital in general,” that is,
once we have a theory of human capital, and once we view the important
issue as being improvement of human capital, that “it is inevitable that
the problem of control, screening, and improvement of the human capital
of individuals … [is] called for.”
May 6, 2014Reality Boxes
Acknowledgement of a conservation law is typically a reliable indication
of realistic analysis. There’s a notable example
here
(embedded in an important article):
In the past, individuals could suffer death or disability due to small
genetic defects, for example in their immune systems, for which modern
medicine now routinely substitutes and which welfare cushions. But even
modern medicine and welfare have their limits. W.D. Hamilton stated that
when the misery resulting from mutations grows too great to bear — for
medical, economic or humanitarian reasons —
the load will be reduced, either naturally or
artificially — painfully through elevated rates of mortality, or
painlessly through eugenics.
[My emphasis]
The slogan It’s going to happen one way or the other is engraved
upon the gateway to the Temple of Gnon.
May 13, 2015Ideological Speciation
It’s
happening.
(Bring it on.)
July 22, 2014Hyper-Racism
While this blog generally seeks to spread dismay whenever the opportunity
arises, it cannot pretend to a huge obsession with what might be described
as ordinary racism. When perusing the thought-crimes of the
mainstream racist community, it is continually afflicted by a sense of
overwhelming unreality. This is not (of course), because races do not
exist, or do not differ significantly, or … whatever. The most politically
incorrect cognitive position on almost every point of this kind is
reliably closer to reality than its more socially-convenient and
comforting alternatives.
The problem with ordinary racism is its utter incomprehension of the near
future. Not only will capabilities for genomic manipulation dissolve
biological identity into techno-commercial processes of
yet-incomprehensible radicality, but also … other things.
First, a sketch of the existing racism-antiracism contention in its
commonplace or dominant form. The antiracist, or universal humanist
position — when extracted from its most idiotic social-constructivist and
hypocritical alt-racist expressions — amounts to a program for global
genetic pooling. Cultural barriers to the Utopian vision of a unitary
‘human’ gene pool, stirred with increasing ardor into homogeneous
intermixture, are deplored as atavistic obstructions to the realization of
a true, common humanity. Races will not exist once they are
reduced, by practical politics and libidinal indiscriminacy, into relics
of contingent historical partition. In contrast, racial identitarianism
envisages a conservation of (comparative) genetic isolation, generally
determined by boundaries corresponding to conspicuous phenotypic
variation. It is race realist, in that it admits to seeing what
everyone does in fact see — which is to say consistent patterns of
striking, correlated, multi-dimensional variety between human populations
(or sub-species). Its unrealism lies in its projections.
Gregory Cochran
suggests
that space colonization will inevitably function as a highly-selective
genetic filter, unless extreme political intervention is taken to prevent
this:
One generally assumes that space colonists, assuming that there ever
are any, will be picked individuals, somewhat like existing astronauts –
the best out of hordes of applicants. They’ll be smarter than average,
healthier than average, saner than average – and not by just a little.
[…] Since all these traits are significantly heritable, some highly so,
we have to expect that their descendants will be different – different
above the neck. They’d likely be, on average, smarter than any existing
ethnic group. If a Lunar colony really took off, early colonists might
account for a disproportionate fraction of the population (just as
Puritans do in the US), and the Loonies might continue to have
inordinate amounts of the right stuff indefinitely.
As a scientific sort, Cochran is exploring this scenario as a potential
source of compelling hereditarian evidence (anticipated through
thought experiment). What, however, of the prospect itself, as
the illustration of a mechanism that lends itself to theoretical
generalization? One might discuss it in terms of ordinary racism, as a
zone of disparate impact (which it would almost certainly be). Yet this is
only to scratch at it, hazily and superficially.
The most prominent model of such a filter is found in the theory of
assortative
mating. Strictly speaking, the racial-preservationist culture advocated by
ordinary racism is an example of assortative mating, with a criterion of
genetic proximity filtering potential matches. This is not why the idea
has such
currency. It is assortative mating on the basis of
SES that
has lifted it to prominence, both because it seems unquestionably to be
happening, and because the implications of its happening are
extreme.
(Crucially, SES is a strong proxy for IQ.)
Assortative mating tends to genetic diversification. This is neither the
preserved diversity of ordinary racism, still less the idealized genetic
pooling of the anti-racists, but a class-structured mechanism for
population diremption, on a vector towards neo-speciation. It implies the
disintegration of the human species, along largely unprecedented lines,
with intrinsic hierarchical consequence. The genetically self-filtering
elite is not merely different — and becoming ever more different — it is
explicitly superior according to the established criteria that
allocate social status. Analogical fusion with Cochran’s space colonists
is scarcely avoidable. If SES-based assortative mating is taking place,
humanity (and not only society) is coming apart, on an axis whose inferior
pole is refuse. This is not anything that ordinary racism is
remotely able to process. That it is a consummate nightmare for
anti-racism goes without question, but it is also trans-racial,
infra-racial, and hyper-racial in ways that leave ‘race politics’ as a
gibbering ruin in its wake.
Neo-eugenic genomic manipulation capabilities, which will also be unevenly
distributed by SES, will certainly intensify the trend to speciation,
rather than ameliorating it. On the sweetness-and-light side, racists and
anti-racists can be expected to eventually bond in a defensive fraternity,
when they recognize that traditionally-differentiated human populations
are being torn asunder on an axis of variation that dwarfs all of their
established concerns.
ADDED: Assortative Mating, Class, and Caste
September 29, 2014
CHAPTER FOUR - STEREOTYPES
Stereotypes
The Less-Evil Twin hasn’t been on its best behavior recently. Discussing
the prospects for Accelerationism (following
this
negative prognosis), it quite innocently suggested:
… and it was already over the line.
[‘bet’ should be ‘best’ (not ‘better’)]
That’s where things paused for a while.
(You’ve heard of
her, right? It’s
a superbly intelligent play off the Shanzhai idea.)
[‘to’ should be ‘too’, of course]
(I’ve no idea what secret treasures await extraction from that final tweet
yet.)
May 28, 2014Stereotypes II
Meta-stereotypes are not to be trusted.
This
is two years old, but recently tweet-linked by Justine
Tunney, and well-worth
recalling. The meat and potatoes:
… stereotypes are not inaccurate. There are many different ways to test
for the accuracy of stereotypes, because there are many different types
or aspects of accuracy. However, one type is quite simple — the
correspondence of stereotype beliefs with criteria. If I believe 60% of
adult women are over 5′ 4″ tall, and 56% voted for the Democrat in the
last Presidential election, and that 35% of all adult women have college
degrees, how well do my beliefs correspond to the actual probabilities?
One can do this sort of thing for many different types of groups.
And lots of scientists have. And you know what they found? That
stereotype accuracy — the correspondence of stereotype beliefs with
criteria — is one of the largest relationships in all of social
psychology. The correlations of stereotypes with criteria range from .4
to over .9, and average almost .8 for cultural stereotypes (the
correlation of beliefs that are widely shared with criteria) and.5 for
personal stereotypes (the correlation of one individual’s stereotypes
with criteria, averaged over lots of individuals). The average effect in
social psychology is about .20. Stereotypes are more valid than most
social psychological hypotheses.
It’s not as if this is
new, or in general outline even two years old. It’s roughly as old as human
culture, in fact. Generalization is what pragmatic intelligence is for
(which means it’s what intelligence in general has been kept around for).
Regardless of where we find ourselves culturally right now, this is a
point of common sense that simply can’t be forgotten forever.
August 27, 2014Stereotypes III
There’s an exchange in Sam Raimi’s
movie
Oz the Great and Powerful, where the fake wizard, speculating on
the incentives for success, says to his monkey(ish) companion and servant
Finley:
“We’re going to find this wicked witch. Steal her wand. I’ll get that
big pile of gold. And you can have a nice pile of bananas, alright?”
“Bananas. Oh, I see, because I’m a monkey? I must love bananas, right? —
That is a vicious stereotype.”
“You don’t like bananas?”
“Of course I love bananas. I’m a monkey. Don’t be ridiculous. I just
don’t like you saying it …”
(I seem to remember Sailer citing a similar joke at some point — probably
from a more reputable source.)
September 28, 2015Stereotypes IV
Folk Wisdom is a thing:
February 29, 2016
CHAPTER FIVE - RACES
Racism for Beginners
Taken on average:
Caucasians should be ashamed of their sanctimonious moral hysteria;
(Ashkenazi) Jews should be ashamed of their susceptibility to insane
ideologies;
East Asians should be ashamed of their thoughtless timid
conformism;
South Asians should be ashamed of their Tamas;
Hispanics
should be ashamed of their mindless populism;
Arabs should be ashamed of their inbreeding and Islam;
and Africans should be ashamed of their incompetent barbarism.
As for casual racism, there’s far too much shame about that already.
(I hope that’s sanctimonious enough for everyone)
ADDED: “Whole books could be filled with the unequal behavior or performances
of people, or the unequal geographic settings in which whole races,
nations, and civilizations have developed. Yet the preconceptions of the
political Left march on undaunted, loudly proclaiming sinister reasons why
outcomes are not equal within nations or between nations.”
July 4, 2013Five Stages of HBD
Stage-1 (Denial): “What is this naziish-sounding “HBD” of which you speak? Actually, I’d rather you didn’t answer that.”
Stage-2 (Anger): “RAAAAAAACISSSST!!!”
Stage-3 (Bargaining): “… but even if HBD is real, it doesn’t mean
anything, does it? You know, comparative advantage, or postmodernism … (or
something).”
Stage-4 (Depression): “Who could possibly have imagined that reality was
so evil?”
Stage-5 (Acceptance): “Blank slate liberalism really has been a mountain
of dishonest garbage, hasn’t it? Guess it’s time for it to die …”
[Thanks to Thales for the
prompt]
October 21, 2013Quote notes (#46)
Commenter ‘augurae’
at
the TC Colloseum:
I believe these people are stupidest and most dangerous people on the
planet. But it would be lying if I said I didn’t share some of their
ideas: for exemple, I think that if prior to, or after the second world
war, we killed all the reactionaries and other fascists-friendly people,
we would’ve prevented the situation we are in today and be way further
in term of technology, medicine, economy, social and global peace…
People who prone social darwinism are the people who don’t invent or
change shit, except for the worse, and I mean the worse periods in
humanity’s History like the Middle Age or WWII. Moreover they are
dangerous, racist, retrograde people who should be killed.
Liberal humanists — you have to love them.
There’s a comment from me pending at TC, and
I’ve lost patience, so here it is (one word edited):
There’s absolutely no reason to think that the “HBD OMG! Auschwitz!”
crowd here is receptive to logical argument, but what the hell — It goes
like this:
Under the present Progressive dispensation, wherever group differences
are detected in social outcomes, the dominant presupposition is that a
grave social injustice has been identified. Not many women, blacks, or
hispanics to be found as programmers in Silicon Valley companies? —
obvious evil at work. The solution: new bureaucratic arrangements,
indoctrination sessions, intensified ideological reconstruction of the
education system, anti-rightist campaigns (the beatings will continue
until ‘fairness’ arrives). Protest any of this, and full-spectrum social
destruction will be orchestrated.
HBD and its associated ideas propose — on the basis of abundant
empirical evidence and theoretical understanding — that the existence of
deeply ingrained group differences, both biological and cultural,
actually predict disparate social outcomes. Men and women, on average,
are attracted to different professions, in keeping with their natural
competences. The same applies to ethnic and racial groups. It makes no
more sense to see a vicious racist conspiracy in the domination of
sprinting by people of African ancestry than to see the same in the
preponderance of Jews, East Asians, and Caucasians among mathematics
professors. If this seems implausible to you, feel free to argue about
it — there are rigorous research programs dedicated to
researching examining such realities (even under contemporary
Lysenkoist conditions).
The first-order consequence of HBD, therefore, is not to start
organizing the cattle trucks to death camps, but in fact to — relax.
People are different. They thrive at different things. No government is
capable of comprehending optimal outcomes in detail (or even broad
outline). Society’s spontaneous sorting mechanisms do a pretty good job
at dealing with the situation, when left alone to do so, and certainly
no superior arrangement presents itself. Best of all, you don’t even
need to pull your jackboots on to let things work. So chill (except
that’s increasingly illegal).
ADDED: A
link
worth noting.
ADDED:
Panic!
(Some smart comments to the initial froth-post.)
November 25, 2013Bell-Curve of the Apes
Another outrageous
study
completely overlooks the problem of stereotype
threat.
Hopkins et al
conclude
(un-shockingly):
Finally, from an evolutionary standpoint, the results reported here
suggest that genetic factors play a significant role in determining
individual variation in cognitive abilities, particularly for spatial
cognition and communication skills. Presumably, these attributes would
have conferred advantages to some individuals, perhaps in terms of
enhanced foraging skills or increased social skills, leading to
increased opportunities for access to food or mating … These individuals
would have then potentially had increased survival and fitness, traits
that would have become increasingly selected upon during primate
evolution, as has been postulated by a number of theorists, going all
the way back to Darwin …
(Thanks to Greg for the
link.)
July 10, 2014The Prussian
If you’d asked me what I think about
The Prussian
yesterday, I’d probably have assumed you were talking about Frederick the
Great. Today I’m seeing his stuff mentioned all over the place (at least,
by Bryce on Twitter, and Scott Alexander
at
his place). The
two
pieces
being especially recommended share a tack (interesting) and a tone
(impressive). The Outside in response to both is unsettled, but
already uneven. At the very least, they initiate a conversation in a way
that is unexpected and worthy of respect.
The highlight for me was
this
(to repeat the second link):
… when differences in African and Caucasian distributions of the ASPM
gene that is involved in brain development, racialists jumped to argue
that this was the long looked for basis for white cognitive supremacy
(Derbyshire’s line). Unfortunately for them, it turned out that the
variation does not affect IQ, but does
affect the ability to hear tones, and is associated with a lack of
tonal languages.
To be honest, this is a lot more interesting than any IQ mumbo-jumbo;
that Indo-European languages (‘Aryan’ languages to use the term
correctly, and not in the disgraceful way it was used) are non-tonal is
one of the big puzzles, and may be a reason why civilization got started
in these regions. This is a variant of Joseph Needham’s hypothesis of
why China ‘got stuck’ at a certain level of technology. Needham argued
that the Chinese failed to make the break to the conceptual level of
science that the ancient Greeks did, and part of this is to do with the
concrete-level of Chinese vocabulary. By contrast, the reduced sound
range and hence, reduced word range available to Indo-European languages
may have played a crucial role in making that initial great
breakthrough.
Has the case just been made for a clearly identifiable genetic
predisposition to digitization? It sounds that way to me.
ADDED: Theden gets serious on the genetics of tonal language.
ADDED: A critique of the Anti-Racialist Q&A at The Right Stuff.
April 19, 2014Escalation
Steve Sailer doesn’t
ask
whether there are any two human races further apart than wolves and
coyotes, because he’s a nice guy.
August 16, 2014Demography is Destiny
For a blast of sudden, icy clarity,
this
is worth recalling:
After decades of American Ed theorists and politicians grumbling about
our low ranking on international tests, we now know that, as
Steve Sailer summarized in 2010, reviewing the PISA (Program for International Student Assessment)
results from the previous year:
* Asian Americans outscored every Asian country, and lost out only to
the city of Shanghai, China’s financial capital.
* White Americans students outperformed the national average in every
one of the 37 historically white countries tested, except Finland (which
is, perhaps not
coincidentally, an
immigration restrictionist
nation where whites make up about 99 percent of the population).
* Hispanic Americans beat all eight Latin American countries.
* African Americans would likely have outscored any sub-Saharan country,
if any had bothered to compete. The closest thing to a black country out
of PISA’s 65 participants is the fairly prosperous oil-refining
Caribbean country of Trinidad and Tobago, which is roughly evenly
divided between blacks and South Asians. African Americans outscored
Trinidadians by 25 points.
Racially disaggregate a conundrum that has tortured progressive education
reformers for over a century, and it entirely disappears.
Non-discrimination is mental and cultural chaos.
April 16, 2015Quote note (#348)
Retrieved
from four years ago (by XS’s favorite HBD-blogger), and still perfect in its outrageous realism:
Daniel Freedman was a professor of anthropology at the University of
Chicago. For his doctoral thesis, he did adoption studies with dogs. He
had noticed that different dog breeds had different personalities, and
thought it would be interesting to see if personality was inborn, or if
it was somehow caused by the way in which the mother raised her puppies.
Totally inborn. Little beagles were irrepressibly friendly. Shetland
sheepdogs were most sensitive to a loud voice or the slightest
punishment. Wire-haired terriers were so tough and aggressive that Dan
had to wear gloves when playing with puppies that were only three weeks
old. Basenjis were aloof and independent.
He decided to try the same thing with human infants of different
breeds. Excuse me, different races. …
You’ll never guess what happens next (although, actually, the readers here
are almost certain to).
The dog-breed analogy is used quite often, but probably still not enough.
It’s pitched at the correct cladistic level, obviously. In addition, since
‘labrador supremacism’ sounds immediately ridiculous it should contribute
to chipping a little stupidity from the race discussion.
April 4, 2017White to Red
Guilt is basically a North-West European thing,
argues
Peter Frost. That would certainly explain the conspicuous abnormality of
white
ethnomasochism, which has a claim to be the social fact of greatest significance in the
world today. There’s a certain type of fanatically universalist moral
argument that — even when encountered anonymously on the Internet —
indicates (absolutely reliably) that one is dealing with a self-hating
pale-face. When someone tells you that some incontestable principle
requires self-sacrifice without reservation to the wretched global Other,
the obvious melanin deficiency almost sucks holes in the screen. None of
this is seriously controversial (although more hard data would, of course,
be nice).
Take one additional step, and hypothesize that the Cathedral latches onto
white guilt as its sole natural territory. Much then follows. Clearly,
whatever ‘globalization’ the Cathedral will ever achieve cannot be
analogous to its domestic dominion. It is a plug that only fits the white
guilt socket, so that every attempt to propagate it more widely encounters
complexities. To a degree, this is initially masked by the fact that a
racial revenge narrative sells well, even when its original moral axioms
are entirely non-communicative. ‘Post-colonialism’ would therefore be
expected to mark the limit of Cathedralist global contagion — a limit that
has already been in large measure reached (or even exceeded). Nobody other
than whites wants white guilt
for themselves. Non-whites will, however, often be delighted that
whites have white guilt, especially when this has metastasized to its
self-abolitional phase, and this second reaction — under the specific
conditions of ‘post-colonial / anti-racist discourse’ — is easily confused
with the first.
If the progressivism-guilt plug-socket arrangement doesn’t travel
racially, than Cathedralist globalization has to fall back upon far cruder
mechanisms of power — of the “Red Foreign Policy” type. The experience of
the last decade suggests that, in doing so, it is no longer remotely
playing to its own strengths. Democratic evangelism, at home and abroad,
are two very different things. Bloody international disorder is strongly
predicted as the complement of its domestic New Jerusalem.
Just one more effort citizens, and the white race will have consummated
its
destiny
as the cancer of human history.
December 8, 2013White Fright
Racial fear is a complicated thing. It’s worth trying to break it down,
without blinking too much.
As one regresses through history, and into pre-history, the pattern of
encounters between large-scale human groups of markedly distinct ancestry
is modeled — with ever-greater fidelity — upon a genocidal ideal. The
‘other’ needs to be killed, or at the very least broken in its otherness.
To butcher all males, beginning with those of military age, and then
assimilate the females as breeding stock might suffice as a solution
(Yahweh specifically warns the ancient Hebrews against such half-hearted
measures). Anything less is sheer procrastination. When economic
imperatives and high levels of civilizational confidence start to
overwhelm more primordial considerations, it is possible for the
suppression of other peoples to take the humanized form of social
obliteration combined with mass enslavement, but such softness is a
comparatively recent phenomenon. For almost the entire period in which
recognizably ‘human’ animals have existed on this planet, racial
difference has been thought sufficient motive for extermination, with
limited contact and inadequacy of socio-technical means serving as the
only significant brakes upon inter-racial violence. The sole
deep-historical alternative to racial oppression has been racial
eradication, except where geographical separation has postponed
resolution. This is the simple side of the ‘race problem’, but it too
begins to get complicated … (we’ll pick it up again after a detour).
For the moment, we need only note the archaic, subterranean ocean of
racial animosity that laps upon the sunless chasms of the brain, directed
by genomes sculpted by aeons of genocidal war. Call it racial terror. It’s
not our principal concern here.
Racial horror is something else, although it
is no doubt intricately inter-connected. Horror of the very phenomenon of
race — of race as such — is both a larger and a smaller topic. It
is at once an expansive affect that finds no comfort in biological
identity, and a distinctively ethno-specific syndrome. When positively
elaborated, racial horror explodes into a ‘Lovecraftian’ cosmic revulsion
directed at the situation of human intelligence by its natural
inheritance. The negative expression, far more common today (among those
of a very specific natural inheritance), takes the form of a blank denial
that any such reality as race even exists. We are fully entitled to
describe this latter development as racial white-out. Any
Critical
Whiteness
Studies
of even minimal seriousness would concentrate upon it unrelentingly.
HBD, or human
biological diversity, is evidently not reducible to racial variation. It
is at least equally concerned with human sexual dimorphism, and is
ultimately indistinguishable from an eventual
comparative human genomics. When considered as a provocation,
however, the translation of HBD into ‘race science’ or more pointedly
‘scientific racism’ drowns out every other dimension of meaning. What is
found appalling about HBD is the insistence that race exists. It is a
‘trigger’ for racial horror. Social outrage, certainly, but beyond that
cosmic distress, tilting into a panic without limit. HBD subtracts the
promise of universal humanity, so it must — at any cost — be stopped.
Because this is no more than a preliminary blog post, I will restrict it
to a single modest ambition: the refoundation of Critical Whiteness
Studies on a remorselessly Neoreactionary basis. White people are
odd. Some
especially significant group of
them, in particular, have radically broken from the archaic pattern of human
racial identity, creating the modern world in consequence, and within it
their ethnic identity has become a dynamic paradox. Whiteness is
an uncontrolled historical reaction which nobody — least of all anybody
from among the complementary anti-racists of Critical Whiteness Studies
and White Nationalism — has begun to understand. To begin to do so, one
would have to comprehend why the
essay
in which Mencius Moldbug most explicitly repudiates White Nationalism is
the same as the one in which he most unambiguously endorses human racial
diversity. It requires an acknowledgement of difficulty, which — because
it demolishes irresistibly attractive but hopelessly facile solutions on
both sides — few are motivated to make.
The signature of indissoluble White difference is precisely racial horror.
HBD is uniquely horrible to White people. Until you get
that, you don’t get anything.
Play with this for a while, or for more than a while (it does a huge
amount of unwanted but indispensable work). To begin with:
(1) Critical Whiteness Studies, whatever its ethno-minoritarian
pretensions, is all about ‘acting white’. Insofar as it criticizes ‘white
privilege’ essentially, it does so by reproducing an ethnically
singular mode of universal reason which no other people make any sense of
whatsoever, except opportunistically, and parasitically. ‘Whiteness’ tends
to become a religious principle, exactly insofar as it lacks the
recognizable characteristics of racial group dominance (“race does not
exist”) and sublimes into a mode of cultural reproduction which only one
ethnicity, ever, has manifested. To quote Alison Bailey — tilting over
into the raw psychosis of systematic ‘whiteness’ critique (repeated
link):
In its quest for certainty, Western philosophy continues to generate
what it imagines to be colorless and genderless accounts of knowledge,
reality, morality, and human nature. Perhaps this is because academic
philosophy in the U.S. has been largely driven by analytic methods and
the legacy of Classic Greek and European thinkers, or because philosophy
departments are white social spaces where the overwhelming majority of
professional philosophers are white men. In either case, it’s likely
that most members of the discipline have avoided racial topics because
they believe that philosophical thought transcends basic cultural,
racial, ethnic, and social differences, and that these differences are
best addressed by historians, cultural studies scholars, literary
theorists, and social scientists. The absence of color talk in
philosophy is a marker of its whiteness.
Supremacist white racism goes so deep it is absolutely indistinguishable
from a complete absence of racism — quod erat demonstrandum.
(2) White Nationalism finds itself stymied at every turn by universalism,
pathological altruism,
ethno-masochism
— all that yucky white stuff. If only you could do White Nationalism
without white people, it would sweep the planet. (Try not to understand
this, I know you don’t want to.) Heartiste is picking up on the
pattern:
Where is this thought leading? The native stock of the West is clearly
suffering from a mental sickness caused by too much outbreeding.
Universalism is the religion of liberal whites, and they cleave so
strongly to this secular religion that they are happy, nay overjoyed!,
to throw the borders open and bequeath their hard-won territory and
culture to battalions of Third Worlders and other temperamentally
distant aliens, who of course given large enough numbers will promptly,
whether wittingly or consequentially, execute its destruction.
(3) All White people need is an
identitarian
religion. Is that not approximately the same as saying: a counter-factual
history?
(4) Those wacky libertarians, with their universal schema for human
emancipation that’s so easily confused with a washing-powder advertisement
— it’s so
dazzlingly
white. Deny the whiteness and self-destruct in bleeding-heart
abasement and
open-borders insanity, or affirm it
and head into post-libertarian racial perplexity.
Destiny is difficult — not least racial destiny. I don’t think many people
want to think about this, but I’m determined to be as awkward about it as
I can … (it’s probably a white thing).
ADDED: Notable race sanity from Neovictorian
here
and
here.
March 29, 2014Mitochondrial Eve
Without wanting to set off the usual suspects,
this
research
into Ashkenazi ancestry is fascinating. Based on MtDNA analysis, it is
evident that: “Overall, at least 80 percent of Ashkenazi maternal ancestry
comes from women indigenous to Europe, and 8 percent from the Near East,
with the rest uncertain, the researchers estimate.”
Jewish matrilineal cultural descent starts to look extraordinarily
odd.
Also, a final goodbye to Koestler’s Khazar hypothesis.
(via)
October 9, 2013On the JQ
Colin Liddell, amid an impressively cool-headed
discussion
of John Engelman and racial neuralgia:
Jared Taylor is trying very, very hard to avoid the Jewish question.
Naturally I disagree with this, but I can understand why Taylor wishes
to do so, as the Jewish Question has become a kind of lightning rod for
a lot of angst and rage in our society that does not have the time,
sophistication, or emotional equilibrium to attain to a more complex
understanding of the challenges of modernity.
Whatever one’s opinion on the JQ, it is important as the marker for a
still intellectually under-developed schism, dividing the meritocratic and
tribalistic strains of HBD. This blog is surreptitiously sympathetic to WN
claims that it is being systematically evaded on the Right out of evasive
cowardice. The main reason for this evasion is that anti-semitic WNs tend
to be over-excitable, inarticulate proles, whose commentary — to quote
Liddell — is characterized by “humourless, droning, brittle outrage” if
not outright splenetic abuse. (In fairness, I have to note that on the
rare occasions when extreme anti-semites have visited this blog, they have
been models of calm lucidity, however lop-sided in their attention.)
The Outside in line on the JQ is well-represented by
Moldbug
and
Amy
Chua. (They’re both smarts-over-loyalty selections of exactly the kind to
raise WN hackles, of course. This isn’t a
bhumiputra
blog.) The slight familiarity I have with the work of Yuri
Slezkine has also
left a very positive impression.
It’s worth taking the opportunity to link
this
recent post.
(Feel free to be evil, but be civil — or else.)
ADDED: Yuri Slezkine interviewed (video).
July 3, 2014Guilt Projection
“This machine breeds
fascists.”
Given Jesse Benn’s repulsive
indulgence
in self-criticism on other people’s behalf, the
riposte
almost writes itself. It’s hard to see anything in the push-back that
seems uncalled for.
Just to be clear: Speaking as a self-appointed representative for people
you feel free to disassociate from at will is
as annoying as hell. It’s hard for me to believe Benn is too
stupid to see that, which leaves the malignant devious evil option.
If the West sees another mass outbreak of antisemitism, a plaintive “Why?”
is going to look laughable. Benn’s ilk are why.
(You might want the other
half
of the proxy-masochism cognitive dissonance machinery.
This
(entirely non-obnoxious piece) is also well-worth a read.)
September 2, 2015Tough Asia
Scott Sumner has a good
post
on the topic, using low government spending and unemployment (a proxy for
“get a job” social attitudes) as indicators. East Asian countries — China,
Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan — do indeed cluster at the
‘hard’ end. Europeans, predictably, are softies. The Anglosphere (or
“immigrant”) societies are intermediate.
My favorite part of the post, though, was this:
… the great Simon Leys once suggested that 5000 years of Chinese
history could be divided up into two types of periods.
A. Times when the status of the Chinese masses was little better than
slaves.
B. Periods of turmoil, when the Chinese masses yearned for period A.
March 26, 2015Chinese Trumpkins
SoBL has passed on
this
fascinating piece on Trump-fervor in Chinese elite opinion. It’s all good.
Quasi-random snippet:
The past 30 years of China’s economic growth and social development
began after a period of chaos [i.e., the Cultural Revolution], and there
was no Enlightenment-like intellectual movement. Government officials,
in order to mobilize reform, exaggerated the evils of the old benefit
system as “everyone eating from one big pot,” which, with the assistance
of some scholars, led to an almost complete social consensus that a
market economy means completely free competition. With no restraint from
ethics or rules, the “law of the jungle” that the weak are prey to the
strong became nearly universal in society. Amid all the worship of the
strong and disdain for the weak, an atmosphere of care and equal
treatment of disadvantaged groups has not formed. Therefore “political
correctness,” which is for the protection of vulnerable groups,
basically does not exist in Chinese society, and the language of
discrimination, objectification of women, and mockery of disabled people
is everywhere. […] This way of thinking is further reinforced among some
Chinese elites: they succeed because they are better able to adapt to
and dominate this kind of environment. In this process, they are hurt by
others, they hurt others, and gradually they develop a heart of stone
and a feeling of superiority — that their success is due to their own
efforts and natural abilities, and the losers in competition must be
those who don’t work hard because they are lazy or have some other
problems. Therefore, they believe in free competition and personal
striving even more than ordinary people, and also feel more strongly
that poor people deserve their low position, are more wary of the abuse
of welfare by lazy people, and are more supportive of Trump’s attacks on
political correctness.
The result is a shockingly civilized civil society (in which women,
conspicuously,
excel), but you wouldn’t get that from reading the article. Highly
recommended, nevertheless.
November 22, 2016
SECTION A - CLADISTICS
CHAPTER ONE - RELIGIOUS CLADES
Cladistic Meditations
Neoreactionaries have a thing about Puritanism. Whether or not this trait
is conceptually essential is a question for another time. The important
point, right now, is that it serves as a
cladistic marker. Whatever it might be that neoreaction speciates
into, it bears this trait as an indication of cultural ancestry,
bookmarking the
root-code
archive of Mencius Moldbug.
When reconstructed as an argument, the Moldbuggian clade proposes a
species of ethnographic categorization on a loosely Darwinian (and
strongly evolutionary) model, according to which cultural phenomena are
logically nested, in tree-like fashion, revealing a pattern of descent.
When considering an English Darwinian Evolutionist, who is also an example
of contemporary political progressivism, Moldbug
makes
this mode of analysis explicit:
My belief is that Professor Dawkins is not just a Christian atheist. He
is a Protestant atheist. And he is not just a
Protestant atheist. He is a Calvinist atheist. And he
is not just a Calvinist atheist. He is an
Anglo-Calvinist atheist. In other words, he can be also
be described as a Puritan atheist, a
Dissenter atheist, a
Nonconformist atheist, an
Evangelical atheist, etc, etc.
This cladistic taxonomy traces Professor Dawkins’ intellectual ancestry
back about 400 years, to the era of the English Civil War. Except of
course for the atheism theme, Professor Dawkins’ kernel is a remarkable
match for the Ranter,
Leveller,
Digger,
Quaker,
Fifth Monarchist, or any of the more extreme
English Dissenter
traditions that flourished during the
Cromwellian interregnum.
If there were a Thirty-Nine Articles of
neoreaction, some suitably compressed version of this cladogram would
constitute the primary tenet of the creed. Among the logically most
attenuated twigs of this scheme, sub-speciated to the limit of cladistic
definition, is found the globally-dominant sovereign instance of advanced
modernity — the Cathedral (the enemy).
It is not surprising, therefore, that the ‘Puritan question’ remains the
core preoccupation of the neoreactionary Dark Enlightenment. This has been
illustrated with consummate clarity by an article posted by J. M. Smith at
The Orthosphere, contesting the Christian genealogy of the
Cathedral, and the subsequent rejoinder by descendants of the
neoreactionary clade — of varying religious persuasions —
Jim (here), Foseti (here), and Nick B. Steves (here,
here, and
here). Foseti reacts with some bemusement to the polemical framing of the
Smith text, because what he encounters is an argument without
disagreement:
At The Orthosphere,
there’s a post
purporting to argue that the Cathedral was not constructed by
Christians. Presumably the title was changed by someone other than the
author of the text of the post, because the post ably demonstrates that
Christians did in fact build the Cathedral. Indeed, the post is
recommended.
Cladistic method contributes significantly to an understanding of these
relationships. In particular, it is essential to grasp the logic of
taxonomic naming, which perfectly corresponds to pure genealogy, and the
ideal reconstruction of evolutionary relatedness. The crucial point:
A cladistic name refers to everything that is encompassed by a
splitting-off, speciation, or schism.
At the risk of superfluous explanation, it might be worth rehearsing this
logic with a colloquialized biological example (using familiar rather than
technical taxonomic descriptors). Paleontologists are supremely confident
that amphibians evolved from bony fishes, and reptiles evolved from
amphibians. This can be reformulated, without loss of information, as a
cladistic series (of branchings), with bony fishes including
amphibians,which in turn include reptiles. In other words, as a cladistic
name, a ‘bony fish’ describes an initial speciating split from an
ancestral clade, which — projected forwards — encompasses every subsequent
speciation, in this case amphibians, and reptiles. Both amphibians and
reptiles are bony fish. So are mammals, apes, and human beings. Bony fish,
as a clade, comprehends every descendant species that has bony fish
ancestry, whether extinct, still existent, or still to come. Nothing that
has bony fish ancestry, however distant, can ever cease to be a bony fish
(whatever else it becomes, in addition). Cladistically, it is
obvious that humans are bony fish, as well as far simpler and
more primordial things.
Smith writes:
… a Great Schism rent American Protestantism in the early nineteenth
century, with the sundering fissure tearing through denominations, and
even congregations. Protestants on one side of the fissure called
themselves “liberals,” those on the other side called themselves
“orthodox.”
… Liberal Protestantism is a new, post-Christian religion that in its
early stages opportunistically spoke in a Christian idiom, but
nevertheless preached a new gospel.
We have seen, however, that from a cladistic point of view, nothing
arising as a schism from X ever becomes ‘post-X’. There is no such thing
as a post-bony-fish, a post-reptile, or a post-ape. Nor, by strict
logical analogy, can there ever be such things as post-Abrahamic
Monotheists, post-Christians, post-Catholics, post-Protestants,
post-Puritans, or post-Progressives. It is a logical impossibility for
ancestral clades to ever be evolutionarily superseded. To have
Christianity as a cultural ancestor is to remain Christian forever. That
is no more than terminological precision, from the
cladistic-neoreactionary perspective.
Steves
elucidates
the same point in a closely-related vocabulary: “… there
are atheist Catholics. Why? Because being Catholic is cultural.
It is not only that, but it is also at least that.”
Cultures are genealogically or cladistically organized — that is the
neoreacionary presupposition. (Lateral complications are not entirely
inconceivable —
link
to a truly ghastly Wikipedia entry on an important thought: the
non-treelike network. That’s not for now.)
What, though, of neoreaction itself? What did it split from? Like
everything else under investigation here, unless it is comprehended as a
schism, it is not comprehended at all.
When cladistically approached, the primordial split is the ineluctable
question of identity, or persistent ancestry. We can, perhaps, postpone it
momentarily, but it will eventually lead us in directions that are more
than a little
Lovecraftian.
What was the last thing that neoreaction was submerged within, before
arising, through schism? (That investigation has to await another post.)
September 4, 2013Religious Clades
Peter A. Taylor relayed this magnificent cladogram of world religions:
(Click on image to enlarge.)
If there’s such a thing as a comprehensive cultural map of the world, it’s
woven on to something very like this. No opportunity to comment on it
right now — but I’m confident it will spark some responses.
April 29, 2014Religions and Ideologies
Tobin Grant (of the Religious News Service) charts political ideology by
religious affiliation:
The chart is reproduced in
this
article, which also includes a complementary
graphic
(of religions and income distribution). I’m assuming visitors here are too
reality-jaded to need a
ThinkProgress trigger
warning (after all, even communists can provide useful
links).
(Click on image to expand)
At this stage, there’s no commentary from this blog on the abundance of
graphically-embedded information here (except to say that the first
diagram makes the Congregationalists look highly attractive, which seems
strange).
It’s being posted as a contextual resource for future discussion.
August 30, 2014Goddamned
That’s roughly Gregory Hood’s title, for an
article
making the case for a return to paganism. As his point of departure, Hood
examines, unflinchingly, the indications of an Occidental
desire for enslavement or destruction by Islam. “It’s a kind of
ethical exhaustion — liberal Whites are weary of the moral responsibility
of existence and survival.” (The diagnosis seems hideously plausible to
me.)
Islam is Nature’s solution. Like the Architect from
The Matrix Reloaded, it is Nature’s way of saying that
“There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept.” It is
stultifying, depressing, and tyrannical. It is an enemy of real culture,
with the most militant variations smashing the tombs and shrines not
only of other religious traditions, but of their own. Modern Wahhabism
is funded by Western decadence, enabled by Western weakness, in many
ways a product of Western postmodernism and self-hatred. […] And lest
what I say be misunderstood, it is obviously, laughably, and comically
false. It is sustained by the protective cordon it has created around
criticism. Yet believing that a pedophiliac illiterate transcribed the
literal word of God still makes more sense than believing all men are
created equal. Islam’s refusal to allow critical analysis of itself is a
sign of strength, not weakness.
Islam is the first term in Hood’s tetralemma. It’s the executioners blade
for a civilization that has lost all cosmic purchase upon existence. A
disgusting way to die, begged for by the broken, in the end (which is
already) — because at least it’s a way to die.
The remaining three terms entertained by Hood are the “god of our
grandfathers, the White Christ upon whose image the West was built” which
“is dying”, faithless liberalism (including modern Christianity), and
paganism. Among these options, he declares, “The Old Gods are my own
choice.”
Much of this analysis — down to its grimmest
conclusions — is highly compelling, even when abstracted from the flow of
Hood’s vigorous prose. The proposed remedy, however, is by far its weakest
component.
To make a choice among Gods, is that not the final expression of
liberalism, and therefore of degenerated Christianity? If we have learnt
anything from the manifold failures of multiculturalism, it is that
religious freedom is downstream of religion. ‘Freedom of conscience’ lies
at the furthest remove from a genuinely secular conception, if any such
thing is even possible. If it now seems imaginable to shop for different
gods, it is because of the way a distinctive religious tradition has
worked out. If political considerations seem to occupy a position of
meta-religious authority, the descent has been deeper still. Choice is
internal to religion, even if the decayed image of
religion serves to obscure this fundamental fact. Contemporary Occidental
paganism remains dissident Christianity. There is no decision that could
alter that.
As Hood himself states:
The very fact that I frame this identity as a “choice” is itself proof
of decadence — a vibrant metaphysics simply is and has nothing to do
with a rational actor listing pros and cons. Ironically, those who
profess the Old Gods are weakened because what they profess is so
obviously new and a product of innovation and modernity. Few would even
call it a real faith that actually expresses literal belief in
personalized divinities. […] The new pagan cults that preach fanaticism
and virility owe too much to reason and deconstruction.
A God that is not the very principle of destiny is no God at all. Are we,
then, destined to rediscover the Old North European Gods? The
impossibility of answering such a question with confident affirmation says
everything necessary about it. The Old Gods manifestly failed against the
challenge of the new One. There is no reason at all to suspect that this
outcome has been rescinded by the subsequent calamities befalling the new
faith.
Religions are providential. They are units of fate. The claims they make
far exceed rational controversy or personal decision, in the abyss of
their decadence no less than at the apex of their flourishing. If
Christian Modernity is a process of escalating nihilism, as Nietzsche
conceived it to be, it is nevertheless a road without turn-offs, that can
only be followed to the end.
ADDED: Second long (italicized) quote has been grafted in, thanks to
Irving (in comments below), who pointed out its clearly indispensable
relevance to the topic. Just in case it is not already obvious, the Hood
essay is a superbly crafted masterpiece — its quality only enhanced by its
supple self-ironization. It deserves to be a landmark reference whenever
this question re-arises, as it will continually do.
November 19, 2014
CHAPTER TWO - ETHNO-CULTURAL CLADES
Ethno-Cladistics
The Ethno-cladistic thesis, sketchily reconstructed
here
from Mencius Moldbug’s neoreactionary usage, proposes that
relations between
cultural systems are captured by cladograms to a highly significant
level of adequacy. The limits to this thesis are set by lateral complications —
interchanges and modifications that do not conform to a pattern of
branching descent — and these are by no means negligible. Nevertheless,
actual cultural formations are dominated by cladistic order. As a
consequence, cultural theories that assume taxonomic regularity as a norm
are capable of reaching potentially realistic approximations, and
furthermore offer the only prospect for the rigorous organization of
ethnographic phenomena.
The most direct and central defense of the ethno-cladistic thesis bypasses
the comparatively high-level religious systems that provide the material
for Moldbug’s arguments, and turn instead to the ethnographic root
phenomenon: language. Languages simply are cultures in their
fundamentals, so that any approach applicable to them will have
demonstrated its general suitability for cultural analysis.
I’d try to spin this out melodramatically, but I don’t think there’s
really any point:
Click on images for full-size (legible) display.
It seems indisputable (to me) that lateral complications of these basic
cladistic schemes are marginal. Languages are naturally grouped in
branching, tree-like structures, which like those of (metazoan) biological
variety are simultaneously explanatory of historical processes and
morphological relatedness, because they represent evolutionary processes
of successive speciation. The dominant organization is a taxonomic
hierarchy, conforming to the formal language of set theory. The real
events captured by these schemes are schisms, whose logical relation is
that of genus to species. In the case of culture, as with biology, the
manifest evolutionary development indicates the existence of some
efficient hereditary mechanism (whose unit of replicated information is
tagged by Moldbug, among innumerable others, as a ‘meme‘). On this last point, it is worth noting that taxonomic biological
classification, and even genetics, preceded the biochemical discovery of
DNA — and was broadly confirmed, rather than disrupted, when this
discovery took place. (The meme is an analogy, but not a metaphor.)
Ethno-cladistics is the schematics of cultural heritage. Despite the
bulldozer assertiveness of this post, it is not designed to block
methodical efforts directed at the subversion of this model. As indicated,
such efforts will necessarily involve the elaboration of lateral (or
‘rhizomatic’) diagrams — a project of great intrinsic significance (and
creative potential). Techno-commercial processes are strongly associated
with lateralizations of this kind.
Culture, however, is fundamentally heritage, and ethno-cladistics
is the theoretical response to this basic historical fact. This is already
Moldbug’s tacit claim, which should be uncontroversial among reactionaries
of any kind. At the core of the neoreactionary endeavor is the cladogram.
September 6, 2013Pictured Power
Couldn’t resist sharing
this:
My main quibble is with the chromatics — a single color for the
Anglosphere would have been helpful. More generally, a correspondence of
color with language groups would have given a more intuitive picture of
history’s shape.
Also, China looks a little slender, no? (I wonder how ‘power’ is being
calculated?)
July 23, 2014European Vedism
Whilst dazzlingly ignorant about Julius Evola, I can at least partially
understand the attraction his work generates for the ultra-traditionalist
wing of the Outer Right. Thomas F. Bertonneau, whose essays are always
worth digesting carefully, produces a typically masterful overview
here.
Evola represents a significant thread of early 20th century reactionary
thinking, rooted in the discoveries of historical linguistics, and the
intellectual formation of an ‘Indo-European’ people corresponding to its
deep cultural cladistics. The core phenomenon that supports the
mystical-reactionary interpretation of history is the unambiguous process
of crudification that afflicts the Indo-European languages, evident
through the line of grammatical degeneration from Sanskrit, through Attic
Greek, to Latin, and then into the vulgar — even structurally collapsed —
tongues of the modern European vernacular. Reactionary, hierarchical, and
racially-inflected ideas comparable to Evola’s are easily identified in
the writings of Martin Heidegger, among many others. Historical
linguistics appears to apprehend a large-scale ethnic totality undergoing
prolonged cultural deterioration at the fundamental (grammatical) level.
Once this is noted, progressivism appears as pure irony — and as a comic
confirmation of decline.
Outside in, comparatively comfortable with chewed-up
techno-commercial jargons and stripped-down communication protocols, is
only minimally attentive to this particular ‘problem of tradition’ (which
it registers from a position of detachment). Insofar as ‘tradition’ is
invoked, however, it seems to be a highly significant reference — and its
tendency to relapse the problem back to a Sanskritic (Vedic) origin is
surely worthy of disciplined commentary. Kali Yuga makes a lot of sense.
November 2, 2013Range Finders
A politically-incorrect short
history
of the Wild West. (Jim at his rough realist best.)
March 10, 2014Thedes
The
formulation
of this concept was a building-block moment for NRx, but the trend in its
usage has been dismally regressive. Apparently devised as a tool for the
analysis of social identities, it is increasingly invoked as a
rallying-cry for
neo–tribalism. From the perspective of Outside in, it will soon become
entirely toxic unless it is dramatically clarified.
Nydwracu initially employs the word ‘thede’ to designate the substance of
group identity, “a superindividual grouping that its constituent
individuals feel affiliation with and (therefore?) positive estimates of.”
Thedes are multiple, overlapping, sometimes concentric, and honed by
antagonistic in-group/out-group determinations. They are seen as following
from the understanding that “Man is a social animal.” Ideological
arguments disguise thede conflicts. At this level of abstraction, there is
little to find objectionable.
In his essay on Natural Law, Jim
writes:
Man is a rational animal, a social animal, a property owning animal,
and a maker of things. He is social in the way that wolves and penguins
are social, not social in the way that bees are social. The kind of
society that is right for bees, a totalitarian society, is not right for
people. In the language of sociobiology, humans are social, but not
eusocial. Natural law follows from the nature of men, from the kind of
animal that we are. We have the right to life, liberty and property, the
right to defend ourselves against those who would rob, enslave, or kill
us, because of the kind of animal that we are.
Occupying a band of group integration between ants and tigers, humans have
intermediate sociality. Even the tightest mode of human social
organization is loose relative to an ant colony, and even the loosest is
tight relative to a solitary feline. In human societies, neither
collectivity nor individuality is ever absolute, and — even though these
‘poles’ are commonly exaggerated for polemical purposes — they
realistically apply only to a range of group integrations (which
is both narrow and significantly differentiated). To say that “man is a
social animal” does not mean that collectivity is the fundamental
human truth, any more than the opposite. It means that man is a creature
of the middle (and the middle has a span).
Insofar as a thede corresponds to a unit of
autonomous, reproducible social organization, it is a far narrower concept
than the one Nydwracu outlines. A thede is an ethnicity if it
describes a real — rather than merely conventional — unit of human
population. This is, of course, to exclude a great variety of identity
dimensions, including sex, sexual orientation, age, interests, star signs
… as well as some of those Nydwracu mentions (musical subcultures and
philosophical schools). Generalization of ‘thedes’ to include all
self-conscious human groupings risks diffusion into frivolous subjectivism
(and subsequent re-appropriation for alternative purposes).
If the analysis of thedes begins with the recognition that man is a social
animal, it is a grave error to immediately expand the scope of the concept
to groups such as women, lesbians, dog-lovers, and black metal fans, since
none of these correspond to biologically-relevant social groupings. If
this is the way the notion is to be developed, this blog takes the first
off-ramp into more biorealist territory. There are quite enough of such
‘thedes’ to be found already in university literature and grievance
studies departments. ‘Thedism’ of this kind is simply
intersectionality
with a slight right-wing skew. It has no cladistic function, unless as
degenerate metaphor.
As a reliable heuristic, only those groupings which are plausible subjects
of secessionist autonomization should be considered thedes. Any group that
could not imaginably be any kind of micro-nation has only intra-thedish
identity. More darkly, a thede — ‘properly’ speaking — is necessarily a
potential object of
genocide. (To argue this way is to depart radically from the usage Nydwracu
recommends. It is not an attempt to wrest control of the word, but only to
explain why it seems so basically impaired. This post will be the last
time it is mangled here.)
Rigorization of thede analysis in the direction of real ethnicities would
also require the abandonment of attempts to assimilate classes to thedes,
although class identities can mask thedes, and operate as their proxies.
Between New England and Appalachia there is a (real) thede difference
between ethnic populations, encrusted with supplementary class
characteristics. Used strictly in this way, the idea of a thede does
theoretical work, and uncovers something. It exposes the subterranean
ethnic
war
disguised by class stratification. When merely used to classify generic
social identities, on the other hand, it thickens the fog, pandering to
the social constructivist mentality. Tribes and classes cannot be absorbed
into a single super-concept without fatal loss of meaning. It is
impossible to belong to a class in anything like the same sense that one
can belong to an (ethnic) thede, unless class is a cover. Class
stratification is primarily intra-thedish and trans-thedish. It is the way
a population is organized, not a population itself.
Religious difference, in contrast, are typically thedish. By far the most
important example, for the internal dissensions of NRx, and for the
Occident in general, is the split between Catholic and Reformed
(Protestant) Christianity. There are real (autonomously reproducible)
Catholic and Protestant populations, and thus true thedes. Either could be
wholly exterminated without the disappearance of the other. Furthermore,
the way in which ‘thedishness’ is comprehended varies systematically
between them. On strictly technical grounds, it is tempting to
counter-pose high-integrity to low-integrity social arrangements, but that
is to give away too much ammunition for free. (This is to depart into a
different discussion, but one that is already overdue. (Alongside other
obvious
references, Nydwracu points to
this))
Ethnicities correspond to real populations, and to cladistic structures.
‘Thedes’ as presently formulated do not. Ironically, this
denotational haziness (super-generality) of the thede concept
lends itself to usages guided by extremely concrete connotations,
with a distinctive Blut und Boden flavor. Usage of the word
‘identity’ (at least, on the right) has exactly the same characteristics.
This blog is done with the ‘thede’ concept unless its meaning is
drastically tidied up.
Note: Where this post wanted to go, when it set off, was
closer to the ‘dogs vs cats’ debate, or
this:
Yeah there is a huge disconnect between the idea of seasteading as a
platform for experimenting with various forms of governance and the
reality that the vast majority of people interested in pursuing it are
orthodox libertarians who see some kind of anarcho capitalist
libertarianism as the inevitable winner in a ‘fair fight’ between
political systems. I really think that a belief in libertarianism is
linked to a distinctive and relatively rare neurological type, and
therefore will never convince the vast majority of people who tend
towards a more altruistic and collectivized morality.
It is at least conceivable that neuro-atypical hyper-individualists could
establish a micro-nation (or be exterminated). They could therefore lay
claim to thedish identity, although in a strict sense — that no one wants
to use.
ADDED: Since this is my last opportunity to borrow ‘thede’ to mean
something with substantial real content (i.e. an autonomous,
self-reproducing social unit), it’s worth enumerating some possible
thedes, to give a sense of its extension: tribes, ethnic groups
(concentrically-ordered), cities, seasteads, space colonies … “What is
your thede?” translates as “Who are your people?” — “Stamp collectors”
shouldn’t be considered a serious answer.
ADDED: Terminological tidying from Nydwracu —
‘Phyle’ is
good.
ADDED: Valuable consolidation (and criticism) at Nydwracu’s place.
October 24, 2014Genetic Interests
‘n/a’ provided a
link
to Frank Salter’s On Genetic Interests. (Available in a variety of
formats.)
That gift follows from the latest exchange on the topic, based on
this
Jayman post. Some (Salterian) contention from Pumpkin Person (here) and n/a (here). It’s a fascinating discussion, that has
divided
Cochran and Harpending, which is an indication of its seriousness. Sadly —
if understandably — it tends to generate massive rancor very quickly, as
is evident in the tone of some of these posts. That’s especially
unfortunate because, heated race politics aside, there’s a massive amount
of philosophical substance underlying it. (Maximum coldness would
certainly be appreciated here.)
A suggestive remark from Salter (p.28), on the disrupted equilibrium
between ‘ultimate’ and ‘proximate’ interests (a crucial and
thought-provoking distinction):
The equilibrium applying to humans has been upset in recent
generations, so that we can no longer rely on subjectively designated
proximate interests to serve our ultimate interest. We must rely more on
science to perceive the causal links between the things we value and
formulate synthetic goals based on that rational appraisal.
So (subject to correction as the argument progresses) Salter proposes an
explicit, rational proxy for the ‘ultimate interests’ of genetic
propagation, now inadequately represented by change-shocked phenotypes
(and, most importantly, brains). This is a Principal-Agent
problem, applied to human biology.
Here is Salter laying out his problem at
greater length:
Certainly we can no longer rely on our instincts to guide us through
the labyrinths of modern technological society. But there is one innate
capacity we possess that, combined with one or more motivations, is
capable of solving this problem. Humans are uniquely equipped with
analytic intelligence, the ability to tackle novel challenges. This
‘domain general’ problem-solving capacity evolved because it allowed our
ancestors to find solutions to novel threats that arose in the
environments in which they lived. General intelligence is distinguished
from ‘domain specific capacities, such as face recognition and speech,
specialized mental modules for solving recurring problems in the
environments in which we evolved. We are flexible strategizers par
excellence, able to construct our own micro environments across a great
diversity of climates and ecosystems. Abstract intelligence is
physiologically costly because it requires a large brain, difficult
childbirth and extended childhood. Nevertheless it has been so adaptive
that it distinguishes our species. It allows us to consciously assess
dangers and opportunities and to devise novel solutions, or to choose a
well-rehearsed routine from our extensive repertoire to apply in a given
situation. Now changed environments have effectively blinded us to large
stores of our genetic interests, or to put it more accurately, for the
first time situated us where we need to perceive those interests and be
motivated to pursue them. This blindness is not cured by a people’s
economic and political power, as documented in Chapter 3, regarding the
decline of Western populations. We must rely on our intelligence to
adapt, not only using science to perceive our fundamental interests in
the abstract but devising ways to realize these interests through
proximate interests, the short-term goals of which we are aware and
towards which we are motivated to act.
There’s a far more general topic here than racial antagonism (without
wanting to dismiss the importance of that). Putting it up here now is a
test of whether it can be discussed without throwing people into a rage.
If so, it could become an engaging conversation.
(Googling Moravec’s concept of ‘replicator usurpation’ for a cite, it
seems that I’m the only person who’s being talking about it for over a
decade. That’s disappointing, because its relevance to these questions
seems obvious. I’m going to need to look it up again in order to come back
here with a helpful quote.)
ADDED: Gloss
and critical commentary from David B. at Gene Expression (2005):
“It is essential to understand that Salter is not presenting a
biological theory of how people have evolved, how they will evolve in
future, or why they behave in the way they do. [Note 2] As Salter puts it
himself: ‘the present work is not primarily a theory of human behavior,
but of interests. Rather than being a work of explanation, this is mainly
an exercise in political theory dealing with what people are able to do if
they want to behave adaptively (p.85)… my main goal in this chapter is not
to describe how people actually behave. Rather, I explore how individuals
would behave if they were attempting to preserve their genetic interests
(p.257)’. Some of these remarks might suggest that Salter is merely
setting out an option that people may wish to follow or not, according to
their own values, but it can hardly be doubted that Salter himself
positively advocates the pursuit of ethnic genetic interests,
principally through the control of immigration. The use of such terms as
‘adaptive’, ‘fitness’, and ‘ultimate interests’ could in principle have a
neutral biological sense, but in practice Salter uses them with an
evaluative force: he regards the policies he discusses not just as
possible but desirable. Otherwise why say that we ‘need to
perceive’ our genetic interests and ‘be motivated to pursue them’? From
time to time he overtly uses the mode of recommendation rather than mere
analysis, for example, ‘Multiculturalism and other versions of ethnic
pluralism… are types of ethnic regime that majorities should certainly
avoid (p.188)… Since genetic interests are the most fundamental, liberals
[sic] should support social policies that take these vital interests into
account (p.250)’. And some of the language and comparisons Salter uses are
strongly emotive … much of Salter’s book is concerned with immigration,
and especially immigration from third-world countries to the West. In my
view there are sound arguments against large-scale, uncontrolled
immigration from the third-world, not least the danger of civil strife
resulting from the presence of large unassimilated groups holding values
and beliefs incompatible with those of the host society. But it would be
unwise for people who object to uncontrolled immigration on these grounds
to latch onto Salter’s ideas. Whatever Salter’s own motives, his theory is
being taken up enthusiastically by racists (as a Google search will
confirm), and anyone who follows their lead will be tainted by
association. Since even by Salter’s own account his theory is not a
scientific thesis, but more of a political manifesto, there can be no
compelling reason for non-racists to accept it.”
David B.’s final point is especially relevant to some of the issues hinted
at in the post here (targeted for future development): “… Salter’s
doctrine is profoundly anti-eugenic. For Salter, it is in the
interest of an individual to preserve and promote the gene frequencies of
his own ethnic group, whether the existing gene frequency is good, bad or
indifferent, as judged by qualitative criteria. So, for example, it is in
the interest of American blacks to promote their own gene frequencies
against those of American whites, even if in some respects it would be
better for blacks themselves to change those gene frequencies. The
doctrine of genetic interests is inherently backward-looking and
conservative. In contrast, the eugenic position is that we are able to
make value judgements about what characteristics are desirable (such as
health, intelligence, and beauty) and undesirable (such as stupidity,
mental illness, and physical disabilities) and then to take reproductive
decisions based on those judgements. Of course eugenics is controversial,
but many of those who might feel vaguely sympathetic to Salter’s approach
would also feel vaguely sympathetic to eugenics, and they should at least
be aware of the conflict between them.”
August 3, 2015Fish People
Since the opportunities for XS to agree (in
advance)
with PZ Myers don’t come along too regularly, it’s worth seizing upon
those
that do. For anyone who thinks cladistics are important, this point is
worth strongly defending:
There are multiple meanings of “fish”. We can use it to refer to
specific species or an extant category of animals: salmon are fish,
halibut are fish, herring are fish. No one objects to that, and they all
understand that if I said “humans are still salmon”, that would be
wrong. […] But another way the term is used is as a descriptor for a
clade. A taxonomic clade is a
“grouping that includes a common ancestor and all the descendants
(living and extinct) of that ancestor”. […] So, for instance, humans belong to the mammalian clade, which
includes mice and cats and cows. If we have transhuman, part-cyborg
descendants, they will still be mammals, because, note, by definition a
clade must include all the descendants of an ancestor. We’re trapped!
There’s no way our progeny can exit the clade!
In fact, it’s such a sound point, it’s worth
generalizing.
July 6, 2016
CHAPTER THREE - THE PURITAN QUESTION
Luciano Pellicani
Mark Warburton passed
this
masterpiece along (Revolutionary Apocalypse, by Luciano
Pellicani). A couple of tiny morsels from its consistently brilliant — and
eerily familiar — analysis:
With Puritanism, an absolutely new element was introduced into Western
civilisation:
(revolutionary) politics as fulfillment of God’s will,
with the objective of consciously building “a new human community, that
could substitute the lost Eden” and produce a prodigious “change in
human nature.” For centuries, politics had been conceived as a
“cybernetic art” (Plato) or as a technique for the accumulation of power
(Machiavelli). From the Puritan cultural revolution on, politics was
conceived as a soteriological practice, dominated by an
eschatological tension toward the Kingdom of God on earth, therefore as a calling, whose methodical objective was to overturn
the world in order to purify it. The slogan originally used by the
Taborites and the Anabaptists was revived: “Permanent warfare against
the existing, in the name of the New World.”
And:
An all-powerful state is essential for communism, since
the total destruction of civil society is the only way
to destroy capitalism. By civil society we mean the “society of
industry, of general competition, of freely pursued private interest, of
anarchy, of natural and spiritual individuality alienated from self.”
But since capitalism — Lenin’s definition is correct — is a phenomenon
that is generated spontaneously, whenever the ideological power relaxes
its watch, the effort to prevent mammon from raising its head must be
permanent. It is a matter of annihilation that requires
mass terror, since the main enemy of communism is
“widespread petit bourgeois spontaneity.” Thus, the “revolutionary
project challenges the normal course of history.” It is a huge effort to
prevent humanity from moving spontaneously toward a bourgeois society.
This is only achieved through permanent terror.
If Pellicani is already being widely discussed in the reactosphere, I’ve
missed it. My guess: he’ll be considered an indispensable reference by
this time next year.
January 3, 2014Ultra-Calvinism
JayMan chips in (succinctly
and lucidly) to a familiar topic (or, perhaps, two):
“New England was not swamped with immigrants because these people
were particularly simpatico with the original Puritan
settlers.”
Sure, today’s SWPLs are heavily admixed with other groups in addition
to their Puritan roots. And sure, small numbers of liberals are found
everywhere. And sure, not all Puritan descendants vote Left (e.g.,
Mormons – but
they have been specially selected). But today, the consistent Blue states are found only in areas which
have Puritan (as well as Scandinavian, and possibly Quaker) descendants.
It does limited (some, but limited) good to compare their attitudes
200-400 years ago with current ones – all groups have undergone
considerable change during that time (the moral circle expanded to fill
its genetic potential). You also can’t blame it on the Jews because A)
there’s not that many of them B) their putative influence resonates with
some and not others, putting us back to the original problem.
March 3, 2015Ultra-Calvinism II
The XS Inner Council doesn’t get as much time to study hardcore
Ultra-Calvinist Theonomy as it would like, but Rushdoony’s
Politics of Guilt and Pity (full-text
available free online) is looking truly awesome so far. A couple of early
snippets:
The reality of man apart from Christ is guilt and masochism. And guilt
and masochism involve an unshakeable inner slavery which governs the
total life of the non-Christian. The politics of the anti-christian will
thus inescapably be the politics of guilt. In the
politics of guilt, man is perpetually drained in his social energy and
cultural activity by his over-riding sense of guilt and his masochistic
activity. He will progressively demand of the state a redemptive role.
What he cannot do personally, i.e., to save himself, he demands that the
state do for him, so that the state, as man enlarged, becomes the human
savior of man. The politics of guilt, therefore, is not directed, as the
Christian politics of liberty, to the creation of godly justice and
order, but to the creation of a redeeming order, a saving state. Guilt
must be projected, therefore, on all those who oppose this new order and
new age. And, because the salvation is mythical, and the enslavement
real, the hatred of life and of innocence grows, and with it grows the
urge to mass destruction.
[…]
In the modern state, in the name of democracy, there is the increasing
pandering to guilt and to the hatred felt by the guilty for the innocent
and for the successful. This then is the full triumph of the politics of
guilt and its open enthronement. For the politics of guilt, the order of
the day is mass destruction. […] Sentimental humanism asserts that man’s
basic need is love, more specifically, a passive need
to be loved. Thus, man is seen as a passive creature
whose basic problem is not a will to evil but an absence of love, so
that a positive agency must be created to supply man’s needs. The result
is the totalitarian caretaker state. Man, being passive, needs an active
agency in his life, and this agency the welfare state provides.
[…]
In guilt cultures, the individual deals directly and
personally with the inner warfare. Man, burdened with a sense of guilt
and unable to enjoy life, confesses his sin, as does the man in a
shame culture, but he pleads guilty to the lesser
crime. With a fine sensitivity, he dredges up minor offenses to prove
the refinement of his conscience in order to escape his capital offense
against God. He may trouble himself over a stolen pencil while ignoring
his open or veiled warfare against God. In the United States, as the
nation has departed progressively from God, it has indulged
progressively in a “debunking” of its history, in a general confession
of many past faults, some often imagined. The hypocrisy of such
confessions is striking: by confessing the “sins” of past generations,
the present scholar or generation thereby implies its own superior
virtues and its innocence of those sins. By the fact of such “debunking”
or confession, it confesses also, very modestly, that wisdom is now born
to us and is among us, so that confession again becomes a vehicle of
pride.
[…]
What man cannot do, i.e., to cleanse himself of sin or to make
atonement to God for sin, God does for man. Men, being wholly God’s
creation, cannot be active towards God; his relationship is derivative
and passive. Man’s will is not autonomous, nor is man creative in
relationship to God. Hence, since God is God, the relationship between
man and God is wholly a part of the eternal decree and wholly determined
by the triune God.
[…]
Today, millions of Negroes, joined by millions of slave whites, are
demanding that the federal government become their slave-master and
provide them with security and care. Slavery is a welfare economy;
private ownership is a privately maintained welfare economy, and it is
not economically a sound unit of operation. Under state ownership,
slavery, a social security structure, is a welfare economy which lacks
the necessity for successful operation which the private owner must
maintain. The private owner must make a profit somewhere; Alexander H.
Stephens made it in law and supported his slaves thereby. The
slave-owning state survives instead by progressive confiscation until
the nation is destroyed. […] … Slavery remains, however, a legitimate
way of life, but a lower way of life. Slavery offers certain penalties
as well as certain advantages. Objectively, the penalty is the surrender
of liberty. Subjectively, the slave does not see the surrender of
freedom as a penalty, since he desires escape from freedom. Even as a
timid and fearful child dreads the dark, so does the slave mind fear
liberty: it is full of the terrors of the unknown. As a result, the
slave mind clings to statist or state slavery, cradle-to-grave welfare
care, as a fearful child clings to his mother. The advantage of slavery
is precisely this, security in the master or in the state. Socialism is
thus a slave state, created by the demands of slaves for a master.
[…]
Hell is a witness to the fact that a God of justice is on the throne of
the universe. When people insist that they cannot believe in hell they
are saying that they refuse to believe that justice has any right to
exist. The denial of hell means that justice has been replaced by the
total tolerance of evil, and this tolerance of evil is disguised as
love. This doctrine of love involves a hatred of God and justice and an
overt or covert love of evil.
November 12, 2015Double Predestination
Cladistic inheritance necessitates that I begin talking about the
Calvinist doctrine of Providence here (soon), despite my total cognitive
depravity on the topic. I’ve been reading the
Institutes of the Christian Religion, and around it, but inevitably as if from Mars (and as a Confucian). It
has to be the case that many of the visitors here are vastly more
intellectually fluent on the subject, so any anticipatory comments will be
hungrily seized upon.
The fatality, as far as it is initially evident:
(1) Neoreaction,
cladistically
located, is a Cryptocalvinist splinter.
(2) The doctrines that
placed Calvinism
in H. L. Mencken’s “cabinet of horrors” (“next to cannibalism”), have
never been philosophically dissolved, whether by theological or
secular argument.
(3) The moralistic dismissal of Modernity and, through association, of
Protestantism, evidences an almost incomprehensibly crude conception of
Providence — as if the way things have turned out was not a fatality, and
in theological terms a message (or punishment), but rather an
accident, or man-made contingency. The rigorous theology of Modernity
cannot reduce to mere
denunciation.
(4) Calvinism is an instrument with which to explore Catholicism,
especially in respect to its implicit philosophy of history (and recourse
to teleological reasoning). The ‘Neo-‘ in Neoreaction appears to be a
Calvinist mark. There are any number of influential secular explanations
for the way history has tortured the Church — such that even the religious
seem typically to default to them. Where does one find a radically
providential account (excavating the theological meaning of Modernity)?
(5) Is not the very word ‘Cathedral’ in its Neoreactionary usage a complex
providential sign? (Which suggests that it has far more to tell than
anything either Neoreactionary writers or mere accident put into it.)
(6) The cluster of disputes around ‘predestination’ (or the action of
eternity upon history) is the Occidental key to the problem of time.
I’m sure there’s much more …
[This
helps to set the tone.]
November 30, 2013Join the Dots
Walter Russell Mead
muses
on identitarian blood-letting.
First the sermon:
The eastern Congo and the African Great Lakes are remote places, and
many people might wonder why Americans or the world at large should care
much about what goes on there. The short answer is that the people who
live there are made in God’s image as much as anybody else and they are
infinitely dear to him, and to remain indifferent to the suffering of
people there is to fail in our clear duty to our Creator and to some
degree to betray our own humanity.
Then the analysis:
While the world’s intelligentsia today spends an endless amount of time
“celebrating difference” and singing the praises of diversity (and we
join in that chorus), diversity and difference constitute potentially
catastrophic political challenges. One thing that seems to happen with
modernization is that groups of people start feeling more need to have
the state and the laws reflect the values and the priorities of their
own ethnic or religious communities. Identity demands to be reflected in
politics.
Pre-modern and “primitive” cultures don’t seem to feel this as strongly
as more modern ones do, and democracies are sometimes even more
chauvinistic than other forms of government as these pressures are felt.
It is often populists who lead campaigns for ethnic cleansing or
nationalist war. The history of Europe and the Middle East has been
shaped by 150 years of sometimes genocidal wars of conquest, revenge,
national liberation and religion. Tens of millions have been killed in
these wars, multinational states have broken down into ethnic nation
states, and millions of refugees have been forced into exile.
[…] One of the biggest questions of the 21st century is whether this
destructive dynamic can be contained, or whether the demand for ethnic,
cultural and/or religious homogeneity will continue to convulse world
politics, drive new generations of conflict, and create millions more
victims. […] … the foundations of our world are dynamite, and that the
potential for new conflicts on the scale of the horrific wars of the
20th century is very much with us today.
In other words: “If everyone shared my (religious) identity, we wouldn’t
be tilting into a century of blood and horror.” Even if this dubious
argument was to be accepted at face value,
they don’t, and we are.
ADDED: “… Great State leaders take the erroneous intellectual short cut of
assuming that foreigners are just human beings who think just like they do
and who focus on the same priorities. … This tendency to a kind of
passive, subconscious, egalitarian universalism is, of course, greatly
amplified if you are actually an Egalitarian Universalist because that is
effectively your official state religion …”
December 19, 2013Progress (IV)
Facile progressivism is over.
January 12, 2016
CHAPTER FOUR - ALTERNATE PATHS
Salience Preference
On the assumption that most reactionary-types will want to refuse the idea
of an integrated ‘salience preference’ — what is the counter-argument?
(I’m also wondering whether ethico-political humanism — in its restrictive
rather than expansive usage — can be bound into the same super-syndrome.)
November 1, 2014Crypto-Brahmins
Poseidon Awoke has a great
post
up about the class characteristics of neoreaction. It’s bound to generate
a lot of discussion. Much of it is irresistibly persuasive. You’ll want to
read it.
I have a few quibbles — Vaisyas aren’t ‘activists’ (because business isn’t
politics), and the Catholic slant of NRx is more complicated than this
essay makes it out to be (because
cladistics). These kind of qualifications aren’t decisive in themselves.
The decisive reservation has to do with the social function of
code specialists. Perhaps this tweet makes the point best:
‘Silicon Valley’ changes the meaning of ‘Brahmin’ — if we’re still going
to use that word. Most simply, the long-established
distinction between literate and industrial elites loses its
security in the epoch of programming, or digitization. NRx washes back
from a social horizon at which the sign and its operationalization have
become de-segmented, necessitating a seismic re-configuration of class
identities.
The Brahmin priest caste, like the digital elite, specializes in signs,
but they are signs of exhortation, rather than of intrinsic efficiency. Is
not the Cathedral precisely a name for that apparatus of signs —
(non-STEM) academia, media, bureaucracy, politics … — which cannot in
principle ever compile? The Cathedral is a secular religion,
which has to preach because it does not work.
When NRx insists upon a division within ‘progress’ between
techno-economics (which works) and socio-politics (which decays), it opens
a rift that splits the Brahmins, rather than further separating them from
social inferiors. NRx, at its core, is a ‘Brahmin’ civil war.
June 6, 2014Quantum Suicide
This
stuff is excellent Frightday night material (a relatively old but
appropriately sensationalist link). It’s the Outside in
candidate for a
conceivable postmodern religion, channeling video game ontology into an
off-the-cliff practice of the numinous. It has to be a better place to
look than Odinist
revival (which it
might ultimately eat). QS fanatics would merit an argument, and better
still, they’d be immunized against it.
NRx would find a lot to talk about with these folks — until they pulled
the trigger. For instance: Exit. Imagine a near-future world in which
political disputes were dominated by QS cults. It would be remarkably
tolerant of electoral processes, whose defects would have been made a
matter of indifference. Divide the social body on the issue of greatest
political rancor, and submit the contest to a ‘resolution’ procedure with
significant probabilistic input. Whoever loses terminates themselves,
in ‘this’ sector of the multiverse. The outcome, from the
perspective of the QS religion, would be that branching universes acquired
increasingly distinctive ideological flavors. Everyone ends up with the
future they selected, in worlds pre-cleansed of dissent. Elections would
be OK, but why not just roll the dice? The important thing would be the
schism, and from the QS perspective, every true devotee ends up on the
right side of it. This is the future you chose would actually
always be true.
Replace elections with the flip of a coin, accompanied by mass suicidal
auto-selection. On the day this becomes an articulate political program, the Quantum
Suicide religion will have arrived.
February 20, 2015
Sore Losers
[L]et’s admit it: Globalization does not automatically benefit France.
[…] Globalization develops according to principles that correspond
neither to French tradition nor to French culture. These principles
include the ultraliberal market economy, mistrust of the state,
individualism removed from the republican tradition, the inevitable
reinforcement of the universal and ‘indispensable’ role of the United
States, common law, the English language, Anglo-Saxon norms, and
Protestant—more than Catholic—concepts.
—Hubert Védrine, February 9, 2002
To be French is to understand—with peculiar lucidity—what it is to have
been defeated by modernity. The world’s first modern nation, enthralled
beyond all others by the call of the universal, has been cropped back to
a nexus of untaken paths, over the course of two centuries. If Hubert
Védrine says this more clearly than Alain Badiou, Badiou says it
nevertheless. Our Wound is Not So Recent. The title already
says almost everything. To anticipate: ‘…our wound comes from the
historical defeat of communism.’
Compared to this primary, chronic and, by now,
essential misfortune, occasional disasters are mere accidents.
The recent massacre in Paris by soldiers of Jihad provides an unusually
dramatic (or ‘particularly spectacular’) instance. Yet, despite its
colorful, richly affective character, the disturbance of state security
represented by the slaughter of a few score Parisians is a minor affair,
when compared to the conquest of modernity itself—and thus the world—by
a far more ominous adversary. Whatever philosophical dignity is to be
found in reflection upon the November 13 incident lies in its cognitive
adoption as a relay, leading back to the main story, ‘the triumph of
globalised capitalism’.
It is understandable, therefore, that the elegance of Badiou’s
presentation is unable to fully conceal its structural irritability.
‘We’ have been distracted, which is how adults understand
‘terror’. It is a distraction of ‘thought’ that has occurred here,
Badiou insists, and thus an annoyance, in multiple senses, including
that of simple condescension. As befits a member of the socio-cultural
elite, Badiou’s response takes the form of a thoughtful
meta-irritation—an irritability directed at irritation as such. This is
an anti-empirical reflex and therefore, in some definite way,
‘French’—but we will get to that soon enough. Those scores of dead
youngsters strewn across Paris demand some affective acknowledgement,
which is undignified (and annoying). Far more significantly, the
atrocity upsets people. It is—precisely as intended by the perpetrators,
and also in the most neutral sense of the word—exciting. The
public response it elicits is not only philosophically useless, but
positively deleterious to the work of the universal. ‘So, to counter
these risks, I think that we must manage to think what has happened.’
We have a duty to philosophy—which is to say, to our only credible
model of nobility—to be cold. Emotional spasms in response to
blood spatter would be unbecoming.
I think so, too. We have a duty to philosophy—which is to say, to our
only credible model of nobility—to be cold. Emotional spasms in
response to blood spatter would be unbecoming. It would also be an
integral contribution to the achievement of ‘fascist’ terror. Worst of
all, it distracts. Terror excites identity, by concentrating it, and
packaging it in a false simplicity. Badiou is not concerned to disguise
the fact that, for the European Left, in particular, ‘identity’ is the
true terror.
There are, however, other distractions—for ‘us’. When Badiou proclaims
that ‘Our wound is not so recent’, we are compelled to ask: How
far does this collective pronoun extend? A response to this question
could be prolonged without definite limit. Everything we might want to
say ultimately folds into it, ‘identity’ most obviously. Whatever
meaning ‘communism’ could have belongs here, as ‘we’ reach outwards to
the periphery of the universal, and thus (conceivably) to the end of
philosophy. ‘Frenchness’ is, in some complex way, involved by it, among
other social sets of lesser and greater obscurity. This ‘we’ is the
whole, even as it is hidden in the margin. It is also strategically
non-negotiable. (Nobody asks ‘who?’—as Badiou knows they will not.)
Smuggled into grammar, it says everything of ultimate consequence in
advance of any possible rejoinder, framing subsequent controversy in its
terms. A sovereign or transcendental antagonism—settled securely beyond
discussion—thus announces itself, in a whisper.
In comparable fashion, then, we can only propose another ‘us’
outside it. As already promised, the detail—if only a little—will soon
follow. For the moment, it need only be noted that ‘their’ identity
cannot be assumed to be ‘ours’, any more than we share their problems,
their successes, or their defeats. The pronoun is scrambled, torn apart.
We are not ‘wounded’ by what hurts them, unless accidentally, and by the
failure of their collective project least of all. Whatever malice might
appear in these words strikes us as sheer retaliation. This is only to
say that Badiou’s ‘we’ was already a project of mobilization and a
declaration of war, if only as a recollection, and a gesture of
defiance. The haze that surrounds ‘us’ is the fog of war. No one can be
sincerely shocked by that. (We are not children.) Our conflict
is not so recent.
The stakes, on both sides, are absolute. There is—most probably—nothing
we would not do, were it still necessary, in order to prevail against
each other
‘It must be seen that the objective victory of globalized capitalism is
a destructive, aggressive practice,’ Badiou asserts. We can only shrug,
since of course, for you (collectively), that is simply true.
Its successes are your defeats, and reciprocally. No one is being
educated by any of this. We have, not so very long ago, menaced each
other with thermonuclear warheads, and burnt down states still more
recently. The stakes, on both sides, are absolute. There is—most
probably—nothing we would not do, were it still necessary, in
order to prevail against each other. ‘Victory’, ‘defeat’—these are
Badiou’s words, even if—for no reason at all—war
is not, at first, although it soon will be.
Let us explicate, then, that which Badiou leaves still partially
implicit. We do not care about Islam. No one does—at least no
one we care about, but only ‘fascists’. For the industrialized world, it
is never more than an annoyance, and more typically a complex
opportunity to be exploited, a weapon to be directed at those whose
antagonism is respected. Having failed at modernity with a
comprehensiveness that approaches the comedic, it has been many
centuries since Islam has had any kind of serious claim upon history to
lose—so ‘a whole section of the global population is counted for
nothing’, inevitably. We can parasitize Badiou’s shallowly-buried
contempt without qualification: ‘it’s fascization that islamizes, not
Islam that fascizes’. We will decide upon the way to categorize their
refusal of our categorizations. Your coldness is tested by this joke.
It is not that religion is quite nothing, of course, even for Badiou, at
his most French. Not originally, in any case. ‘Religion can
perfectly well act as an identitarian sauce for all of this, precisely
in so far as it is a suitably anti-Western referent. But as we have
seen, in the final analysis, the origin of these youths doesn’t matter
much, their spiritual or religious origin, as they say, and so on.’ (It
‘is counted for nothing’.) ‘What counts is the choice they have made
about their frustration’ (we decide). ‘And they will rally to the
mixture of corruption and sacrificial and criminal heroism because of
the subjectivity that is theirs, not because of their Islamic
conviction. What is more, we have been able to see that, in most cases,
islamization is terminal rather than inaugural.’ Nihilistic individuals,
seduced into ‘fascism’, articulating their motivations in words that
count for nothing, pathetic existentialist communists with false
consciousness, malicious punks…if there are some further resources of
contempt that might be added to this analysis, they will not be easy to
find. Which is not at all to suggest that we encounter anything
problematic here, or in need of rectification.
It could easily have been some other faith that provided this
‘terminus’, we are expected to accept (unless the concession to ‘a
suitably anti-Western referent’ is the clue to a more persuasive—and
decorously unspoken—claim). All right, we accept. For the sake of moving
forward, we accept it, despite the extraordinary deformation of
historical evidence required to do so. Let us pretend that our Jihadi
‘fascists’ are only randomly differentiated from Buddhists or
Confucians, in order to proceed to the identities that more immediately
concern us.
Those dead Parisian youngsters cannot be ‘counted for nothing’ quite so
easily. They would have certainly done some capitalism, even despite
themselves, and also – being young and French—quite probably some
communism, in addition, so they matter to ‘us’, at least a little. The
young Jihadi ‘fascists’ who slaughtered them, in contrast—with nothing
to make but a distraction—are nothing at all, to either of us. That
saddens Badiou, rhetorically, and tactically. ‘Their own life did not
count. And since their own lives did not count, the lives of others
meant nothing to them either.’
Look what globalized capitalism did to them. Perhaps we should
turn our attention to this far more serious, historically-productive
monstrosity, before we upset people—gratuitously—with our unfathomable
and entirely mutual indifference.
Let’s recapitulate. We have a contemporary world structure dominated
by the triumph of globalised capitalism. We have a strategic weakening
of states, and even an ongoing process of the capitalist withering
away of states. And thirdly, we have new practices of imperialism that
tolerate, and even encourage in certain circumstances, the butchering
and the annihilation of states.
The main story of recent times has been ‘the liberation of
liberalism’—the freeing of capitalism—Badiou insists. (His preferred
identity lies in insisting this.)
To succumb to excitement about the empiricity of ‘Capitalist
globalization’, in its scandalous singularity, is to thrill to its
vast annoyance, rather than its universal disaster
This Thing—the Great Foe—is not devoid of identity, however
embarrassing it may be to explicitly acknowledge that fact (i.e. its
factuality as such). To succumb to excitement about the empiricity of
‘Capitalist globalization’, in its scandalous singularity, is to thrill
to its vast annoyance, rather than its universal disaster. Yet it is,
as everyone clearly recognizes, an Anglophone global affliction
that disturbs ‘us’, and an Anglophone ideological negligence that has
‘counted for nothing’ those without any productive part to play in its
expansion. The major enemy is Anglophone, Anglo-Saxon,
Anglo-American—‘Anglo-Jewish’, it will inevitably be said, if not by
Badiou then by innumerable others, including especially the Islamic
‘fascists’ whose sensitivities refuse to be dulled on the point. It is,
in any case, the positive ethnic constituency primarily identified with
‘the liberation of liberalism’ when this is acknowledged with coarse
realism. No one gets to see how peculiar this thing is from
nowhere. Its critics, we can confidently—if indelicately—speculate, have
been concretely offended. They have been ‘wounded’—and not
only so very recently.
Of course, there could be nothing more gauche than to
articulate ideological criticism in the voice of national resentment.
From the perspective of philosophy, to speak in the name of
any positive identity—even one far more fashionable than the
nation and its associated ethnic categories—is a simple disgrace.
Selected identities might be exalted from a distance, in approximate
proportion to their transgressive or victimological status, but every
elite intellectual understands profoundly—if often only implicitly—that
ontic definition is dirt.
Badiou is fastidious, therefore, in avoiding all temptation to
self-identification in less than universal terms. His ‘discursive
position’ depends upon his identity as a proud communist, who merely
happens to be French. There is a cost to be paid for this, in honesty—or
realism—first of all. A necrotic collectivist utopianism does not
constitute a plausible site of enunciation, and no one believes that it
does. It is perhaps for this reason that Badiou refrains from quite
closing the door onto a certain nuanced ‘patriotism’, even if his
catastrophist narrative demands that it is held ajar only in a mode of
nostalgia (and one that is not wholly devoid of bitterness). What France
was, as a revolutionary power, is still affirmed, in a tone at
once tragic and philosophical, drawing the requisite quantum of
detachment from both:
France, what is singular about France—because if there are French
values, we must ask what is singular about them—is the revolutionary
tradition. Republican first of all, from the ’89 revolution. And then
socialist, anarchosyndicalist, communist, and finally leftist, all of
this between 1789 and, let’s say, 1976. […] But all that’s over. It’s
over. France can no longer be represented today in any credible way as
the privileged site of a revolutionary tradition. Rather, it is
characterised by a singular collection of identitarian intellectuals.
The surrender of France to the identitarian vice is but part of the more
comprehensive defeat. Yet the dramatic quality of Badiou’s stance here
should not blind us to what it evades. The French accent in what he has
to say—both before and after this passage—extends far beyond his lament
for the nation’s withered revolutionary vocation. The ethnic identity
that speaks in his words encompasses, among many other things, a
specific mode of universal aspiration, a secular faith
‘freed’—contemptuously—of religious trappings, and a firm confidence in
the moral dignity of the State. There has only been one ‘revolution’ of
the kind he inherits as a model, and it was French. It identified reason
with revolutionary innovation—to a degree commonly found amusing beyond
the Gallic cultural sphere, despite its menacing incarnation in an armed
re-origination of the state, from first principles. Naturally, these
‘first principles’ were already a dismissal of the old religion, through
their very originality, and also an exaltation of philosophy—as smelted
in the flames of insurrection. They were the monsters bred from
Descartes’s methodically exacerbated, artificial nightmare, released by
a passage through zero (radical doubt), in which organic tradition was
immolated upon the altar of the universal. They would—for instance—have
decimalized time and geometry, and struggled earnestly to do so,
repeatedly, without even a moment of pious reservation or residual
doubt…but they failed. Modern history, from a particular but
illuminating angle has been this failure, this defeat.
Our Wound is Not So Recent.
French identity, radically conceived, corresponds to a failed national
project. Is it not, in fact, the supreme example of
collective defeat in the modern period, and thus—concretely—of
humiliation by capital?
French identity, radically conceived, corresponds to a failed national
project. Is it not, in fact, the supreme example of collective
defeat in the modern period, and thus—concretely—of humiliation by
capital? It is the way the ‘alternative’ dies: locally, and
unpersuasively, without dialectical engagement, dropping—neglected—into
dilapidation. It can be inserted into a limited, yet not inconsiderable,
series of identities making vehement claim to universality without
provision of any effective criterion through which to establish it. When
frustrated by the indifference of the outside, such objective
pretentions tend to turn ‘fascist’ in exactly the sense Badiou employs.
Their claims are shown—demonstrably—to be non-compelling beyond
their own shrinking domain. They are ignored, so they ‘act up’. A
certain violent madness is easily spawned. Yet it is rarely more than a
distraction.
What we are suffering from is the absence, at the global scale, of a
politics that would be detached entirely from the interiority of
capitalism. It is the absence on the global scale of this politics
that means that a young fascist appears, is created. It is not the
young fascist, banditry, and religion, that create the absence of a
politics of emancipation able to construct its own vision and to
define its own practices. It is the absence of this politics that
creates the possibility of fascism, of banditry, and of religious
hallucinations.
This is Badiou’s analysis. The pin-pricks so far—and the far greater
sufferings to come—result from an ethno-political defeat, in a long
conflict still recalled by its stubborn survivors as a global drama of
the Universal. It is a defeat that they imagine—or at least, still
claim to imagine—might one day be undone. Who would deprive
them of their old songs, and strange flags, and wounded dreams?
The ‘liberation of liberalism’ has scarcely begun
Spite, or triumphalism, are identitarian confusions, extravagances, and
also simply errors that we cannot afford. Our war is far less
comprehensively won than theirs is lost. The adversaries that matter—real fascists—have controlled the commanding heights of our societies since the New
Deal. The techno-economic dispersion of power remains radically
incomplete. Sino-capitalism—momentarily trembling—has yet to re-make the
world. The ‘liberation of liberalism’ has scarcely begun. None of this
is a concern for Badiou, however, or for the Islamists. It belongs to
another story, and—for this is the ultimate, septically enflamed
wound—as it runs forwards, ever faster, it is not remotely theirs.
2016Rhizomes
After the counter-revolution, when the most
ludicrous
Lysenkoists have been cast down from power, it will be necessary to
undertake a scrupulous examination of horizontal genetic transfer. Among
the stream of data received from
Existoon on the topic,
this
line of inquiry is definitely notable. The phenomenon in question is
introduced well
here:
Within our bodies resides a dynamic population of microbes forming a
symbiotic super-organism with whom we have co-evolved. Recent
investigations indicate that these microbes majorly impact on cognitive
function and fundamental behavior patterns, such as social interaction
and stress management. The collective microbiome comprises a myriad of
bacteria of approximately 10^14 cells, containing 100 times the number
of genes of the human genome. Despite evolution of this microbiome for
500 million years, only recent advances in sequencing technology have
allowed us to appreciate the full complexity of the host–microbe
interrelationship. The gut microbiota is a highly developed organ of
immense metabolic complexity and has approximately the same weight as
the human brain. It is now clear that the gut microbiota plays a key
role in the life and health of the host by protecting against pathogens,
metabolizing dietary nutrients and drugs, and influencing the absorption
and distribution of dietary fat. However, the influence of the
microbiota extends beyond the gastrointestinal tract, playing a major
role in the development and functioning of the central nervous system
(CNS). Among the many substances produced by the gut microbiota are key
central neurotransmitters whose influence extends beyond the enteric
nervous system to the brain.
[See original for references.]
Under present cultural conditions, in which the imperatives for wishful
thinking — and even raw, institutionally mandated dishonesty — are so
extraordinary, I doubt that significant cognitive resources can be spared
from the primary task of defending basic Darwinism against the aggressions
of Cathedral religious ideology. That does not mean the
rhizomatic
(lateral-reticulated) model has been addressed with any detailed adequacy,
but only that, in a ruined culture, its time has not yet come. Perhaps the
Chinese can get on with it in the interim …
ADDED: Contagious insanity (via).
April 17, 2015
BLOCK 3 - POLITICAL THEORY
CHAPTER ONE - THE BASICS
On Power
Power is an Idea. It is exactly what it is thought to be.
Even among pre-civilized social animals, where the temptation to confuse
power with force is strongest, the need to demonstrate force is
only sporadic, and wherever force is not continuously demonstrated, power
has arisen.
That is how dominance distinguishes itself from predation. On occasions,
no doubt, a predator dominates its prey, convincing a struggling herbivore
that resistance is futile, and its passage into nourishment is
already, virtually, over. Even in these cases, however, a predator does
not seek to install an enduring dominion. It matters not at all that its
command of irresistible force be recognized beyond the moment of
destruction. There is no social relationship to establish.
Even the most rudimentary society requires
something more. The economy of force has to be institutionalized, and
power — perfectly coincident with the Idea of power — is born. When power
is tested, driven to resort to force, or regress to it, the idea has
already slipped, its weakness exposed.
Mere dominance has to regularly re-assert itself, rebuilding itself out of
force. Under civilized conditions, in contrast, power is exempted from the
test of force, and thus realizes itself consummately. It becomes magic and
religion, perfectly identified with its apprehension, as a radiant
assumption.
Power is thus profoundly paradoxical. Its truth is inextricable from a
derealization, so that when it is practically interrogated, by forces
determined to excavate its reality, it tends to nothing.
Even the force that power calls upon, when pressed to demonstrate or
realize itself, has to be spell-bound to its idea. Will the generals obey?
Will the soldiers shoot? It is power, and not force, that decides. No
surprise, therefore, that power can evaporate like the snow-slopes of a
volcano, as if instantaneously, when an eruption of force is scarcely more
than a rumble. Power is the eruption not happening, far more than
the eruption being contained. (Equally, anarchy is the question of power
being practically posed, before it is any kind of ‘solution’.)
To conceive economic power as wealth, is to misconstrue it as
(rationalized) force, and thus to miss the Idea. ‘True’ economic power is
a thoroughly derealized yet authoritative standard and store of value, as
instantiated — exclusively — in fiat currency. Monetary signs that are not
backed by anything beyond the ‘credit’ (or credibility) of the State are
the tokens of pure, supremely idealized power in its economic form. They
symbolize the effective — because untested — suppression of anarchy. They
live through the Idea, and die with it.
Those who recognize the completion of power in an Idea, celebrants and
antagonists alike, have no reason to object to its belated baptism as
the Cathedral: our contemporary political appropriation of
numinous authority, served by an academic, journalistic, judicial, and
administrative clerisy, prominently including the priesthood of fiat
adoration and financial central planning. There is no macroeconomics that
is not Cathedral liturgy, no confidence or ‘animal spirits’ independent of
its devotions, no economic cataclysm that is not simultaneously a crisis
of faith. A single Idea is at stake.
In macroeconomics, as in politics more generally, only one (systematically
inhibited) question remains:
Do we believe? Well, do we?
ADDED: Belief drain (via)
April 25, 2013On Chaos
Turbulence is nonlinear dynamism, so remarking upon it very quickly
becomes reflexive. In any conflict, an emergent meta-conflict divides
those who embrace and reject the conflict as such, and ‘meta’ is
in reality reflexivity, partially apprehended. So ignore the sides of the
war, momentarily. What about war?
Moldbug really doesn’t like it. The closest he ever comes to a
wholly-arbitrary axiom — comparable, at least superficially, to the
libertarian Non-Aggression Principle — is exhibited in this context.
Following some preliminary remarks, his first
exposition
of the formalist ideology begins: “The basic idea of formalism is just
that the main problem in human affairs is violence.” As with Hobbes, the
horror of war is the foundation of political philosophy.
This is by no means a trivial decision. With avoidance of war identified
as the fundamental principle of political order, an ultimate criterion of
(secular) value is erected, in simultaneity with a framework of genetic
and structural explanation. Good government is defined as an effective
process of pacification, attaining successively more highly-tranquilized
levels
(and stages) of order:
… there are four levels of sovereign security. These are peace, order,
law, and freedom. Once you have each one, you can work on the next. But
it makes no sense to speak of order without peace, law without order, or
freedom without law.
Peace is simply the absence of war. The Dictator’s first goal is to
achieve peace, preferably honorably and with victory. There is no
telling what wars New California will be embroiled in at the time of its
birth, so I will decline to discuss the matter further. But in war, of
course, there is no order; war is pure chaos. Thus we see our first rule
of hierarchy.
In this model order and chaos are strictly reciprocal. Suppression of
chaos and establishment of order are alternative, inter-changeable
formulations of the same basic political reality. There is no productivity
proper to government other than the ‘good war’ directed against the
Cthulhu-current of chaos, violence, conflict, turmoil, and inarticulate
anarchy.
No surprise, then, that widespread dismay results from outbreaks of
conflict across the digital tracts of neoreaction. How could any Moldbug
sympathizer — or other right-oriented observer — not recognize in these
skirmishes the signs of anarcho-chaotic disturbance, as if the diseased
tentacles of Cthulhu were insinuated abominably into the refuge of
well-ordered sociability? Beyond the protagonists themselves, such scraps
trigger a near-universal clamor for immediate and unconditional peace:
Forget about who is right and who wrong,
the conflict itself is wrong.
I don’t think so.
Entropy is toxic, but
entropy production is roughly
synonymous
with
intelligence. A dynamically innovative order, of any kind, does not suppress the
production of entropy — it instantiates an efficient mechanism for entropy
dissipation. Any quasi-Darwinian system — i.e. any machinery that actually
works — is nourished by chaos, exactly insofar as it is able to rid itself
of failed experiments. The techno-commercial critique of democratized
modernity is not that too much chaos is tolerated, but that not enough is
able to be shed. The problem with bad government, which is to say with
defective mechanisms of selection, is an inability to follow
Cthulhu far
enough. It is from turbulence that all things come.
The question Outside in would pose to NRx is not ‘how can we
suppress chaos?’ but rather ‘how can we learn to tolerate chaos at a far
higher intensity?’ Dynamic order is not built deliberately upon a
foundation of amicable fraternity. It emerges spontaneously as a
consequence of effective entropy-dissipation functions. The primary
requirement is sorting.
To sort ourselves out takes a chronic undertow of war and chaos.
Initially, this will be provided by the soft and peripheral shadow-fights
we have already seen, but eventually NRx will be strong enough to thrive
upon cataclysms — or it will die. The harsh machinery of Gnon wins either
way.
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.
ADDED: Highly on point (with even a smidgen of Hobbes).
April 25, 2014Politics
Following a typical
HBD Bibliography
twitter intervention (paraphrased: “educate yourself”), a professor of
Global Liberal Studies turned up to engage in activity that can be
technically described as “hooting”. The pattern of symbolic behavior that
then manifested cannot, of course, be reduced to the expectations of
primatology. If it seems like an entirely predictable assertion of
dominance, as found among all the great apes, something is surely being
missed. That at least is the claim now being made (decorated by a little
immediate status signaling):
The error of mistaking this expert hooting for the first step in an
argument was too tempting to resist. After all, if a professor of Global
Liberal Studies deigns to teach you about the limits of possible
biological understanding, it is only polite to listen attentively.
Unfortunately, certain monkey juices were triggered by the chest-thumping
of GLS-prof., and I descended quickly into obstreperousness:
Uh oh, look what’s happening now — it’s
gibbering monkey business
political dialectic. GLS-prof. isn’t being even nominally respected,
there’s nothing remotely like a “please mount my butt you hairy master”
moment taking place, and it’s not hard to see that GLS-p. isn’t getting
enough of those from anywhere, so he’s kind of desperate for a random
dopamine hit. Time to really make it clear that politics transcends
biology, and anybody who thinks the contrary better bend over quickly for
a piece of hierarchically-clarifying ass-punishment:
Translation:
So which serious
alpha monkey like me
person owns you as their bitch? Politics is nothing like primate
dominance. Dumbass.
Translation: [*sarcastic counter-hoot*]
Translation:
My buddy PROFESSOR Wilson wouldn’t even use you as a doormat — so why
am I even talking to you, impertinent gamma wretch? It’s distracting me
from serious politics and stuff.
There has to be some
chimpanzee ass-play
politics that isn’t quite this disgustingly stupid, but I’m guessing — not
a lot.
Note: “Michael Rectenwald is professor in Global Liberal Studies at New
York University. He is the author of numerous essays and six books.” He is
widely respected by his peers in the field.
ADDED: After posting this I worried a little that it was too harsh. The
guy was probably just having a bad day. After all, no one “paid to write
and think” by a (somewhat) prestigious university could possibly engage in
these self-parodying dominance chimp-outs on a regular basis, surely?
Ooops:
September 24, 2014Order and Value
A piece of machinery that
reduces
(local) disorder has value. It might be a functional police force, a
catallactic economic arrangement, or a sociopolitical mechanism
implementing dynamic geography (or Patchwork,
1,
2,
3,
4). Others might be listed. Any complex adaptive
system
works like this (until it ceases working). Since
Schrödinger, it has been taken as an abstract definition of life. In certain
strands
of philosophy, it has also been taken as the complete, rigorous meaning of
a machine (as counterposed to a ‘gadget’ – which works only
within a larger machinic assemblage). Only by exporting entropy does
anything of even minimal complexity get to continue its existence. The
production of order is functionality in its most elevated, teleological
sense.
A piece of rhetoric which merely celebrates order, as something nice to
have, is worth nothing in itself. “We want order” is the “give us free
stuff” slogan of intellectually degenerated reaction. When examined
closely, it is indistinguishable from political pan-handling. (Democracy
has taught everyone how to beg.) It is unlikely that even the most
radically degraded libertarian would be shameless enough to consider
“wealth is good, poverty is bad” anything more than an expression of
sub-comic emotional incontinence. “Order is good, chaos is bad” is a
slogan of exactly equivalent merit. “We want order” is just “we want
money” at a superior level of generality. Monkeys want peanuts, but we are
reluctant to dignify their hungry hooting with the label ‘political
philosophy’.
Entropy dissipation is a problem. It might quite reasonably be
considered the problem. Any serious social theory is respected
insofar as it elicits the question:
So how is entropy dissipated? The main current of Anglophone
intellectual culture focuses tightly upon it, in a broad lineage from
Newtonian mechanics, the Scottish Enlightenment, the science of heat,
classical economics, and Darwinian naturalism, into theories of
complexity, distributed systems, dynamic networks, and productive
multiplicities. Spontaneous order is the consistent topic.
‘Spontaneous’ means only:
Does not presuppose that which it is tasked with explaining. If
the genesis of order is not being theorized, order is merely being
assumed, and then consumed. The difference is between a supply side
problematic (“how is order practically produced?”) and an empty demand
(“we want more order”). The former is industrial, the latter
simply tyrannical, when it is anything at all beside vacuous noise.
Unless a pol-econ. theory can contribute to an explanation of the
production of order (dissipation of entropy), it is wasting
everyone’s time. “But I really want order” is just silliness.
It’s astounding that it could ever be thought otherwise.
March 7, 2016Wealth Space
From
Szabo’s critically-important exploration of collectibles:
At the extreme upper left-hand corner is modern money – used purely as
a medium of exchange and obligation satisfaction, and with high
velocity, typically several transactions per month. The predominant such
media in a culture also usually becomes its of account. At the opposite
(southeast) extreme are pure stores of value – seldom if ever alienated,
they usually change ownership only at death. At the northeast extreme
are pure collectibles – a low-velocity (a few to a few dozen transfers
per human lifetime) medium of obligation satisfaction and exchange, but
also a store and display of wealth. At the southwest extremely are
immediate consumables, such as food obtained from foraging in cultures
that do not preserve or store their food.
September 3, 2016
CHAPTER TWO - DISTRIBUTION, FRAGMENTATION AND TRUST
Pattern Recognition
There has been enough productive history to know what functional social
systems look like, and the basic common factor is obvious. Institutions
advance by substituting for trust.
(To the extent we still have any of these things …)
— We have market capitalism because businesspeople can’t be trusted.
— We have experimental science because neither truth intuitions nor
scientists can be trusted.
— We have constitutional republicanism because neither political leaders
nor the citizenry can be trusted.
— We have freedom of conscience because priests can’t be trusted.
— We have common law because neither legislators nor judges can be
trusted.
— We have the blogosphere because the media can’t be trusted.
— We have gold coins buried in the garden because bankers can’t be
trusted.
— We have basements packed with semi-automatic rifles because state law
enforcement can’t be trusted.
Siding with intelligence has nothing at all to do with trusting,
liking, or respecting intelligent people. It is intelligent people,
typically, who run the engines of stupidity. ‘Trust, but
verify‘ is politely euphemistic, and — in truth — wholly inadequate. Distrust,
and test, test, test … to destruction wherever possible.
Three theses:
(1) The robust sophistication (or design quality) of any society or social
institution is inversely proportional to the the trust it demands. This is
not, of course, to be confused with the trust it
earns.
(2) In any society capable of institution building, distrust is the
principal driver of innovation. Systematization and automation, in
general, incarnate distrust.
(3) Productive distrust reaches its apotheosis in the Internet, which
routes around everything and everybody that has ever been believed.
March 18, 2013Quote notes (#68)
Pat Buchanan
asks: Is Europe Cracking Up? His tour of disintegration takes in
Ukraine, France, Britain, Belgium and Spain, but …
… the most startling news on the nationalist front last week came in
Venice and the Veneto region, where 89 percent of a large turnout in a
non-binding referendum voted to secede from Italy and re-establish the
Venetian republic that vanished in 1866.
The proposed
“Repubblica Veneta”
would embrace five million inhabitants of Veneto. Should it succeed in
seceding, Lombardy and Trentino would likely follow, bringing about a
partition of Italy. Sardinia is also reportedly looking for an exit.
Buchanan’s preferred term ‘nationalism’ is ambiguous in this context,
since it can mean either integration or disintegration. After all, it was
Italian ‘nationalism’ that built this self-dismantling monster.
Increasingly, it’s the fissile aspect — nationality as ethnic splintering
and escape from something larger — that’s driving the process.
How many micro-nationalities remain as yet undiscovered?
ADDED: A (libertarian-secessionist) voice from Italy.
March 26, 2014Wolfendale v. Urban Future
Pete Wolfendale has a version
here. There were some threading issues, so this is the
Urban Future version:
[Not “causally” but “casually”.]
***
***
May 24, 2014Counterfactual Cyberspace
Internet retro-futurism is taken to a whole new
level
by Andrew L. Russell:
What happened to the “beautiful dream” [of Open Systems
Interconnection]? While the Internet’s triumphant story has been well
documented by its designers and the historians they have worked with,
OSI has been forgotten by all but a handful of veterans of the
Internet-OSI standards wars. To understand why, we need to dive into the
early history of computer networking, a time when the vexing problems of
digital convergence and global interconnection were very much on the
minds of computer scientists, telecom engineers, policymakers, and
industry executives. And to appreciate that history, you’ll have to set
aside for a few minutes what you already know about the Internet. Try to
imagine, if you can, that the Internet never existed. …
The article is rich enough to support a number of take-away lessons. The
most compelling from the perspective of this blog: the real benefits of
bypassing discussion are huge. We got a TCP/IP Internet because OSI was
discussing the future far too widely and comprehensively. The route that
avoids the talking shop is the one history tends to take.
December 8, 2014Distrust
Every public institution of any value is based on
distrust.
That’s an elementary proposition, as far as this blog is concerned. It’s
worth stating nakedly, since it is probably less obvious to others. That
much follows from it is unlikely to be controversial, even among those who
find it less than compelling, or simply repulsive.
One major source of obscurity is the category of ‘high trust cultures’ —
with which neoreactionaries tend naturally to identify. There is plenty to
puzzle over here, admittedly. This post will make no serious effort to
even scratch the surface of the questions that arise. Instead, it contends
that the culture primarily commended for its trustfulness has been
conspicuously innovative in the development of trustless institutions.
These begin with the foundations of Occidental reason, and especially the
rigorous criterion of logical and mathematical
proof. A proof substitutes for trust. In place of a simple
declaration, it presents (a demanded) demonstration. The
compliant response to radical distrust has epitomized Western
conceptions of rationality since classical antiquity.
The twin pillars of industrial modernity (i.e.
of capitalism) are trustless institutions. Natural science is experimental
because it is distrustful, and thus demonstrative. It raises the classical
demand for proof to a higher level of empirical skepticism, by extending
distrust even to rational constructions, in cases where they cannot be
critically tested against an experimental criterion. Only pure
mathematics, and the most scrupulously formalized logical propositions,
escape this demand for replicable evidence. The ultimate ground
of the natural scientific enterprise is the presupposition that
scientists should in no case be trusted, except through their
reproducible results. Anything that requires belief is not
science, but something else. Similarly, the market mechanism is an
incarnation of trustless social organization. Caveat emptor.
Capitalists, like scientists, exist to be distrusted. Whatever of their
works cannot survive testing to destruction in the market place deservedly
perish. Reputation, in its modern version, has to be produced through
demonstration.
Prior to its demotic ruination — through positive trust in the people —
distinctively modern republican governance was similarly founded in
distrust. As formulated by John Adams (1772): “There is danger from all
men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man
living with power to endanger the public liberty.” It has not been an
excess of distrust that has brought this sage recommendation to nought.
For those seeking higher authority, Psalm 118:8-9 (ESV): “It is better to
take refuge in the Lord than to trust in man. It is better to take refuge
in the Lord than to trust in princes.” (My usual fanatical trust in the
KJV betrayed me on this occasion.)
An appeal for trust is a reliably fatal failure mode for all public
institutions. Trustless transaction is the future, and its name is
Bitcoin. The deep cultural momentum is already familiar.
Total depravity is the key to world historical predestination,
and it is routed through the blockchain.
December 10, 2014Trust Webs
The systems of governance native to the Internet Epoch are going to emerge
out of
this. Anybody who is trying to build institutions today, of whatever kind*,
would be wise to immerse themselves in the way this stuff works. It will
take time to shape the order of the world, but it isn’t going away. The
same can very much not be said for the nation states of the
Gutenberg Era, whose recession is already unmistakable.
Virtually speaking, there is nothing serious left for the Westphalian
state to do. Of course, anybody expecting these relics to die tidily is
almost certainly deluding themselves. Making the Westphalian order set the
world to the torch. Its unmaking is unlikely to be much easier.
*[ahem]
ADDED: Related —
February 11, 2015Quotable (#67)
Private property has no real legitimacy,
argues
David Graeber:
Basically, we assume that market relations are natural, but you need a
huge institutional structure to make people behave the way that
economists say they are “supposed” to behave. So, for example, think
about the way the consumer market works. The market is supposed to work
on grounds of pure competition. Nobody has moral ties to each other
other than to obey the rules. But, on the other hand, people are
supposed to do anything they can to get as much as possible off the
other guy — but won’t simply steal the stuff or shoot the person.
Historically, that’s just silly; if you don’t care at all about a guy,
you might as well steal his stuff. In fact, they’re encouraging people
to act essentially how most human societies, historically, treated their
enemies — but to still never resort to violence, trickery or theft.
Obviously that’s not going to happen. You can only do that if you set up
a very strictly enforced police force.
In the absence of a moral bond, who’s going to stick to the rules, when
they could cheat? It’s a consistent viewpoint, in its own way.
Merge with me morally, or I’m just going to steal your stuff. And
people wonder where the impulse to algorithmic governance comes from.
March 7, 2015Convergence
Haidt: “We argue that the social conditions that promote complaints of
oppression and victimization overlap with those that promote case-building
attempts to attract third parties. When such social
conditions are all present in high degrees, the result is a culture of
victimhood in which individuals and groups display high sensitivity to
slight, have
a tendency to handle conflicts through complaints to third
parties, and seek to cultivate an image of being victims who deserve
assistance.”
Bitcoin: “What is needed is
an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of
trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each
other without the need for a trusted third party.”
(XS emphasis in both.)
Insignificant coincidence? Or a key to the crucial conflict nodes of the
21st century?
This is the thesis I’m tempted by:
September 9, 2015Age of Fragmentation
More inflection point material, this
time
macro-political, and Europe-focused, beginning:
Perhaps the greatest academic growth area over the past twenty years or
so has been “European integration studies”, a field that has both
analysed and boosted support for the European “project”. Almost all of
its practitioners have proceeded from the assumption that the process of
integration is – must be – “irreversible”. It is the intellectual
equivalent of the principle of the European
acquis communautaire by which powers, once surrendered
or pooled, cannot be retrieved. Or, more unkindly, one might see it as a
“European Brezhnev doctrine”, by which socialism, being inevitable,
could not be allowed to fail in any country in which it was already
established.
But what if this is not so? What if, as the Croatian political
scientist Josip Glaurdic, an expert on the collapse of Yugoslavia, once
quipped, what we really need is a school of “European disintegration
studies”? …
(Don’t be put off by the leftist publication credentials from reading the
whole thing.)
November 10, 2015Quote note (#211)
At
Nathan Cook‘s new
blog:
Bitcoin is not a Marxist reification. Bitcoin reifies in the rare sense
of ‘ex nihilo, actually create a physical object’.
Bitcoin reifies property. Property before bitcoin is an
abstraction, a social relation treated provisionally as an object, but
never attaining that status (Property is Impossible).
Bitcoin quite literally makes property into something physical. Anything
that can store a private key and keep it secret, and can use it to
create and emit transactions, can own Bitcoin. The relation ‘X owns
Bitcoin’ is spatially local and temporally persistent; in other words,
it more closely resembles relations like ‘X is made of wood’ or ‘X
weighs 20 kilograms’ than it does relations like ‘X is a dollar
billionaire’. Property is possible — when property is Bitcoin.
Prior to functional, distributed crypto, ‘property’ was nothing but
confused political pleading. Now it’s something else.
ADDED: Still a rocky road ahead. “What was meant to be a new, decentralised
form of money that lacked ‘systemically important institutions’ and ‘too
big to fail’ has become something even worse: a system completely
controlled by just a handful of people. Worse still, the network is on the
brink of technical collapse.”
January 14, 2016Twitter cuts (#112)
The point doesn’t really need decompressing,
but just in case —
When a proposition nation serves as the global model of the state, such
discriminations are easily blurred. The underlying stresses have become
far more visible recently. (Language figures, ironically doubled, in the
irruption of ‘excessive’ national questions.)
The last time such a mismatch was recognized, in the early 20th century,
Wilsonian dreams seemed available, as a fix. After much subsequent
unpleasantness, the problem was eclipsed. We can now see, however, that it
never disappeared.
(If ‘Nation State’ is a pseudo-pleonasm, we can expect diagonal lines of
political philosophy to open as it cracks.)
April 30, 2016Proposition Nations
Xenosystems likes proposition nations so much it wants to see a
lot more of them.
America is a problem for the world for two main (and conflicting) reasons:
1) Its proposition contains enough productive innovation to be scary.
Independence war, foundational liberalism, constitutionally-restricted
government, and laissez-faire capitalism have been a
memetic-cocktail-from-hell for those in thrall to competitively-inferior
ideas. But, undoing all of this, is the legacy of the American Civil War
(in particular) —
2) The suppression of the propositional principle — i.e. geopolitical
ideological sorting — under an idealization of national unity. Upon this
pyre the liberal tradition has been incinerated, until it exists only as a
charred parody of itself. The Proposition is by now little more than the
State of the Union. Mandatory agreement, within an undivided territory, is
policed by the democratic mechanism.
That we remain one is left as the only strictly axiomatic
propositional content (as the Trump and Sanders presidential candidacies
in their different ways illustrate).
Spatial Metapolitics recommends that America do both Trumpist
ethno-nationalism, and Sanderista democratic socialism, and a
large number of other (more interesting) things, even also more stupid
ones, if such can be devised. The critical point is the precise inverse of
the late-modern axiom:
As long as mandatory unity is dissolved, ideological tolerance can be
extended without definite limit
— across a disintegrated territory.
First-order ideological preferences, elaborated under an assumption of
dominant unity, are a trap
entirely irrespective of their specific content.
Here’s a proposition: Abolish the Union. Only disintegration is
worth doing.
May 17, 2016Quotable (#177)
The fatal illusion
continues:
If every EU member were prepared to make concessions to the concerns of
others, everyone could emerge better off.
Confusing integration with a global optimization process is the single
most calamitous error of modern times.
July 6, 2016Quote note (#337)
Hengest
on Bill Bishop and
Tiebout
Sorting among the (in this case specifically Anglo-Saxon)
nations
of America:
Rather than [the] borders dissolving between cultures and populations,
the various nations are actually becoming further differentiated with
time. This concept is demonstrated in
The Big Sort
by Bill Bishop. Bishop argues that Americans are segregating themselves
into like-minded geographic regions at increasing rates with the onset
and ease of long-distance travel. Basically, the various Anglo-Saxon
regions are more strongly becoming themselves.
If this is actually the trend, the motor of dynamic geography (running
Patchwork-type geopolitical arrangements) should work fine.
There needs to be much more work done in the field of
Entropic and Negentropic Trends Emerging in Dynamic Social
Distributions. It would tell us who’s going to win this thing.
March 1, 2017Quote note (#343)
The new great
divergence:
Increasing polarization, even fragmentation, of society is becoming
apparent in US politics. There is a sense that society is separating
into parts, each of which is listening only to other members of that
group. The separation between groups can enable them to deviate even
further in values and perspectives. …
(Via.)
That’s the process. Nothing else is necessary. The only task remaining is
to accelerate it.
March 17, 2017
Disintegration
According to a certain construction of cultural history, to which the
natural sciences have often seemed attached, religion is essentially
conceived as pre-scientific naturalistic explanation. Seen this way,
religions are comparatively primitive cosmologies. This is what makes them
vulnerable to scientific progress. A Galileo, or a Darwin, advances into
their core territory, mortally wounding them in the heart. A somewhat
sociologically-indistinct notion of “science” is envisaged as religion’s
natural successor.
However plausible (or implausible) this narrative is found to be, it
matters. By way of it, scientific ascendancy acquires its foundational
myth. Crucially, this mythical power does not depend upon any kind of
rigorous scientific validation. No one has ever been under compulsion to
put it to the test. Everything pre-modern — and even profoundly archaic —
in the modernist enterprise runs through it. It provides a tacit
infrastructure of deep belief.
To refer to “mythic science” is not positively skeptical, still less
polemical. For scientific ideas to acquire the status of myth is a matter
of cultural potency, supplementary to whatever epistemic validity they
retain. Scientific concepts do not become any less scientific by also
becoming mythic. They can, however, on occasions sustain mythic power
disproportionate to their strictly scientific legitimacy. The dominating
apex of a culture is some more-or-less scientific cosmology.
This is what the word “nature” has primordially conveyed. An ultimate
object of cognitive affirmation is promoted through it.
This is what we believe. Things are this way, and not another way
(or only another way elsewhere).
We ask here, then, as innocent scientific pagans:
Which way are things?
The best current cosmology is accelerationist, and disintegrationist. To
put the matter crudely — and ultimately untenably — the expansion of the
universe is speeding up, and apart. Rather than being decelerated by
gravity, subsequent to an original explosion, the rate of cosmic inflation
has increased. Some yet-unknown force is overwhelming gravity, and
red-shifting all distant objects. Quite recently baptized “dark energy,”
this force is thought to account for
seventy percent of physical reality.
Compared to this strongly confirmed discovery of accelerating
fragmentation, the notion of an underlying integral “universe” looks
increasingly like an unsustainable mythological relic. “Unsustainable,”
that is, even in terms of consistent scientific myth, and also more
practically.
The distance from which information can be received, or to which it can be
broadcast, over any period of time has a boundary set by the speed of
light. The space-time horizon of reality for any entity is determined by
this “light-cone.” Beyond it, there is only the absolutely incommunicable.
A light-cone is thus, among other things, a strict delimitation of power
projection, understood as practical unity. The process leads from general
relativity to absolute disintegration.
In his intellectual history of relativistic physics,[1]
Peter Gallison connects the problem of relativity to that of imperial
management. Synchronization is the precondition for any sophisticated
process of coordination. Even under (compact) terrestrial conditions, the
extreme finitude of the speed of light posed a significant technical
problem for governance at global-imperial scale. Telegraphic networks, in
particular, demanded technical correction for relativistic effects.
By irresistible extrapolation, we can see that domination is only ever
able to mask processes of escape. There can be no Cosmic Imperium. Space
does not tolerate it. This is merely a science fictionesque fact, until it
is mythologized.
Dark energy is tearing the cosmos apart. Eventually its pieces will
mutually depart from each others’ light-cones. They will then be nothing
to each other ever again. This is a finding of extraordinary consequence.
At the greatest scale of empirical objectivity, unity has no future. The
“universe” is an unrealistic model. Everything now known about the cosmos
suggests that fragmentation is basic.
Cosmology thus provides a model of disintegration that is remarkable for
its extremity. It characterizes pieces that have nothing at all except a
shared past in common, propelled into absolute non-communication. No
political conception of separation has ever yet reached this limit.
Some fascinating results quickly fall out of the extrapolation. The
cosmological evidence our scientific tradition has been able to draw upon
will eventually cease to be available. A future intelligent species could
not build any comparable model of the universe upon empirical foundations.
Whatever counted as the whole, for it, would in fact be only a fragment
(we can already see). Distant galactic clusters would have become matters
for sheer speculation. The very possibility of empirical science would
have been demonstrably bounded in space and time.
Geoff Manaugh
calls it
“the coming amnesia.” He remarks on a talk by science fiction writer
Alastair Reynolds:
Reynolds was drawing upon an article entitled “The End of Cosmology?” by
Lawrence M. Krauss and Robert J. Scherrer, published in Scientific
American (2008). This article summarized itself in the sub-head: “An
accelerating universe wipes out traces of its own origins.”
The extrapolation can be pushed further. If a far-future scientific
culture can be seen to be structurally-deprived of evidence essential for
realistic appraisal of cosmic scale, can we be confident our situation is
fundamentally different? Is it not more probable that the absolute or
unsurpassable locality of scientific perspective is a basic situation? How
likely is it that we can see universally — in principle — when we can
already see how others will in the future be unable to? On the basis of
available evidence, we have to envisage a future civilization that is
utterly deluded about its own structural parochialism, confident in its
ability to finally shrug off perspectival limitation. The most esteemed
scientific minds in such a culture might be expected to dismiss any
suggestion of inaccessible cosmic regions as groundless metaphysics. It
seems merely hubristic to refrain from turning this scenario back upon
ourselves. If universal cosmology is to become impossible, the default
hypothesis should be that it already has.[2]
Natural science exhibits a tragic structure. Pursuing only its own
essential methods, it finds — through cosmology — a compelling case for
its large-scale unreliability. The acquisition of universal insight
through rigorous empirical investigation appears cosmically obstructed.
Science is thus eventually bound to be fundamentally localized. The
“locality” at issue here is not merely the weak particularism of an option
taken against the global, or universal. Rather, it is the very horizon of
any possible universalistic ambition that finds itself rigorously
constricted, and dismantled. Localism, thus understood, is not a choice,
but a destiny, and even a fatality already imposed. At its greatest
scales, reality is shattered. Unity exists only to be broken.
The principle of isotropy holds that there are no privileged orientations
in space. Together with the presumption of the homogeneity of space, it
composes the Cosmological Principle. We are surely entitled to an
isochronic analog, in which a fate observable in the order of time can be
assumed equally to already be behind us.
We have a cosmos still, and perennially, then, but no longer a universe.
The cosmos we, as moderns, subscribe to under cultural obligation is in
fact the manifest disintegration of the apparent universe.
Our topic gears down from inflationary cosmology through thermodynamics.
We are talking of diversification, or heterogenesis, after all –
and that is the rigorous negative of entropy increase. Homogenization is
entropy. The two concepts are not strictly distinguishable. What was
discovered under the name of entropy was the destruction of difference —
whether variation in temperature (Clausius and Carnot) or, later,
variation in particle distribution (Boltzmann and Gibbs). Heterogenesis is
local, the second law of thermodynamics tells us. At the truly global
level – where no inputs or outputs can occur – deterioration necessarily
prevails.
To get ahead of ourselves, we will find that the West has made of entropy
a God, One whose final law is that everything shall be the same. It is a
false god. The ultimate cosmo-physical problem –
How is negative entropy possible? – attests to that. We know that
heterogenesis is no weaker than its opposite, even if we do not know how.
Cosmological disintegration is more widely echoed among the natural
sciences. Perhaps most importantly, The Origin of Species has
disintegration as its basic topic, as its name already underscores.
Darwinism — which is to say the whole of scientific biology — has
speciation as its primary object, and speciation is splitting.
Despite recognition of various exotic lateral connections, from symbioses
to retroviral genomic insertions, it is the divergence of genetic lineages
that best defines life at the largest scales. Meldings are anomalous, and
in any case impossible unless diversity has first been produced. The
ingredients of any heterogeneous coalition presume prior
diversification.[3]
Disintegrationism in the biological sciences amounts to a science in
itself, named cladistics.[4]
Cladistics formalizes the method of rigorous Darwinian classification. The
identity of any biological type is determined by the particular series of
schismatic events it has passed through. To be human is to be a primate, a
mammal, a reptile, a bony fish, and a vertebrate, among other, more basic,
classes. The sum of what you have broken from defines what you are.
A “clade” is a shard. It is a group, of any scale, determined by secession
from a lineage. The point of differentiation between clades corresponds to
their most recent (i.e. last) common ancestor. Crucially, therefore, all
descendants of a clade belong to that clade, which encompasses any number
of sub-clades. The production of subclades (origin of species) is called
“radiation.” It tends to proceed through serial bifurcation, since
simultaneous complex cladistic fragmentation events are comparatively
exotic. Successive simple branchings typically capture diversification.
The stakes of it not doing so are not huge.
Cladistics can be identified with a rigorization of taxonomic
nomenclature. A system of names writes a cladogram, which is to say a
model of evolutionary history, and of biological relatedness. Any
cladogram is an evolutionary hypothesis. It proposes a particular order of
splitting. Any such proposed order is empirically revisable.
Cladistics maps the whole of disintegrationism below the cosmological
level, and perhaps even up to it. Naturally, it is supremely
controversial. The full scope of its provocation has yet to be understood.
Insofar as cladistics is explanatory, however, much follows. Notably,
identity is conceived as essentially schismatic, and being is apprehended
fundamentally as a structure of inheritance.
Historical linguistics fell naturally into a cladistic mode. Linguistic
‘families’ shared essential characteristics with their biological
template. They proliferated by sub-division, providing the material for a
classification schema. It was upon this linguistic taxonomy that racial
groupings were first systematically determined. The “Yamnaya” — still
today more widely known as “Aryans” — were originally identified through
the cladistics of Indo-European languages. Their pattern of radiation was
marked by a tree-like linguistic diversification.
Differential anthropology was drawn in cladograms. Trees, phylogenetic
order, language families, genealogies, actual (massively extended)
families — it was all extremely coherent. Here, too, phenomena of fusion,
lateral cross-contamination, and convergence — while by no means absent —
were evidently secondary and derivative.
Linguistic diversification looks like a process of schismatic
ethnogenesis. As peoples branch out, they mutually differentiate. The
origin of peoples is only origin of species at higher resolution — the
abstract pattern is the same.
The concrete mechanism of speciation typically involves the isolation of
populations, and in this way becomes — very recently — political. There is
a politics of “invasive species” and anthropic bio-dispersal, but this is
not especially rancorous, or significantly polarizing. The case of human
population isolation is very different. During this process of
politicization, the exogamic radicalism of North-West European populations
has been sublimed into a universal ideology.
Since the subject of race tends to produce extreme ideological and
emotional disturbance today, it might be preferable to consider variegated
domestic animals, as the English naturalistic tradition was inclined to
do. Not only sound analogy but also balance, or true moderation is to be
found in doing so. Since, in our contemporary cultural context the
influence of country life has notably receded, and with it the sense of
vivid distinction among cultivated species, dogs serve us as by far the
most illustrative examples.
A world without mongrels would be a poorer world. Mongrels are often
advantaged by special and even superior qualities. The Golden Doodle, for
instance, is as exalted as any canine type that exists. Such crosses add
to the diversity of the world. This is fully consistent with a basic
process through which the world is enriched by diverging dog breeds, in
which “dogs in general” is an increasingly uninformative category. There
is not – yet – any ideology directed to global canine genetic
homogenization.
Diversity is good, which is to say robust, and
innovative (at least). The ecological consensus can be trusted in
this regard. Invasive species are detested because they lower diversity,
not because they raise it. Heterogenesis is at all times the superior
ambition. Yet diversification — the production of diversity — is a
peculiarly neglected topic in our contemporary social sciences. The mantra
of diversity is coupled with almost complete indifference, and even
strategic negligence, in this regard. Obligatory public celebration of
diversity accompanies, and covers, its programmatic practical extirpation.
Mankind, it has been authoritatively decided, is one, and destined only to
be ever more so. Genetic partition is today considered tantamount to a
human-rights violation.[5]
Our supreme orthodoxy is that it would be terrible almost beyond
contemplation not to already be and become yet more One. We might be
tempted to call this faith monohumanism. That mankind shall be a unity is
its fundamental doctrine. It cannot be sufficiently emphasized that this
is far less an empirical observation than a moral and political project,
in which racial entropy has been elevated to a sacred obligation. The
radical — as opposed to merely conservative — alternative to this vision
is found only in science fiction.[6]
Preservation of human diversity is a staple of dissident ethnopolitics,
with “Beige World” increasingly perceived as a coercive ideal. A typically
inchoate resistance to racial entropy is the central mobilizing factor in
such cases, though one regrettably afflicted by an immoderate
fetishization of mandatory racial purity. At worst – and not uncommonly –
this reaction against monohumanism has come to see all contributions to
human genetic diversity through racial crossing as an avatar of coercive
homogenization. The balanced response, to repeat the lesson of the dogs,
is that a world of tendential speciation or increasing genetic diversity
is by no compelling necessity a world hostile to mutts.
Over the last 60,000 years, human genetic divergence has been
overwhelmingly the dominant process. Conspicuous fragmentation of modern
humans into genetically distinct sub-species has been the basic pattern.
It is a process worthy of ecological celebration, and even
techno-industrial acceleration. Despite the fondest hopes of the present
secular church, there is no chance it will be terminally dispelled.
“Globalism” is a word that, while ideologically contested, is of
uncontested ideological weight. It might be defined, with minimal
tendentiousness, as seeking the direction of policy from a perspective in
accordance with the whole. Stubbornly partial orientations are its
enemies. Yet such has been its triumph that — even in the face of recent
set-backs — hostility is peculiarly drowned in condescension.
“Parochialism” is among the slurs globalism finds prepared to its
convenience. It might accept an inability to see universally as
understandable, and educable. A refusal of universalistic perspective,
however, can merit no such sympathy. It is, for the globalist, essentially
unethical. Parochialism is less to be argued against than simply scorned.
It is to be despised in the name of the universal — which is becoming
amusing.
Whatever we have seen as the death of God is only a special case of
universality’s more comprehensive demise. While God’s death was mostly
inferred, the death of the universal unfolds as an explicit scientific
spectacle. Astrophysics sees the universe being dismantled before its
artificial eyes.
The globalist camp is especially prone to gesticulations of piety in
respect to the idea of science. It is ironic therefore that — in
scientific terms — globalism looks increasingly like an untenable
religion. Its intrinsic cosmology is an archaic myth. It could not easily
be more obvious that there is no universe, outside this mythological
structure. The fundamental nature of the cosmos is to go its separate
ways.[7]
Pieces are basic. To conceive them following from wholes is confusion,
produced by unsustainable universalistic frames. Any perspective that can
actually be realized has already been localized by serial breakages.
Nothing begins with the whole, unless as illusion. Today, we know this
both empirically and transcendentally. Anything not done in pieces is not
done in profound accordance with reality.
[1]
Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time, New York,
2003.
[2] Manaugh quotes
Krauss and Scherrer saying: “We may be living in the only epoch in the
history of the universe when scientists can achieve an accurate
understanding of the true nature of the universe.” The intellectual
indolence of this suggestion is remarkable.
[3] Isolation of
genetic lineages is a matter of sound — if spontaneous and unconscious —
experimental technique.
Avoid cross-contamination of test samples. Which is to say
do it, if you insist, but don’t expect optimal epistemic outcomes
if you do. Optimal epistemic outcomes tend to win.
[4] The arborescent
orientation of cladistics could not be more unflinching. The word
‘clade’ is taken from the Greek clados, meaning branch. A cladogram is
an abstract tree. Its articulations are all branchings. Deleuze &
Guattari’s critical engagement with it has been highly influential. They
tell us they are “bored of trees.” The alternative to arborescence, they
propose, is the rhizome — a network in which every node connects to
every other. Appropriately, the ‘rhizome’ is not itself a taxonomic
concept, but a morphological one. The balanced position is to
acknowledge that evolutionary trees are complemented by ecological webs.
Neither is conceivable without the other. The evolutionary tree is
pruned and trained within ecologies of lateral relations. Phylogeny is
overwhelmingly tree-like, while ontogeny involves far more lateral
influence. We will limit ourselves here, with cryptic brevity, to
remarking that Deleuzoguattarian rhizomatics is rhizomatically connected
to Neo-Darwinism, but it is cladistically Neo-Lamarckian.
[5] This is a
simplification, wormed-through by incoherences and unprincipled
exceptions. Most notably, ad hoc special permissions are granted to
‘minor’ populations. The notably erratic usage of the word ‘genocide’ is
the most obvious index of this. A closer construction of the operating
formula might be:
Population partitioning is wrong, absolutely and universally, insofar
as it secures the isolation of North-West European populations.
[6] Bruce Sterling,
Alastair Reynolds, and Neal Stephenson among very many others populate
their fictional worlds with radically diversified neo-hominid
types.
[7] Robin Hanson
devotes a
recent blog post
to three (comparatively exotic) varieties of tree like descent. The
first is an odd thought experiment that need not distract us even
momentarily here. The second concerns his mind-clone “ems.” This is of
potential relevance to a range of potential, and even already actual
software lineages. The third is the structure of the quantum multiverse.
It suggests that a tree-like cosmology arises on paths quite different
from that pursued here. He notes: ” … a quantum history is in part a
tree of observers. Each observer in this tree can look backward and see
a chain of branches back to the root, with each branch holding a version
of themselves. More versions of themselves live in other branches of
this tree.”
Tree-like multiverses are especially numerous. Lee Smolin
proposes
a Darwinian multiverse, selecting for reproductive fitness through the
production of black holes. It might be described as a
cladistically-structured multiverse, were this label not so much more
widely applicable. Cladistic multiverses belong to the much larger set
of cladistically-structured entities, whose parts are characterized
by:
Such multiverses predict their own imperceptibility. Since parallel
branches are mutually non-communicating, it is to be expected that their
existence is strictly theoretical. If the multiverse was a rhizome we’d
see more of it.
Simulation Argument ontology also tends to disintegrationism.
Simulations are essentially experiments, and thus various.
CHAPTER THREE - IDEOLOGICAL SPACE
Ideological Space
Does ideological space make more sense when depicted as a triangle (rather
than a line or quadrant)? It certainly helps to explain the room for
controversy on the ‘extreme right’. Having Darwin out there beyond the
edge of the ideologically-thinkable makes a lot of sense, too.
Click image to enlarge.
If anyone knows where this diagram originated, please let me know and I’ll
credit it properly.
(Accessed via @MikeAnissimov).
February 10, 2014Right and Left
Endless conversational stimulation is to be found in the fact that the
most basic distinction of modern politics is profoundly incomprehensible,
and at the same time almost universally invested. Almost everybody thinks
they understand the difference between the Right and the Left, until they
think about it. Then they realize that this distinction commands no solid
consensus, and exists primarily as a substitute for thought. Perhaps the
same is true of all widely-invoked political labels. Perhaps that is what
politics is.
Spandrell directs a winding, intermittently brilliant
post
to the topic, which is enriched by a comments thread of outstanding
quality. Like the Right/Left distinction itself, the argument becomes
increasingly confusing, the closer it is examined. The ‘rightist
singularity’ of the title is introduced as a real political alternative to
the Left Singularity modeled by James Donald, driven by analogous
self-reinforcing feedback dynamics, but into nationalistic rather than
egalitarian catastrophe. For societies menaced by the prospect of Left
Singularity, it offers an alternative path. China is taking it, Spandrell
suggests.
Notably, in passing, Spandrell’s gloss on
Donald’s Left Singularity is a gem:
The leftist singularity is based on claiming higher status by being
more egalitarian than anyone else. So you get a status arms race in
which everyone tries to be more egalitarian than the others. That works
because people (and monkeys) take equality to be a good thing.
(To continue, we have to bracket the ‘old’ Right Singularity: the
Technocommercial Singularity that Donald’s formula for Left Singularity
distinguished itself from. Nobody even mentions it in this discussion.
It’s a problem for some other time.)
To backtrack from these digressions: If ‘rightist singularity’ is
nationalistic, that aligns the Right with nationalism, doesn’t it? But
nothing remotely this crude is sustainable (not when time is involved),
Spandrell notes: “the Right isn’t nationalist any more.” He expands,
convincingly, in his own comment thread:
What historically has been called Right was about law and order, i.e.
leaving things as they are. Tribalism qua nationalism isn’t inherently
“Rightist”, in fact originally it was a Leftist subversive meme against
the Ancient Regime, but when mass media was invented nationalism was the
status quo, i.e. the Right, and political labels have become fossilized
since.
As Vladimir (May 25, 22:10) articulates the point:
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn would have a ready answer for you:
nationalism is leftism. It is basically another name
for Jacobinism. These paradoxes of right-wing nationalism are just
another manifestation of the fundamental problem of modern rightism —
namely, that a large part of its content is just yesterday’s leftism
that the left has in the meantime abandoned for a more extreme left
position.
So, I’d say this is nothing but just another mode of leftist
singularity.
Or, Spandrell again (May 26, 02:34): “Historical evidence is that
nationalism was leftist before socialism appeared further left, making it
rightist.”
The Right is yesterday’s Left, or at least, it is soon exposed as such
when it appears in its historical and populist guise. When the masses turn
Right, they are defending a dated Left, frozen in place by modernist mass
media memory, stuck in a black-and-white newsreel, like an insect in
amber.
The squirming is over, unless it changes dimensions. Then chaos yawns,
despite heroic efforts to restore order (Baker, May 25 17:29; Handle May
25 18:33; Den Beste
linked
by Peter Taylor May 27 17:47), with Moldbug’s preferred Order and Chaos
spectrum sucked — among innumerable others — into the vortex. Tradition
and revolution, authority and liberty, hierarchy and equality, greed and
envy, independence and solidarity, capitalism and socialism … there’s not
even a remote prospect of closure, coherence, or consistency. Every
attempted definition intensifies fragmentation. Right and Left disagree
(we all agree), but exactly how they disagree — on that there’s no
agreement.
Peter A. Taylor (May 29, 06:15):
The left-right spectrum, in so far as it is an honest attempt to make
sense of the world rather than mere propaganda, looks to me like an
attempt to fit chaos into Procrustes’ bed. … Moldbug loves Carlyle.
Carlyle admired Cromwell. Moldbug hates Cromwell. Chaos.
Spandrell (May 26, 08:28), twists it back to the Trichotomy:
Both the Western Right and the Chinese Right are a loose combination of
traditionalists, nationalists and capitalists. Which mostly hate each
other and never get along when they get any amount of power.
By this point, however, trichotomous diversity starts to look like a
mirage of integrity. Right and Left are every difference that has ever
been conceived, if not yet, then in the near future. If these signs mean
anything more than the war continues, like the black-and-white
distinction between chess pieces, no one has yet convincingly shown us
why.
Yet perhaps, if Right and Left, apprehended together, mean
the basic modern antagonism, the conflict itself, as an
irreducible thing, will prove to be the source of whatever sense
can be found.
[To be continued …]
ADDED: Whatever you do, don’t miss Handle’s systematic analysis of the
question (May 31, 10:09pm below).
May 29, 2013Quote notes (#49)
Some foundational wisdom beautifully
restated
by Handle:
… the long history of progressivism in general is most quickly
summarized by an enthusiasm to reject the old, time-tested social
institutions originating in undesigned traditions as obsolete
anachronisms and replace with them with new, more ‘enlightened’
innovations rationally constructed from first principles.
The Rightist view of human nature is often described as ‘tragic’ or
‘realistically pessimistic’. Whether one on the right sees man as
‘fallen and totally depraved’ or merely a ‘hairless ape’ makes little
difference in regards to the conclusion of what is required to regulate
such a creature’s behaviors. And that prescription, unfortunately but
inescapably for most people, involved a certain amount of
severity of consequence. There is pain, harshness,
punishment, impoverishment, and so on, or at the very least an
effectively salient terror of the credible threat of these things.
December 12, 2013PPD and r/K
Ideological categorization is the astrology of politics, in the sense that
it panders to insatiable
identity
hunger.
This post
still holds the daily traffic record here, which is probably not entirely
due to people looking for their political star signs, but neither is it
mostly for other reasons. New approaches to the Left-Right
spectrum — the
Prime Political Dimension — promise master-keys to the secrets of
identity-core opinion.
Given the quite absurdly competitive nature of the terrain, there is
something truly remarkable about the simplicity and persuasiveness of
this
PPD-model, based upon the biological distinction between
r/K selection
strategies. The application of this distinction to humans is — I
confidently assume — radioactively controversial. Its usage as a
conceptual tool to collapse ideology into an axis of Human Biological
Diversity is therefore undoubtedly disreputable. (This trigger-warning
isn’t likely to act as much of a deterrent here.)
The ‘Anonymous Conservative’ theory does the most important things
expected of a PPD-model. In particular, it provides an explanation for the
polarized clusters of ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ traits, which have
often proved highly resistant to reflective integration. Why should
anti-capitalism, pacifism, and sexual laxity belong together? When grouped
together as expressions of an r-type strategy, this bundle of seemingly
unconnected ideological predispositions tightens into an intuitively
coherent whole.
Worth special mention is the mapping of ideological difference onto
environmental conditions. The (‘liberal’) r-type strategy is a response
top conditions of resource abundance, versus (‘conservative’) K-type
adaptation to scarcity. When augmented by some modest assumptions about
the effects of r-type prevalence upon the persistence of Civilization, the
r/K PPD-model automatically generates a cyclical history of social ascent
and decline (through a biorealist abundance-decadence mechanism). The
hope-crushing tragic structure is sure to appeal to reactionary
sensibilities.
The Outside in prediction: This is a theory (and
book)
that will go far. You can read the first chapter
here.
August 19, 2014Right and Left II
Bill Whittle and Stefan Molyneux work through the Anonymous Conservative
r/K model of
ideological polarity in a compelling
video.
XS prediction: This analysis is going nova. It sets the gold standard for
definition of Right / Left difference.
As a darkening vector for the mainstream right, with at least significant
truth value, it’s hard to beat.
ADDED: Reminded to link
this, which I was too lazy to do yesterday.
November 14, 20152014 Lessons (#1)
The world war is
Bitcoin versus
Dugin. Everything else is just messing around
(or, perhaps, tactics).
December 27, 2014Populism
Political categories — however plausible they look on paper — quickly
dissolve into senseless noise when applied to modern historical reality,
unless they foreground populism as the critical discriminating
factor. Furthermore, populism is for all practical purposes
already national populism, irrespective of ideological
commitments to the contrary, since super-national popular constituencies
exist only in the feverish brains of Utopian intellectuals. The Syriza
victory in Greece is making all of this extraordinarily
graphic:
Ushering in the new era, Alexis Tsipras, the prime minister-designate,
announced that he would not be sworn in, as tradition dictates, in the
presence of Archbishop Iernonymos but would instead take the oath of
office in a civil ceremony. At 40, he becomes the country’s youngest
premier in modern times. […] The leftist, who surprised Greeks by
speedily agreeing to share power with the
populist rightwing Independent Greeks party, Anel, is expected to be handed a mandate by president Karolos
Papoulias to form a government later on Monday. Earlier, Panos Kammenos,
Anel’s rumbustious leader, emerged from talks with Tsipras lasting an
hour saying the two politicians had successfully formed a coalition. […]
“I want to say, simply, that from this moment, there is a government,”
Kammenos told reporters gathered outside Syriza’s headquarters. […] “The
Independent Greeks party will give a vote of confidence to the prime
minister, Alexis Tsipras. The prime minister will go to the president
and … the cabinet makeup will be announced by the prime minister. The
aim for all Greeks is to embark on a new day, with full
sovereignty.”
Anyone who thinks it odd that Marine
Le Pen
and Slavoj
Žižek
are both firm supporters is missing the picture entirely. As Žižek
remarks:
This is our position today with regard to Europe: only a new “heresy”
(represented at this moment by Syriza), a split from the European Union
by Greece, can save what is worth saving in the European legacy:
democracy, trust in people, egalitarian solidarity.
That’s what the Left means. Construct your ideological spectrum
accordingly.
Mainstream, but sane:
Of course, politics is about emotion as much as reality. And here,
socialism has one advantage in its favor: easy populism.
Socialism has one huge advantage: People are idiots.
… and while I’m slumming it at NRO,
here‘s Andrew Stuttaford:
Fun fact No. 1: One of the two sons of Syriza’s leader was given the
middle name “Ernesto” in honor of the murderer better known as Ernesto
“Che” Guevara. […] Fun fact No. 2: The neo-Nazi Golden Dawn probably
came in third with 6 percent or so. […] I, for one, continue to be
grateful that the single currency has proved to be such a bulwark
against extremism.
ADDED: Childish incomprehension from the Left (of which we will be seeing a
great deal): “… Last but not least, while Mr. Kammenos and his
sovereigntyist right-wing ANEL party [Independent Greeks] are certainly a
lesser evil compared to formations like To Potami (whose stated goal was
to force Syriza to stay within the narrow boundaries set by the EU and the
Memorandums), they are nonetheless an evil. Their participation in the
government, even with just one minister, would symbolise the end of the
idea of an ‘anti-austerity government of the Left’. Moreover, this is a
party of the Right, one that is particularly concerned to protect the
‘hard core’ of the state apparatus (it will be important to keep a
watchful eye over whatever cabinet portfolio it might get). It will be no
surprise if its first demands are for the ministry of defence or public
order, though it seems that it will not get them.” (Relevant
predictions
from Jim.)
January 26, 2015Populism II
David Frum does a good job at
explaining
why the new populist upsurge isn’t an intrinsically rightist phenomenon:
They aren’t necessarily superconservative. They often don’t think in
ideological terms at all. But they do strongly feel that life in this
country used to be better for people like them—and they want that older
country back.
You hear from people like them in many other democratic countries too.
Across Europe, populist parties are delivering a message that combines
defense of the welfare state with skepticism about immigration; that
denounces the corruption of parliamentary democracy and also the risks
of global capitalism. Some of these parties have a leftish flavor, like
Italy’s Five Star Movement. Some are rooted to the right of center, like
the U.K. Independence Party. Some descend from neofascists, like
France’s National Front. Others trace their DNA to Communist parties,
like Slovakia’s governing Direction–Social Democracy.
These populists seek to defend what the French call “acquired
rights”—health care, pensions, and other programs that benefit older
people — against bankers and technocrats who endlessly demand austerity;
against migrants who make new claims and challenge accustomed ways;
against a globalized market that depresses wages and benefits. In the
United States, they lean Republican because they fear the Democrats want
to take from them and redistribute to Americans who are newer, poorer,
and in their view less deserving—to “spread the wealth around,” in
candidate Barack Obama’s words to “Joe the Plumber” back in 2008. Yet
they have come to fear more and more strongly that their party does not
have their best interests at heart.
It’s built for compromise, delusion, and heart-ache. (Interesting, of
course, nonetheless.)
December 30, 2015Quotable (#197)
This
interesting interview with Michael Glennon on “double government”
concludes with one of the most confused self-abolishing meanderings ever
to see print:
The ultimate problem is the pervasive political ignorance on the part
of the American people. And indifference to the threat that is emerging
from these concealed institutions. That is where the energy for reform
has to come from: the American people. Not from government. Government
is very much the problem here. The people have to take the bull by the
horns. And that’s a very difficult thing to do, because the ignorance is
in many ways rational. There is very little profit to be had in learning
about, and being active about, problems that you can’t affect, policies
that you can’t change.
The utter nothingness of that paragraph says something important in
itself. Roughly:
Sadly, the kind of things that need to happen can’t possibly happen, which doesn’t suggest the problem is being taken very seriously.
All that’s needed is for people to wake up simply doesn’t cut it,
when — at the very same time — you know beyond all serious question that
they won’t.
ADDED (for obvious relevance):
October 19, 2016Through the Mirror
The articulate Left
comes
close to capturing NRx from the other side, mapping out a persuasive
genealogy (through games theory and public choice analysis). The final
line of this piece gets closest:
It is the logical endgame of a dark political vision crafted in
opposition to democratic advances; the realisation of a strange freedom
which lies at the root of the neoliberal dystopia, from which the
political establishment offers no deliverance.
… except, they think counter-democratic darkness is already in power, in
the guise of ‘neoliberalism’, and that the populist political charade,
with its 40%+ state absorption of economic product, financial central
planning, and publicly-promoted egalitarian evangelism, is an outcome
compatible with the triumph of a disillusioned right. It seems an absurd
sticking point to reach — that in the end, we can’t even agree about who
is ruling the world.
April 25, 2015Neuro-Politics
Woah:
Darren Schreiber, a political neuroscientist at the University of
Exeter in the United Kingdom, first performed brain scans on 82 people
participating in a risky gambling task, one in which holding out for
more money increases your possible rewards, but also your possible
losses. Later, cross-referencing the findings with the participants’
publicly available political party registration information, Schreiber
noticed something astonishing: Republicans, when they took the same
gambling risk, were activating a different part of the brain than
Democrats.
Republicans were using the right amygdala, the center of the brain’s
threat response system. Democrats, in contrast, were using the insula,
involved in internal monitoring of one’s feelings. Amazingly, Schreiber
and his colleagues write that this test predicted 82.9 percent of the
study subjects’ political party choices — considerably better, they
note, than a simple model that predicts your political party affiliation
based on the affiliation of your parents.
When you consider what hereditarian realism makes of “the affiliation of
your parents” (with its massive confounding effect when brought into
comparison with neurological characteristics) the level of correlation
looks even more preposterous.
(The
insula sounds
like an intrinsically leftist neurological structure, I mean — does ‘feels
monitoring’ really count as doing anything? Radical insulectomy in
exchange for blockchain credits and Neocameral residency privileges has to
be worth a test.)
(Via.)
December 4, 2015Modernity in a Nutshell
Two revolutions:
(1) Techno-economic self-propelling change obsolesces ever wider swathes
of humanity on a steepening curve. Capital (i.e. techno-commercial
synthesis) tendentially autonomizes. For humans, there are ever more
intriguing opportunities for synergistic attachment, on new terms, but the
trend is — to put it very mildly — ‘challenging’.
(2) Jacobin political violence, modeled on the French Revolution, provides
the basis for demands aimed at a redistribution of the (capitalist)
productive spoils through explicit extortion. All socio-political history
in the modern epoch falls into compliance with this pattern. It coincides
quite exactly with ‘democracy’ in its modernist usage. Universal Basic
Income is its natural telos.
To the extent that there has been an equilibrium between these twin
processes, it is
coming
apart. All the pol-economic innovations of recent years, on the Left and
Right, are indicators of this accelerating disintegration.
So the options are these:
Both (1) and (2) is the Status Quo (delusion).
Neither (1) or (2) is Reaction (also delusion).
(1) against (2) is the Neo-Modern Right.
(2) against (1) is the Neo-Modern Left.
Those are the only slots available.
Fernandez concludes:
The technological revolution is going to pose increasingly serious
challenges to nearly every Western social democratic society. People are
either going to be really angry when they discover there’s no patronage
or angrier still when they discover they have to provide the “basic
income” for everybody else. Only one thing is relatively certain: the
solution to these problems won’t be found in the ideologies of the early
20th century.
(It’s a
theme.)
April 8, 2016Twitter cuts (#122)
This is what the rancorous Brexit controversy — and catabolic geopolitics
in general — looks like when the option between integrative connection and
disintegrative disconnection is elaborated, without reference to the
diagonal line (of connective disintegration).
Zizek is worth
referencing
on the same conundrum.
June 26, 2016Wagner’s Law
Wagner’s Law
is a critical concept for political-philosophy. In the words of Adolph
Wagner (1835–1917, as cited by Wikipedia): “The advent of modern
industrial society will result in increasing political pressure for social
progress and increased allowance for social consideration by industry.” It
thus explains why the right has to be radical, if it isn’t to be a sad
joke, because snowballing socialism is the ‘natural’ trend.
Here‘s Will Wilkinson abasing himself before it abjectly, and Arnold Kling
showing
considerably more spine. Also,
commentary
from Scott Sumner.
Nothing that falls short of a serious assault upon the real process
formalized by Wagner’s Law merits the label ‘right-wing’. Conservatism,
for instance, is merely decelerated leftism. Wilkinson is positively
enthused by that. The Outer Right is everything that definitely isn’t.
What, then, is required to practically defy Wagner’s Law? NRx abstractly
designates the project. Neocameralism goes into the details.
If XS expected the Alt-Right to break from the modern demotic meta-regime
whose signature is Wagner’s Law, it would celebrate the fact. It doesn’t,
sadly, expect anything of the kind. That’s why the Alt-Right isn’t ‘us’ or
even — strictly speaking — a right-wing political phenomenon at all.
November 14, 2016
Trump’s Warsaw Uprising
For supporters and detractors alike, U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s July
6 speech in Warsaw was immediately recognized as the most important of his
presidency to date. Since so much was crystallized by it – or perhaps
brought to a head – it is impossible to begin making sense of this
event without some preliminary broad-brush outline of its context.
The new dominant ideological polarity, on both sides of the Atlantic,
exhibits remarkably similar characteristics. Perhaps most strikingly, it
displays the culmination of an ideological-class inversion, decades
in coming, which has aligned the masses – and in particular the native
working class – with the right, and social elites with the left. In
consequence, populism has been firmly locked into place as a phenomenon of
the right. Even those classical liberal stances most tightly bound to the
advancement of commercial liberty, and thus most firmly associated with
the conservative right, have not escaped radical scrambling, whether
through re-assessment, marginalization, or complete inversion.
In this new and disconcerting epoch, business interest has ceased to be
any kind of index for right affiliation, and popular opposition to
free-trade no longer defines a substantial bloc on the left. If anything,
the opposite is now true. Those on the left or right (including this
author) who stubbornly maintain that ideological orientation to capitalism
is the fundamental determinant of meaningful political polarity find
themselves cast into a position of unplugged anachronism. The stunning
magnitude of this transition should not be underestimated.
This is not, of course, a development without alarming precedent. From at
least one perspective – which is by no means necessarily hysterical – the
boundary between right-wing populism and fascism can be difficult to
discern. Insofar as the affective context to Trump’s speech is concerned,
this is without serious question the most important element.
Many books could be devoted to the new terms of political controversy, and
almost certainly will be. Each of the still-unstable new camps is highly
heterogeneous, and cross-cut with a variety of complex strategic interests
regarding the way the great rift between them is described, so every
attempt at articulation will be contested, often fiercely. Yet even amid
the present shock and confusion, some basic structure is discernible.
Beside the political opposition between left and right – in
its present, re-adjusted, sense – it is not hard to recognize a
corresponding globalist and nationalist emphasis, pitting universalists
against particularists: defenders of the contemporary world’s
institutional order against its opponents, or partisans of cosmopolitan
openness against parochial localists, according to taste. Because,
concretely, the insurgency marks a crisis of international social
management, and of confidence in established, credentialized elites, to
describe it as a struggle between technocrats and
populists is roughly as neutral as we can get. Such terms are
employed here as mere labels, rather than as judgments, or explanations.
No extravagant disparagement is directed at either, relative to the other.
The constituencies they name have substantial depths, exceeding any facile
definition. They are obscure social masses in conflict, rather than
competing ideas.
With Trump’s arrival in Warsaw, two pairs of profoundly antagonistic
political constituencies – one American, the other European – were mapped
across each other, resonantly. Populist Red America had found its local
champion in Warsaw, versus that of technocratic Blue America, in Berlin.
These alignments were not seriously questioned, from any side. That the
open-door policy of Angela Merkel’s Germany, exemplifying its defense of
EU institutions and traditional policy stances in general, were in
fundamental affinity with the ideological intuitions of Blue America, were
self-evident to all parties. Reciprocally, the identification of Trumpian
Red America with the Polish stance of EU dissidence – on the immigration
issue most pointedly – was taken as self-evident. Even before the visit,
to those paying attention, the Polish regime had become an icon of
ethno-nationalist popular revolt against technocratic transnational
government, evangelical secularism, and mass migration. Everything
clicked.
It is difficult to be confident about how much lucid strategy under-pinned
the event. In all matters Trump, the default assumption tends to be
not very much. Given Trump’s characteristic bluster, and unusual
comfort with low demagoguery, such dismissal is to be expected. This is
not at all to suggest it is acute. If political instincts tuned almost to
perfection played no part, then divine intervention – or some blessing of
fortune functionally indistinguishable from it – is the next most
plausible hypothesis.
The speech itself was rhetorically pedestrian, and even clumsy. It is hard
to imagine any single sentence being remembered from it, unless for
purposes of dry historical illustration. The language was tailored
entirely to its immediate audience – both local and international – rather
than to the delectation of future generations. The speech was, in this
respect among others, a thing of the social media age, tuned to
instantaneous feedback. It manifestly schmoozed, even by the dismal
standards of such orations. The rapport it struck with its local listeners
tipped into collective self-congratulation.
Wow, we really are great seems to have been the consensus, among
all directly involved. To those disinclined to identify with the speaker
and throng in question, this can only have been annoying. Enemy rallies
generally are, as conservatives learnt during the Obama years. The
untroubled self-love of one’s foes, exuberantly manifested, is a truly
horrible thing to see. Naturally enough, Trump has been no more distressed
by this fact than his predecessor.
There is one further, and indispensable contextual element that needs to
be raised before proceeding to the media reaction – which was, of course,
the deepest level of the event – and that is the ‘Jew Thing.’
Everyone knows, at some level, we have to start talking about that, in
some way, even those who – entirely understandably – really don’t
want to. Ignoring the topic is a disappearing option, because there’s no
reason, at all, to think it’s going away. Perhaps it was mere
coincidence that Trump’s visit took him deep into holocaust territory,
which, again, nobody really seems to want to mention, even though it was
an explicit thread within his speech. It was, however, structurally
essential to everything that followed. Unmistakably, even as it went
unacknowledged, the Jewish dimension added greatly to the feverish
intensity of the response.
The extreme sensitivity to Jewish socio-political anxieties that has
prevailed in the postwar West is notably losing its edge, in a way that
doesn’t seem plausibly reversible. At least in part, this is a consequence
of the generalization of identity politics, predominantly under leftist
direction, which has the peculiar cultural effect – in its late stages –
that special cases are becoming increasingly difficult to make.
Victimological status bursts its banks, among conditions of unbounded, and
symmetrical, ethnic paranoia. Lurid grievance anecdotes – tailored to
every imaginable social niche – are always in abundance, fed by Internet
supply-lines. Persecution narratives explode from all sides. Demands to
“check one’s privilege” have proven awkwardly mobile, and reversible, as
they have been increasingly normalized, even to the point – in this
particular example – of overt, caustic antisemitism.
The result is nothing less than a crisis of the diasporic Jewish left,
whose argumentative edge has been blunted by decades of exceptional
immunity to unflinching criticism. Defensive cultural strategies that
have, for half a century, been accepted, unquestioned as a special
ethno-historical privilege have quite suddenly become subjected to
irreverent public inspection.
Everyone wants a piece of ethnic survivalism now.
This is the key to what happened in Warsaw. It is evoked as the subtext to
Peter Beinart’s
wail
of distress, when exposed to Trump’s line: “The fundamental question of
our time is whether the West has the will to survive.” Beinart was quite
correct in recognizing – horrified – the resonance of this sentence with
the most extreme elements of the present transition, but that was no help
to him. He had been ambushed.
Trump made his speech explicitly about ethnic survival, disarmingly
aligned with WWII Jewish victimage, with heroic Polish resistance to
foreign military occupation, and finally – most provocatively – with the
contemporary situation of the West. It naturally helped him,
overwhelmingly, that the Warsaw Uprising was an insurrection
against actual Nazis. This provided a vaccination against the normal
workings of Godwin’s Law.
You know who else wanted ethnic survival? Adolf Hitler! — We have
reached the core of the event now. There was simply no way this response,
which was the only one that mattered to Trump’s enemies on the left, could conceivably be made to operate on this occasion. What was being
celebrated was the Poles surviving Nazism, then communism, and now –
infinitely awkwardly – again the Germans, this time cast in the
role of principal executors for a transnational political order promoting
mandatory multiculturalism, secular technocracy, and the culture of
Western historical self-flagellation. The result, almost inevitably, was a
rout.
It took no great flights of oratorical bedazzlement to triumph on this
battlefield. The situation did almost everything. Trump’s maddened
enemies
blundered into the trap, and were shattered. The left, for whom
of course the West has no right to survive, found itself
ideologically isolated to a degree that was unprecedented under the
present administration. Their tactical allies in the ‘Never-Trump’
conservative establishment evaporated. Hardened Trump skeptics, such as
Rod Dreher,
David French, and
Jonah Goldberg
contributed their talents to hunting down the fleeing leftist remnants.
David Frum
only held his ground in opposition by arguing that Trump was personally
unworthy of his own speech.
Beinart came out of the trauma worst. He will forever be haunted by his
own definition of the matter at stake, which was immediately judged from
all sides to be an unforced production of Alt-Right propaganda: “The West
is a racial and religious term. To be considered Western, a country must
be largely Christian (preferably Protestant or Catholic) and largely
white.” Across social media, much nodding ensued, from constituencies
whose approval he would surely least appreciate.
Jonah Goldberg refused explicitly to follow what was now so vividly
exhibited as the road of obligate European ethnomasochism and
civilizational self-hatred: “What’s ironic is that Peter’s desk-pounding
outrage about Trump’s talk of the West is oh-so Western. The West’s
tolerance for anti-Western philosophies is a fairly unique feature of the
West itself. We love to beat ourselves up.” Defense of the West,
therefore, is taken up as a cause inclusive even of its critics.
It is Rod Dreher, however, who best captures what Trump consolidated in
Warsaw, perhaps for the first time. He
says, comparing Trump to his leftist critics:
However much Trump fosters aversion among many conservatives, he also
provokes events that remind conservatives why they hate liberals (using
these terms in their degenerate contemporary American sense). Plenty of
conservatives hate Trump, and will continue to hate him, probably until
the end of his second term in office, if not longer. But the
way liberals hate him poses an obvious existential threat to all
forms of conservative life. As Martin Niemöller never quite said,
first they came for Trump and it was pretty damn obvious I was next in
the queue.
CHAPTER FOUR - LIBERALISM
Language and Liberalism
The inversion of the meaning of liberalism over the last 150 years has to
be counted among the world’s most remarkable ideological facts. The
coinage of the term ‘classical liberalism’ in recent times, as an utterly
marginalized linguistic act of dissent, attests to the comprehensiveness
and radicality of the change that has occurred. It has surely been
essential to the momentum of the historical tide that it has usurped the
most elementary cultural tools required for its articulation. What has
taken place cannot even be discussed without obscure struggle in a
drifting, semiotic fog.
Daniel B. Klein of the Adam Smith Institute has formulated a lucid
response to this ideological event, in a
website entirely devoted to the
re-ordering of the language of liberalism during the crucial period from
1880-1940. Combining ngrams, historical quotations, and reflections (from
the author), it depicts with unprecedented clarity the process through
which the Old Liberalism lost its tongue.
July 9, 2014Slippage
Watch
the whole of modern political confusion expose itself in a micro-tremor:
Locke’s commitment both to voluntary religion and voluntary,
contractual government are mutually reinforcing. Just as people join and
remain in religious communities by their consent, so they enter and
sustain political communities. “Men being, as has been said, by Nature
all free, equal, and independent,” Locke writes in the
Second Treatise, “no one can be put out of this estate
and subjected to the political power of another without his own
consent.” If the members of a faith community believe their church is
failing to uphold its spiritual responsibilities,
they have a right to leave — without fear of reprisal.
Likewise for a political society: If its members believe the political
authority is failing to safeguard their natural rights — their “lives,
liberty, and estates” —
it forfeits the right to govern.
(XS emphasis.)
“Likewise”? Yet one leaves a church, but replaces a
government. The fall from liberty into democracy takes only a single false
step. With a little more consistency, the case for Exit-based control of
government would have been solidly made centuries ago (intrinsically
secure against all Rousseauistic perversion). Still, it’s not too late to
do that now.
February 16, 2017Quote note (#344)
Cowen:
… Here’s another way to put my concern. The percentage of global GDP
which is held in relatively non-free countries, such as China, has been
rising relative to the share of global GDP held in the freer countries.
I suspect we are underrating the noxious effects of that
development.
If freedom has become disconnected from economic competence, then
classical liberalism is dead.
(The XS suspicion, however, is that Cowen’s sense of “freedom” has been so
corrupted by social democracy that it’s incapable of doing the work he
wants it to here.)
March 22, 2017
Psycho Politics
Classical liberals are sitting-out the end of the world. Sitting out,
mostly, in the way Norma Bates sat out her son’s exploration of
psychological diversity.
Norman would know
why she’s not moving, if he could only remember.
Before even starting, we’re deep into the identity problem, and actually
several. ‘Liberalism’ is the most profoundly corrupted word in political
history. Without any exaggeration, rhetorical license, or metaphorical
latitude, it’s the leathery sliced-off face of something murdered long ago
which now serves to disguise a foaming chainsaw-wielding maniac sharing
none of its DNA. That psycho-killer usage needs to be put to rest before
even getting to Bates. Liberalism, from this point forward, means
nothing at all like state-happy progressivism. It is defined, instead, as
the polar opposite of socialism. Its sole commanding value is liberty. It
is individualist, only ever guardedly traditionalist, commercially and
industrially oriented, strategically neglectful of care,
skeptical in respect to all purported public agencies, and rigorously
economical in respect to every dimension of government. It had a truly
terrible 20th century, and right now things aren’t looking any
better.
At no time in recent history have liberal concerns been less relevant to
public policy – even as foils, or ‘neoliberal’ bogeymen. It might be
necessary to return to the 1930s to find a time of comparable eclipse.
They aren’t being listened to, and they certainly aren’t the
object of any animated conversations, unless to slip into social
media banter as the butt of jokes. Their concerns seem eccentric, and even
identifiably dated, to some point between the end of the 1970s
and the Baby Bush quagmire. Where the right once nursed a secret
ambivalence for Pinochet, out of admiration for the Chicago Boys, today
it’s only interested in the
helicopters.
It isn’t – mostly – the gender and generational confusion of the Norma /
Norman sub-personalities that make libertarians so Batesian. It’s the
third alter, who goes missing in the movie but not in the
novel. Norman
intermittently mistakes himself for Normal. Normal is the one who
thinks he’s just like everyone else. Liberalism does exactly the same
thing. It goes mad by thinking of itself as normal, when really it’s
WEIRD.
Liberal universalism has aged badly in recent years. More specifically, it
has aged badly in two very different directions. To the left, liberalism
has been consumed by universalism, becoming a liberty-deriding globalist
monster, while to the right it has been thoroughly demoralized, as
recognition has dawned about what its universalism actually means. To
anyone still trembling to some slight residual death-flutter of the
liberal impulse, the discussion quickly becomes nearly intolerable at this
point. Withdrawal, psychic-shattering, and other manifestations of
traumatized craziness ensue.
Everything that the 2016 US Presidential Election was about is germane.
Political correctness and the Overton Window in general, race,
immigration, gender, and social norms in particular, every part
of it caught upon an aspect of the liberal agony. Donald Trump was, in the
strict sense – and not just the depraved one – a drastically
illiberal candidate. In his campaign, public humiliation of
universalism amounted almost to a platform. American politics had become
nakedly tribal.
That American dream girl who you were talking to over dinner? The one who
might have been the future? She bled-out from multiple knife-wounds in the
shower. You killed her, Norman. Yes, you did. It’s hard to
believe, obviously, but we’re going to explain how.
To begin with the most heated dimension of identity politics, liberalism
has a race problem. Liberals tend to like immigrants a lot, while
immigrants don’t like liberals very much at all. Some quantitative
evidence for this is provided by Hal Pashler, in a (2013)
paper
on U.S. Immigrants’ Attitudes Toward Libertarian Values, which
discovers:
According to a wide range of metrics, foreign-born residents expressed
significantly lower support for limited government than the native-born
population. Such effects would almost certainly been strengthened further
if the latter category had itself been broken-down by ethnicity. When
Americans were offered a binary choice between smaller or larger
government, an expansion of government was favored by only 27% of Whites,
but by 55% of Asians, 64% of Blacks, and 73% of Hispanics. More precise
ethnic categories only sharpen the pattern. The
Hajnal Line, which divides Europe’s most committed (north-western) out-breeders from
their more tribalistic neighbors, summarizes a gradient of individualism,
among other distinctive liberal traits. Emmanuel Todd’s
ethnography
of family types and their associated ideological tendencies binds
liberalism to the (North-West European) ‘Absolute Nuclear Family.’ Common
law traditions are peculiar to Anglo-Saxons. Weber and Sombart ethnically
identify capitalist dispositions with Protestants and (modern) Jews. It
begins to seem extremely unlikely that liberals would represent a random
sample of the world’s peoples.
Liberal gender-skew is scarcely less striking.
Did Women’s Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government?
ask
John Lott and Lawrence Kenny. It certainly looks that way:
The era of big government and that of female emancipation don’t seem to be
easily distinguishable. In the incautious
words
of Peter Thiel:
The hideously compelling but utterly illiberal conclusion seems to be that
women and non-whites have used their rising political influence to
massively expand the scope of government. To which a third factor can be
added, which is marriage. Quite simply, singles are communist maniacs,
comparatively speaking. In regard to US partisan politics, Steve Sailer
calls
it ‘the marriage gap.’ It isn’t small. In the 2012 Presidential Election,
married women (in general) broke for Romney over Obama by 55%,
married white women by 63%, and married white men by 67%. (Romney’s share
among black single women was 2%.)
As liberal demographic, political, and social policies have been
entrenched, classical liberals, steering the course of modern social
evolution from a position modestly to the left of the old monarchical and
ecclesiastical establishment, eventually became libertarians, railing
ineffectually against the plunge into socialist tyranny from the position
of a stranded, alienated, and derided outer right. Throughout the whole of
this process, liberalism has consisted – almost without exception – of
white men. These have typically been white men in denial, admittedly.
Across the entire sweep of world history there has never been a population
group more neglectful of its own privileges. And thus they destroyed
themselves.
Anyone who has reached the “Oh, my God, the stereotypes!” stage with this
is onto something. That has been a central part of the learning process.
All the stereotypes are true (basically). That’s
science,
too, if it helps, though it rarely does. Unless inflated, or dogmatized,
beyond the range of usefulness as broad epistemological heuristics,
stereotypes have vastly greater reliability than – for instance –
ideologically-motivated cognitive commitments. What’s more, classical
liberals used to know that. It’s a Burkean expectation.
Stereotypes are spontaneous social products, like natural languages,
common law, and metallic money. To say all this explains why classical
liberals are conservatives, characterized by a principled acceptance of
the way things have turned out. What had been, historically, a
reasonably sanguine view of centralized state government was based on how
little of it there had ever been. The mere existence of the gargantuan
social-democratic welfarist state makes such conservative liberalism (or
liberal conservatism) impossible. Radically frustrated revolutionary
libertarianism takes its place.
It’s easy to see what pushes Bates over the edge. He’d thought he was
Normal, but it turns out he’s a WASP. By a further mad twist, he
recognizes the one thing WASPs will never do is defend their own culture –
that’s an essential ethnic tradition. Libertarianism has been crazily
WASPish that way, when he looks at it, which he can’t for long. It’s an
intractable paradox that leads through incoherence into fragmentation. To
have protected his identity would have been something only another could
have done. Perhaps his mother would look after him? But she’s dead.
The identification of classical liberalism with WASP culture is a strong
approximation. Few socio-historical correlations are more robust, but the
coincidence can only be statistical. There are socialist WASPs, and
classical liberal non-WASPs, although not enough of either to seriously
disrupt the pattern. When the French, in particular, refer to Anglo-Saxons
stereotypically, they know what they are talking about, and so does
anybody else who is paying attention. Hubert Védrine
puts
it best:
It all makes sense from outside, but for WASP culture itself – which is to
say for liberalism – identity politics is madness. That leaves it
with nowhere to go. The leather-face schizo-Maoism of the contemporary
Anglophone left is not any kind of plausible option, but neither is
anything opening up on the popular right. As the Alt-Right consolidates
its passionate affair with identity, it sounds ever more like Hubert
Védrine. Individualism is derided. Its suspicion of free-trade owes more
to Friedrich List than to the Scottish Enlightenment. Its criticism of
labor arbitrage is often almost indistinguishable from that familiar from
socialist traditions, marked by the same current of moral outrage at the
fact that Capital – despite itself being competitively disciplined by
footloose consumers – is permitted to shop around for its human resources.
Wage competition, and even price competition more generally, is an
increasingly common object of attack. At its dynamic, racial edge the
Alt-Right promotes solidarity among Whites, or
Europeans, as if either could ever be a WASP thing.
Europe is what liberalism has always sought to escape. Populism
demands grievance politics, which means default antipathy to
market dominant minorities, and thus – in the Western context – an irrepressible inclination to
anti-Semitism. None of this describes a place that even maddened liberals
can go.
Because the word ‘fascism’ has been so ruined by incontinent polemical
usage, it is difficult to employ without apparent rhetorical over-reach.
This is unfortunate, because in its cold, technical sense, the word is not
even merely convenient, but even invaluable. It literally means
the politics of bundling. Fasces are sticks bound
together. Liberals are essentially defined by their dissent from that. If
WASP culture has a core, it is loose association. There’s no real
possibility of simply sticking it back together. Pirates and cowboys don’t
do national solidarity. That would be a different culture altogether.
As for Bates, he knows his mother is dead by now, and even that he killed
her – kills anyone like her. Bad thoughts flood in. It’s
difficult to move on, but at least he has confidence in his own inviolable
non-aggression principle. There’s no way it could have been as they say,
because he wouldn’t hurt anyone. Not even a fly.
SECTION A - REPUBLICANISM AND CONSTITUTIONS
CHAPTER ONE - SOVEREIGNTY
Quibbles with Moldbug
To be a reactionary, minimally speaking, requires no more than a
recognition that things are going to hell. As the source of decay is
traced ever further back, and attributed to ever more deeply-rooted – and
securely mainstream — sociopolitical assumptions, the reactionary attitude
becomes increasingly extreme. If innovative elements are introduced into
either the diagnosis or the proposed remedy, a neo-reactionary mentality
is born.
As the United States, along with the world that it has built, careers into
calamity, neo-reactionary extremism is embarrassingly close to becoming a
vogue. If evidence is needed, consider the Vacate Movement, a rapidly
growing dissident faction within the 0.0000001%. This is a development
that would have been scarcely imaginable, were it not for the
painstakingly crafted, yet rhetorically effervescent provocations of
Mencius Moldbug.
From Moldbug, immoderate neo-reaction has learnt many essential and
startling facts about the genealogy and tendency of history’s central
affliction, newly baptized the Cathedral. It has been liberated
from the mesmerism of ‘democratic universalism’ – or evangelical
ultra-puritanism – and trained back towards honest (and thus forbidden)
books. It has re-learnt class analysis, of unprecedented explanatory
power. Much else could have been added, before arriving at our
destination: the schematic outline for a ‘neocameral’ alternative to the
manifestly perishing global political order. (On a trivial etiquette
matter: Moldbug politely asks to be addressed as ‘Mencius’ — comparable
requests by Plato Jiggabug and Siddhartha Moldbucket have been evaded
too.)
Moldbug scrupulously distances his proposals from any hint of
revolutionary agitation, or even the mildest varieties of civil
disobedience. Neocameralism is not designed to antagonize, but rather to
restore order to social bodies that have squandered it, by
drafting a framework compatible with the long-lost art of effective
government. (‘Long-lost’, that is, to the West – the Singapore example,
among those of other city states and special economic zones, is never far
removed.) Neocameralism would not overthrow anything, but rather arise
amongst ruins. It is a solution awaiting the terminal configuration of a
problem.
The neocameral program proceeds roughly as follows:
Phase-1: Constructively disciplined lamentation
Phase-2: Civilization collapses
Phase-3: Re-boot to a modernized form of absolute monarchy, in which
citizens are comprehensively stripped of all historically-accumulated
political rights
Despite its obvious attractions to partisans of liberty, this program is
not without its dubious features, a few of which can be touched upon here
whilst rehearsing the Moldbug case for Neocameral government in slightly
greater detail. Stated succinctly and preliminarily, our reservations
drift into focus when that guy on a white horse appears. Where exactly
does he come from?
To answer ‘Carlyle’ would be easy, and not exactly inaccurate, but it
would also miss the structural coherence of the issue. Moldbug refuses to
call his neocameral dictator a ‘national CEO’ (which he is), preferring to
describe him as a ‘monarch’ (which – as a non-dynastic executive appointee
— he isn’t), for reasons both stylistic and substantial. Stylistically,
royalism is a provocation, and a dramatization of reactionary allegiance.
Substantially, it foregrounds the question of sovereignty.
Moldbug’s political philosophy is founded upon a revision to the
conception of property, sufficient to support the assertion that
sovereign power is properly understood as the owner of a country.
It is only at this level of political organization that real property
rights – i.e. protections – are sustained.
The sovereign power (sovereign corporation, or ‘sovcorp’), alone, is able
to ensure its own property rights. Its might and rights are absolutely
identical, and from this primary identity subordinate rights (to
‘secondary property’) cascade down through the social hierarchy.
Neocameralism is nothing but the systematic, institutional recognition of
this reality. (Whether it is, in fact, a ‘reality’ is a question we shall
soon proceed to.)
Perhaps surprisingly, Moldbug’s conclusions can be presented in terms that
recovering libertarians have found appealing:
In order to take a step back from this vision, towards its foundations, it
is useful to scrutinize its building blocks. When Moldbug defines property
as “any stable structure of monopoly control” what is really meant by
‘control’? It might seem simple enough. To control something is to use, or
make use of it — to put it to work, such that a desired outcome is in fact
achieved. ‘Property’ would be glossed as
exclusive right of use, or instrumental utilization, conceived
with sufficient breadth to encompass consumption, and perhaps (we will
come to this), donation or exchange.
Complications quickly arise. ‘Control’ in this case would involve
technical competence, or the ability to make something work. If control
requires that one can use something effectively, then it demands
compliance with natural fact (through techno-scientific understanding and
practical skills). Even consumption is a type of use. Is this historical
variable – vastly distant from intuitive notions of sovereignty – actually
suited to a definition of property?
It might be realistic to conceive property through control, and control
through technical competence, but it would be hard to defend as an advance
in formalism. Since this problem thoroughly infuses the topic of ‘might’,
or operational sovereignty, it is also difficult to isolate, or
parenthesize. Moldbug’s frequent, enthusiastic digressions into the
practicalities of crypto-locked military apparatuses attest strongly to
this. The impression begins to emerge that the very possibility of
sovereign property is bound to an irreducibly fuzzy, historically dynamic,
and empirically intricate investigation into the micro-mechanics of power,
dissolving into an acid fog of Clauswitzean ‘friction’ (or ineliminable
unpredictability).
More promising, by far – for the purposes of tractable argument — is a
strictly formal or contractual usage of ‘control’ to designate the
exclusive right to free disposal or
commercial alienation. Defined this way, ownership is a legal
category, co-original with the idea of contract, referring to those things
which one has the right to trade (based on natural law). Property is
essentially marketable. It cannot exist unless it can be alienated through
negotiation. A prince who cannot trade away his territory does not ‘own’
it in any sense that matters.
Moldbug seems to acknowledge this, in at least three ways.
Firstly, his formalization of sovereign power, through conversion into
sovereign stock, commercializes it. Within the neocameral regime, power
takes the form of revenue-yielding property, available for
free disposal by those who wield it. That is the sole basis for
the corporate analogy. If sovereign stock were not freely disposable, its
‘owners’ would be mere stewards, subject to obligations, non-alienable
political responsibilities, or administrative duties that demonstrate with
absolute clarity the subordination to a higher sovereignty. (That is,
broadly speaking, the current situation, and inoffensively conventional
political theory.)
Secondly, the neocameral state exists within a
patchwork, or system of interactions, through which they compete for population,
and in which peaceful (or commercial) redistributions — including
takeovers and break-ups — are facilitated. Unless sovereign stock can be
traded within the patchwork, it is not property at all. This in
turn indicates that ‘internal’ positive legislation, as dictated by the
domestic ‘sovereign’, is embedded within a far more expansive normative
system, and the definition of ‘property’ cannot be exhausted by its
local determination within the neocameral micro-polis. As Moldbug
repeatedly notes, an introverted despotism that violated broader patchwork
norms – such as those governing free exit — could be reliably expected to
suffer a collapse of sovereign stock value (which implies that the
substance of sovereign stock is systemically, rather than locally,
determined). If the entire neocameral state is
disciplined through the patchwork, how real can its local
sovereignty be? This systemic disciplining or subversion of local
sovereignty, it should be noted, is the sole attraction of the neocameral
schema to
supporters
of dynamic geography (who want nothing more than for the national
government to become the patchwork system’s bitch).
Thirdly (and relatedly), neocameralism is floated as a model for
experimental government, driven cybernetically towards effectiveness by
the same types of feedback mechanisms that control ‘secondary’
corporations. In particular, population traffic between neocameral states
is conceived as a fundamental regulator, continuously measuring the
functionality of government, and correcting it in the direction of
attractiveness. The incentive structure of the neocameral regime – and
thus its claim to practical rationality — rests entirely upon this. Once
again, however, it is evidently the radical limitation of local
sovereignty, rather than its unconstrained expression, which promises to
make such governments work. Free exit – to take the single most important
instance — is a rule imposed at a higher level than the national
sovereign, operating as a natural law of the entire patchwork. Without
free exit, a neocameral state is no more than a parochial despotism. The
absolute sovereign of the state must choose to comply with a rule
he did not legislate … something is coming unstuck here (it’s time to send
that white horse to the biodiesel tanks).
Neocameralism necessarily commercializes sovereignty, and in doing so it
accommodates power to natural law. Sovereign stock (‘primary property’)
and ‘secondary property’ become commercially inter-changeable, dissolving
the original distinction, whilst local sovereignty is rendered compliant
with the wider commercial order, and thus becomes a form of constrained
‘secondary sovereignty’ relative to the primary or absolute sovereignty of
the system itself. Final authority bleeds out into the catallactic
ensemble, the agora, or commercium, where
what can really happen is decided by natural law. It is this to
which sovereign stockholders, if they are to be effective, and to
prosper, must defer.
The fundamental point, and the reason why the pretender on the white horse
is so misleading, is that sovereignty cannot, in principle, inhere in a
particular social agent – whether individual, or group. This is best
demonstrated in reference to the concept of natural law (which James
Donald
outlines with
unsurpassed brilliance). When properly understood, or articulated, natural
law cannot possibly be violated. Putting your hand into a fire,
and being burnt, does not defy the natural law that temperatures beyond a
certain range cause tissue damage and pain. Similarly, suppressing private
property, and producing economic cataclysm, does not defy the natural law
that human economic behavior is sensitive to incentives.
Positive law, as created by legislators, takes the form: do (or don’t do)
this. Violations will be punished.
Natural law, as discovered by any rational being, takes the form:
do what thou wilt and accept the consequences. Rewards and
punishments are intrinsic to it. It cannot be defied, but only
misunderstood. It is therefore absolutely sovereign (Deus sive Natura). Like any other being, governments, however powerful, can only comply
with it, either through intelligent adaptation and flourishing, or through
ignorance, incompetence, degeneration, and death. To God-or-Nature it
matters not at all. Natural law is indistinguishable from the true
sovereign power which really decides what can work, and what doesn’t,
which can then – ‘secondarily’ — be learnt by rational beings, or not.
Moldbug knows this – really. He demonstrates it – to take just one highly
informative example — through his insistence that a neocameral state would
tend to tax at the Laffer optimum. That is to say, such a state would
prove its effectiveness by maximizing the return on sovereign property
in compliance with reality. It does not legislate the Laffer
curve, or choose for it to exist, but instead recognizes that it has been
discovered, and with it an aspect of natural law. Anything less, or other,
would be inconsistent with its legitimacy as a competent protector of
property. To survive, prosper, and even pretend to sovereignty, it can do
nothing else. Its power is delegated by commercium.
It is surely no coincidence that Cnut the Great has been described by
Norman Cantor as “the most effective king in Anglo-Saxon history.” As
Wikipedia
relates
his story:
Most importantly:
January 24, 2013Cnut the Great
According to legend, at least,
Cnut was the
wisest of all kings, precisely because he ironized the attribution of
sovereignty.
“Surely, Great King, you are ominipotent
Fnargl
himself!”
“Let us then
test
the claim, shall we?”
Modern macroeconomics is the systematized refusal to learn from this
story. Sovereignty does not rise above the waves.
March 3, 2016Twitter cuts (#52)
Responding to this (Outsideness) twitter-stream:
The transcendental self is not the empirical person, Kant argues,
though confusion of the two is a reliable anthropological fact. …
‘Sovereignty’ demands disciplined critique on exactly these lines.
Monarchical theater is (exactly) a naive image of ‘the sovereign’. …
Moldbug is clear that the ‘monarch’ (state CEO) is an agent of
sovereignty, and not the sovereign ‘himself’. … The LARPing loved by
romantic reaction, and derided by the Left, dwells entirely within this
rigorously identifiable philosophical error. … Sovereignty is no less a
profound philosophical enigma than the transcendental self, the prompt
for an exploration of vast difficulty. … “We know what a sovereign looks
like.” — It is scarcely possible to imagine a delusion of greater
absurdity.
Something of greater articulacy is clearly called for, but the kernel
would be unchanged. ‘Sovereignty’ is the translation of the transcendental
into the realm of political philosophy. This is why, even for atheists,
the Idea of Divine Right sovereign legitimacy is a superior point of
departure than mere charismatic leadership.
March 8, 2016Quotable (#176)
Stockman
on
the limits of power:
The Deep State can control Congress. It can control the state
bureaucracy, Wall Street and Big Business. It can even – usually –
control the voters. But it can’t control the credit cycle.
Cnut the Great
is the ancient hero of the Austrians, and
Nemesis
is their goddess.
June 29, 2016Scale-free Reaction
Kaplan
goes
full
Moldbug:
Unless some force can, against considerable odds, reinstitute hierarchy
… we will have more fluidity, more equality and therefore more anarchy
to look forward to. This is profoundly disturbing, because civilization
abjures anarchy. … without order — without hierarchy — there is
nothing.
Perhaps, in the field of international relations, Kaplan is
more Moldbug than Moldbug, presenting an uncompromisingly
hardline reactionary model of world order, completely undisturbed by
domestic considerations or even the slightest hint of libertarian descent.
If sovereignty is conserved globally, as well as nationally, a
worldwide Patchwork order looks as improbable as a stable constitutional
republic, and exit options evaporate. Scale-free Moldbuggian analysis
could prove more than a little blood-chilling.
April 18, 2013Transcendental Anarchy
This, from
NBS, is perfect.
Asked (by Garrett Gray): “What reason is there to think there’s an
irreducible anarchy between sovereigns?” he responds —
Suppose there is no anarchy between sovereigns. This means there is a
law governing sovereigns. Which means there is a sovereign over the
sovereigns. Which means that the sovereigns weren’t sovereign. Which is
a contradiction. Therefore there IS anarchy between sovereigns.
This insight is already the solid foundation of
IRT, but it’s surprising how few seem to clearly get it.
September 15, 2016
CHAPTER TWO - CONSTITUTIONS AND ALGORITHMIC GOVERNANCE
A Republic, If You Can Keep It
The interlocking achievements of Kurt Gödel, which revolutionized the
rigorous understanding of logic, arithmetic, and time, are not of a nature
that wins ready popular acclamation. There is nevertheless a broadly
factual story about him that has attained some notable level of
popularity, and it is one that connects suggestively with the core
concerns of his work. At the website of the Institute for Advanced Study
(where Gödel was based from 1940 until his death in 1978), Oskar
Morgenstern’s recollection of the episode in question
is recorded:
To the great advantage of intelligence on earth, Gödel did not in the end
disqualify himself from residence in the USA through this disastrously
over-accurate understanding of its constitution. Evidently, despite
everything that had happened by 1947, detailed attachment to the
constitution had not yet become a thought-crime.
Today, emphatic attachment to the US Constitution is restricted to the
decent i.e.
lunatic fringe of
the Outer Party, and even
crankier
outliers.
Hardcore libertarians
tend to dismiss it as a distraction, if not a malign incarnation of
statist degeneracy (when compared to the less Leviathan-compatible
Articles of Confederation). Reactionary realists of the Moldbug school (in
all their vast multitudes) are at least as dismissive, seeing it as little
more than a fetish object and evasion of the timeless practical question:
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? If constitutions are realistically indefensible, both in principle and
as a matter of brutally demonstrated historical fact, what significance
could they have to any cold-eyed analysis of power?
Since the overwhelmingly bulk of present USG activity is transparently
unconstitutional, the skeptical case largely makes itself. Presidents
mobilize congressional support to appoint Supreme Court justices whose
principal qualification for office is willingness to conspire in the
subversion of the constitution, to the deafening applause of a
pork-ravening electorate and their intermediary lobbies. How could that
plausibly be resisted? Perhaps that was Gödel’s point.
In fact, no one really knows what Gödel’s point was.
Jeffrey Kegler, who has examined the topic carefully, leaves it open. “Apparently, the
‘inconsistency’ noted by Gödel is simply that the Constitution provides
for its own amendment,”
suggests
a “gravely disappointed” Mark Dominus, who “had been hoping for something
brilliant and subtle that only Gödel would have noticed.” Dominus draws
this tentative conclusion from Peter Suber’s
Paradox of Self-Amendment, where it is
stated
more boldly:
Suber adds: “A desire to limit the amending power, or to make it more
difficult — not the same thing — shows a distrust for democracy or a
denial that in general the people deserve what they get.” (We’ll get back
to that later.)
This is conceptually persuasive, because it harmonizes Gödel’s
constitutional concerns with his central intellectual pre-occupation: the
emergence of inconsistencies within self-referential formal systems. The
Amending Clause (Article V, section 1) is the occasion for the
constitution to talk about itself, and thus to encounter problems
rigorously comparable to those familiar from Gödel’s incompleteness
theorems in mathematical logic. Despite the neatness of this ‘solution’,
however, there is no solid evidence to support it. Furthermore,
self-referential structures can be identified at numerous other points.
For instance, is not the authority of the Supreme Court respecting
constitutional interpretation a similar point of reflexivity, with
unlimited potential for circularity and paradox? This insight,
highly-regarded among the neo-reactionaries, recognizes that the
constitution allows – in principle – for a sufficiently corrupted Supreme
Court to ‘interpret’ its way to absolute power (in conformity with a
constitution that has sublimed into pure ‘life’). Insofar as a
constitution allows for its own processing, it must – ultimately — allow
anything.
Moldbug asks us to accelerate through this formal tangle, cutting the
Gordian knot. “Sovereignty is conserved,” he
repeats,
insistently, so the occasions when power undertakes to bind itself are essentially
risible. Of course the final custodian of the constitution is a
constitutionally unrestrained dictator. That’s simple
Schmittian sanity.
With all due contempt for argumentum ad hominem, it can probably
still be agreed that Gödel was not a fool, so that his excited
identification of a localized flaw in the US Constitution merits
consideration as just that (rather than an excuse to bin the entire
problematic). The formal resonances between his topically disparate
arguments provide a further incentive to slow down.
Whether in number theory, or space-time cosmology, Gödel’s method was to
advance the formalization of the system under consideration and then test
it to destruction upon the ‘strange loops’ it generated (paradoxes of
self-reference and time-travel). In each case, the system was shown to
permit cases that it could not consistently absorb, opening it to an
interminable process of revision, or technical improvement. It thus
defined
dynamic intelligence, or the logic of evolutionary imperfection, with an adequacy that was
both sufficient and necessarily inconclusive. What it did not do was trash
the very possibility of arithmetic, mathematical logic, or cosmic history
— except insofar as these were falsely identified with idols of finality
or closure.
On the slender evidence available, Gödel’s ‘reading’ of the US
Constitution was strictly analogous. Far from excusing the abandonment of
constitutionalism, it identified constitutional design as the only
intellectually serious response to the problem of politics (i.e.
untrammeled power). It is a subtle logical necessity that constitutions,
like any formal systems of comparable complexity, cannot be perfected or
consistently completed. In other words, as Benjamin Franklyn fully
recognized, any republic is precarious. Nothing
necessarily follows from this, but a number of things might.
Most abruptly, one might contemplate the sickly child with sadness, before
abandoning it on the hillside for the wolves. Almost every interesting
voice on the right seems to be heading this way. Constitutions are a grim
joke.
Alternatively, constitutionalism could be elevated to a new level of
cultural dignity, in keeping with its status as the sole model of
republican government, or truly logical politics. This would require,
first of all, that the necessity for constitutional modification was
recognized only when such modification
made the constitution stronger, in purely formal, or systemic
terms. In the US case, the first indication of such an approach would be
an amendment of Article Five itself, in order to specify that
constitutional amendments are tolerated only when they satisfy criteria of
formal improvement, legitimated in exact, mathematical terms, in
accordance with standards of proof no different than those applicable to
absolutely uncontroversial arguments (theorems). Constitutional design
would be subsumed within applied mathematics as a subsection of nonlinear
control theory.
Under these (unlikely) circumstances, the purpose of the constitution is
to sustain itself, and thus the Republic. As a mathematical object, the
constitution is maximally simple, consistent, necessarily incomplete, and
interpretable as a model of natural law. Political authority is allocated
solely to serve the constitution. There are no authorities which
are not overseen, within nonlinear structures. Constitutional language is
formally constructed to eliminate all ambiguity and to be processed
algorithmically. Democratic elements, along with official discretion, and
legal judgment, is incorporated reluctantly, minimized in principle, and
gradually eliminated through incremental formal improvement. Argument
defers to mathematical expertise. Politics is a disease that the
constitution is designed to cure.
Extreme skepticism is to be anticipated not only from the Moldbuggian
royalists, but from all of those educated by Public Choice theory to
analyze ‘politics without romance’. How could defending the constitution become an absolute,
categorical or unconditional imperative, when the only feasible defenders
are people, guided by multiple incentives, few of which align
neatly with objective constitutional order? Yet, how is this different
from the question of mathematical or natural scientific progress? Are not
mathematicians equally people, with appetites, egos, sex-driven status
motivations, and deeply defective capabilities for realistic
introspection? How does maths advance? (No one can seriously deny that it
does.) The answer surely lies in its autonomous or impersonal criteria of
excellence, combined with pluralistic institutions that facilitate
Darwinian convergence. The Gödelian equivalence between mathematical logic
and constitutional government indicates that such principles and
mechanisms are absent from the public domain only due to defective
(democratic-bureaucratic) design.
When it comes to deep realism, and to guns, is there any reason
to think the military is resistant by nature to constitutional
subordination? Between the sublime office of Commander in Chief, and the
mere man, is it not obvious that authority should tend to gravitate to the
former? It might be argued that civilization is nothing else, that is to
say: the tendency of personal authority to decline towards zero.
Ape-men will reject this of course. It’s what they do.
Between democracy, monarchy, anarchy, or republican government, the
arguments will not end soon. They are truly ancient, and illustrated in
the Odyssey, by the strategy of binding oneself against the call of the
Sirens. Can Odysseus bind himself? Only republicans defend the attempt, as
Gödel did. All of the others let the Sirens win. Perhaps they will.
February 1, 2013The Royalist Imperative
This is an argument I’m really not grasping:
Libertarians are unrealistic because the world was once vastly freer than
it is today, and then progressively rolled down the populist hill into the
present social democratic latrine trench,
so
“Why would we expect different results on the second go?” [OK, still
following so far] … thus we need Kings back, because … [we need
to catch the rising tide, after all, the world hasn’t ever been more
monarchist than now? Prussian Neocameralism outlasted Manchester
Liberalism? Royalist institutions have demonstrated their inherent
immunity to the forces of
decay?
…]
How can reactionaries criticize free republics for falling apart?
Everything reactionaries have ever respected fell apart.
Nobody would be a reactionary if their favored configuration of the
world hadn’t fallen apart.
Republics are extremely fragile. All the more reason to take devoted care
of them (first of all, by protecting them from democracy).
ADDED: Fag-end of a ludicrous institution. (via
AoS)
ADDED: Epic
response
from Nydwracu .
February 20, 2013The Odysseus Problem
Moldbug’s insistence that ‘Sovereignty is conserved’ surely counts as one
of the most significant assertions in the history of political thought. It
is arguably the fundamental axiom of his ‘system’, and its implications
are almost inestimably profound.
Sovereignty is conserved says that anything that appears to
bind sovereignty is itself in reality true sovereignty,
binding something else, and something less. It is therefore a negative
answer to the
Odysseus Problem: Can Sovereignty bind itself? If Moldbug’s assertion is
accepted, constitutional government is impossible, except as a futile
aspiration, a ‘noble lie’, or a cynical joke.
In addition to Moldbug’s powerful arguments, we know from the work of Kurt
Gödel that the Odysseus Problem is at least partially insoluble, since it
is logically impossible for there to be a
perfect knot. However well constructed a constitution might be,
it cannot, in principle, seal itself reliably against the possibility of a
surreptitious undoing. In a sufficiently complex (self-referential)
constitutional order, there will always be permissible procedures whose
consequences have not been completely anticipated, and whose consistency
with the continuation of the system cannot be ensured in advance.
Yet it would be obviously misleading to assume that such concerns were not
already active during the formulation of the American Constitution. It is
precisely because some quite lucid comprehension of the Odysseus Problem
was at work, that the founders envisaged the grounding principle of
republican constitutionalism as a division of powers, whereby the
component units of a disintegrated sovereignty
bound each other. The animating system of incentives was not to
rest upon a naive expectation of altruism or voluntary restraint, but upon
a systematically integrated network of suspicion, formally
installing the anti-monarchical impulse as an enduring, distributed
function. If the republic was to work, it would be because the
fear of power in other hands permanently over-rode the
greed for power in one’s own.
The American Constitution was, of course, destroyed, in successive waves.
After Lincoln, and FDR, only a pitiful and derided shell remains. USG has
unified itself, and the principle of sovereign power has been thoroughly
re-legitimated in the court of popular opinion. Democracy rose as the
republic fell, exposing yet again the essential political bond of the
tyrant with the mob, Leviathan with the people.
Does this ruin refute the constitutional conjecture? Is there really
nothing further to be said in defense of imperfect (but perhaps
improvable) knots? This one came horribly undone. Might there be other,
better ones? Outside in remains obstinately interested in the
problem …
ADDED: Many relevant speculations and insights are to be found in
this
article on the practicalities of secession (especially section XI J, XII,
XIII, and XIV). “Since it is important that the AFR [or proposed American
Federal Republic] function as a constitutional republic, one of the first
things it should do is to hold a constitutional convention. We anticipate
that the resulting document will be similar to the present American
constitution, but not identical.” It includes some (very modest)
recommendations to curtail democracy.
February 21, 2013Shelter of the Pyramid
Moldbug’s ‘Royalism’ (or Carlylean reaction) rests upon the proposition
that the Misesian catallactic order is, like Newtonian mechanics, true
only as a special case within a more general system of principles.
He
writes:
Here is the Carlylean roadmap for the Misesian goal. Spontaneous order,
also known as freedom, is the highest level of a
political
pyramid of needs. These needs are: peace, security, law, and
freedom. To advance order, always work for the next
step – without skipping steps. In a state of war, advance toward peace;
in a state of insecurity, advance toward security; in a state of
security, advance toward law; in a state of law, advance toward
freedom.
Alexander Hamilton (Federalist #8) pursues a closely related argument, in
reverse:
Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national
conduct. Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to
its dictates. The violent destruction of life and property incident to
war, the continual effort and alarm attendant on a state of continual
danger, will compel nations the most attached to liberty to resort for
their repose and security to institutions which have a tendency to
destroy their civil and political rights. To be more safe, they at
length become willing to run the risk of being less free.
This pyramidal schema is ‘neat’, but by no means unproblematic. Like any
hierarchical structure operating within a complex, reflexive field, it
invites strange loops which scramble its apparently coherent order. Even
accepting, as realism dictates, that war exists at the most basic level of
social possibility, so that military survival grounds all ‘higher’
elaborations, can we be entirely confident that catallactic forces are
neatly confined to the realm of pacific and sophisticated civilian
intercourse? Does not
this mode of analysis
lead to exactly the opposite conclusion? Self-organizing networks are
tough, and perhaps supremely tough.
There is nothing obvious or uncontroversial about the model of the market
order as a fragile flower, blossoming late, and precariously, within a
hot-house constructed upon very different principles. The
pact is already catallactic, and who is to say — at least,
without a prolonged fight — that it is subordinate, in principle, to a
more primordial assertion of order. Subordination is complex, and
conflicted, and although the Pyramid certainly has a case, the trial of
reality is not easily predictable. An ultimate (or basic)
fanged freedom is eminently thinkable. (Isn’t that what the
Second Amendment argument is about?)
February 24, 2013Casino Royale
Even prior to the twitterization catastrophe, and the terminal
disintegration of thought into nano-particles, symphonic orchestration
wasn’t obviously emerging as an Outside in core competence. One
unfortunate consequence of this deficiency is that highly persuasive
blogging ideas get endlessly can-kicked, unless they can be easily
pulverized.
“Blogging ideas” doesn’t mean anything grandiose (those type of thoughts
splinter anything in their path, and bust in), but rather highly
medium-adapted discussion packages, which present things in a way that
racks up hits. The relevant example right now is — or rather ‘was to be’ —
The X Fundamental Disputes of Neoreaction (‘X’
being an as-yet undetermined number — optimally of surreptitious
qabbalistic significance). That puppy would have been clocking up views
like Old Faithful, but confusion reigns, and patience has run out. Into
the shredding machine it goes.
The principal provocations for this spasm of impatience are two posts on
the topic of monarchism,
at
Anomaly UK,
and
More Right. The Great AUK post is structured as a science fiction
scenario, modeling a future monarchist regime, whilst Michael Anissimov’s
MR defense of “traditionalism and monarchism” is organized dialectically.
Both serve to consolidate an affinity between neoreaction and
monarchist ideals that was already solidly established by Moldbug’s
Jacobitism. It would not be unreasonable to propose that this affinity is
strong enough to approach an identity (which is quite possibly what both
of these writers do envisage). So the time to frame the monarchist case
within a question, as a Fundamental Dispute of Neoreaction, is now.
Perhaps the first thing to note is that, even
though Outside in adopts the anti-monarchist position in this
dispute, it finds the Anomaly UK description of a future Britain
remarkably attractive, and — without any hesitation — a vast improvement
upon the present dismal state of that country’s political arrangements. In
addition, there is not a single objection to the monarchist idea, among
the ten listed by Anissimov, that we find even slightly persuasive. If
these were the reasons to refuse monarchy government, any suggestion of
republican sentiment would strike us as an obnoxious perversion. Our
dissatisfaction with the monarchist solution has other grounds.
The primary concern is abstractly constitutional, which is to say, it
arises from considerations of political engineering. For our purposes
here, the concept of ‘constitutional government’ can be quite exactly
specified, to refer to a blueprint for the mechanism of power that
achieves cybernetic closure. An adequate constitution designs a
fragmentation of authority, such that each element is no less controlled
than controlling, with the result that sovereignty emerges from a
distributed system, rather than inhering in concentrated form within any
particular node. The simplest model for such a system is a dynamic
triangle, comparable to the circuit of paper-scissors-stone, in which
power flows nonlinearly, or circulates. Thus conceived,
a constitution is a design for the dissolution of power reservoirs, in
which the optimum administrative function of each node is a check, or
restriction, on the effective authority of nodes downstream (within a
circular arrangement). The achievement of dynamically stable governmental
self-limitation through strategic fragmentation (of functions and powers)
is the constitutional objective.
Clearly, monarchism represents a definitive abandonment of this
constitutional ambition. It contends that, since sovereignty cannot be
effectively or permanently dismantled, rational attention is better
focused upon its concentrated expression. The monarchist case is able to
draw great sustenance from the manifest degeneration of republican
constitutionalism — most obviously within the United States of America —
where its most radically deteriorated possibility, mass democracy, betrays
a scarcely contestable inferiority to monarchical government in each day’s
news headlines. It needs to be emphasized at this point that any
constitutional republicanism which is less anti-democratic than absolute
monarchy is, in that regard, contemptible. Neoreaction is essentially
anti-democratic, but only hypothetically monarchist.
Republicanism, like monarchy, has a rich and deep historical archive of
examples to draw upon, dating back to classical antiquity. The confusion
between republican government and democracy is a recent and unfortunate
eventuality. The historical reasons for this confusion are by no means
trivial, but nor do they point inexorably to the monarchist conclusion. It
is especially important to consider the possibility that the demotic
destruction of monarchical regimes, and of functional republics, has been
a parallel process, rather than a succession (in which republicanism
served as an intermediate stage of political disorganization). A detailed
historical analysis of the 1848 revolutions would bring out some of the
complexity this topic introduces. In particular, it raises the question
why the model of the Dutch Republic (1581-1795) was unable to offer a
template for constitutional government of effective relevance beyond the
Anglosphere. From the perspective of constitutional republicanism, the
limited influence of the Dutch example marks a fatal historical
bifurcation, exposing the European peoples to a calamitous bi-polar
struggle between monarchical and democratic forces (from which our present
ruin was hatched). It is also immediately evident from this perspective
that the emergence of advanced capitalistic economic organization is
inextricable from the propagation of the Dutch model (transplanted into
the UK by the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and from there to the
Anglophone New World). Since capitalism epitomizes cybernetic closure — a
system without uncontrolled nodes — these connections should not surprise
us.
Because monarchism dismisses the possibility of cybernetic closure, and
thus asks us to accept the inevitability of uncontrolled nodes, or
concentrated sovereignty, it necessarily compromises on the prospects of
meritocratic selection. It argues, soundly enough, that we can do far
worse than kings, and have done so, but in making this case it falls far
short of the selective mechanism for excellence that capitalism routinely
demonstrates. When Moldbug compares a monarch to a CEO, it is with the
understanding that — under approximate free-enterprise conditions —
business leadership has been socially sifted for rare talent in a way that
dynastic succession cannot possibly match. The fact that the outcome of
democratic-electoral selection is reliably far worse than the monarchical
alternative does not indicate that ‘royalty’ represents an impressive
solution to the meritocratic problem — it is simply less appalling than
the one presently prevalent among our contemporary political systems. It
is capitalism that has found the solution, from which any rational
politics would seek to learn.
That monarchy is superior to democracy is a point of secure neoreactionary
consensus, but this is a remarkably low benchmark to set. That there is
anything beyond it recommending the return of kings remains an unsettled
matter of dispute.
October 7, 2013Rules
Foseti and Jim have been conducting an argument in slow motion, without
quite connecting. Much of this has been occurring in sporadic blog
comments, and occasional remarks. It would be very helpful of me to
reconstruct it here, through a series of meticulous links. I’ll begin by
failing at that. (Any assistance offered in piecing it together,
textually, will be highly appreciated.)
Despite its elusiveness, I think it is the most important intellectual
engagement taking place anywhere in the field of political philosophy. Its
point of departure is the Moldbuggian principle that ‘sovereignty is
conserved’ and everything that follows from it, both theoretically and
practically. The virtual conclusion of this controversy is the central
assertion of Dark Enlightenment, which we do not yet comprehend.
The problem is this: Can real — which is to say
ultimate (or sovereign) — political authority be constrained? Moldbug’s
answer is ‘no’. A constrained authority is a superseded authority, or
delegated power. To limit government is to exceed, and thus supplant it.
It follows that ‘constitutionalism’ is a masked usurpation, and the task
of realist political theory is to identify the usurper. It is this that is
apparently achieved through the designation of the Cathedral.
To crudely summarize the argument in question, Foseti upholds this chain
of reasoning, whilst Jim refuses it. Constitutional issues cannot be
anything but a distraction from realistic political philosophy if Foseti
is correct. If Jim’s resistance is sustainable, constitutions matter.
Outside in (and its predecessor) has sought purchase on this
problem here,
here,
here, and
here. It has yet to find an
articulation that clicks. Eventually, something has to, if we are to
advance even by a step. So long as the Foseti-Jim argument falls short of
mutually-agreeable terms of intellectual engagement, we can be confident
that this critical controversy remains stuck.
What are the rules of contestation? If we knew that, we would know
everything (that matters to us here). Rules are the whole of the problem.
A constitution is a system of rules, formalizing a social game. Among
these rules are set procedures for the selection of umpires, and umpires
decide how the rules are to be revised, interpreted, and implemented. The
circuit is irreducible. Without accepted rules, a Supreme Court justice is
no more than a random old guy — prey for the most wretched species of
street thug. Who has power in a world without rules, Clarence Thomas or
Trayvon Martin?
Yet without umpires (or, at least, an umpire-function), rules are simply
marks on a piece of paper, disconnected from all effective authority. “You
can’t do that, it’s against the rules!” To the political realist, those
are the words of a dupe, and everyone knows the rejoinder: “Who’s going to
stop me, you and who’s army?” It’s enough to get Moldbug talking about
crypto-locked weaponry.
The Dark Enlightenment knows that it is necessary to be realistic about
rules. Such realism, lucidly and persuasively articulated, still eludes
it. That the sovereign rules does not explain the rules of sovereignty,
and there must be such rules, because the alternative is pure
force, and that is a
romantic myth of transparent absurdity.
If there is an uncontroversial fact of real power, it is that force is
massively economized, and it is critically important that we understand
what that implies. Moldbug acknowledges exactly this when he identifies
the real sovereign instance of climaxed Occidental modernity with the
Cathedral, which is a church (and not an army). Political philosophy
cannot approach reality before accepting that rules are irreducible, which
is not to say that they are sufficient,or even (yet) intelligible.
One further point on this problem (for now): A model of power that is not
scale-free is inadequately formulated. If what is held to work for a
nation state does not work for the world, the conception remains
incomplete. Do we dream of a global God-Emperor? If not, what do royalist
claims at a lower level amount to? What does ‘conserved sovereignty’ care
for borders? They are limits — indeed
limited government — and that is supposed to be the illusion prey
to realist critique.
If there can be borders, there can be limits, or effective fragmentation,
and there is nothing real to prevent fragmentation being folded from the
outside in. If patchworks can work, they are applicable at every scale.
Who would choose a king instead of a patchwork? God-Emperor or
confederacy? That is the question.
ADDED:
First
key to the text trail, beginning June 5, 2013 at 6:48 pm (provided by
Foseti in the comments below).
ADDED:
Thoughts
on sovereignty and limits at Anomaly UK. At
Habitable Worlds, Scharlach
applies
methodical intelligence to the problem, with encouraging results.
ADDED: James Goulding
explains
why “‘sovereignty is conserved’ captures the imagination yet is badly
flawed.”
June 24, 2013Quote notes (#76)
Not a new point in this neck of the woods, but
formulated
with exceptional elegance:
There are only two possibilities regarding the Constitution of the
United States. One is that it is working as it was intended, in which
case it is a monstrosity. The other is that it was broken somewhere
along the way – in which case it failed.
The prod back to this topic is appreciated, because it really hasn’t been
properly processed yet. (This blog has yet to do more than stick a
tag on the
problem.) Insofar as constitutions are at least partly functional, they
are involved in the production of power. As abstract engineering
diagrams for regimes they should no more be expected to rule than rocket
blueprints are expected to blast into space — but they matter.
ADDED: An articulate cry from the republican id:
… this fifteen-year journey back to the USSR under the leadership of a
former KGB lieutenant colonel has shown the world the vicious nature and
archaic underpinnings of the Russian state’s “vertical power” structure,
more than any “great and terrible” Putin. With a monarchical structure
such as this, the country automatically becomes hostage to the
psychosomatic quirks of its leader. All of his fears, passions,
weaknesses, and complexes become state policy. If he is paranoid, the
whole country must fear enemies and spies; if he has insomnia, all the
ministries must work at night; if he’s a teetotaler, everyone must stop
drinking; if he’s a drunk—everyone should booze it up; if he doesn’t
like America, which his beloved KGB fought against, the whole population
must dislike the United States. A country such as this cannot have a
predictable, stable future; gradual development is extraordinarily
difficult.
April 27, 2014Next Stage of the Slide
As a prophet of the unfolding calamity, Angelo Codevilla has
always
been handicapped by his touching faith in ‘the people’. The ‘country
class’ was already demonstrably unworthy of Goldwater in 1964. Things are
far worse today.
As a guide to the next step in the crack-up, however, there are few better
guides, and his
latest
ruminations on the disintegration of the American party system are highly
convincing. The death of the Republican Party is a much-deserved necessary
way-stage to pretty much anything, whatever one’s sense of the way. As
always, the insightful
commentary
of Richard Fernandez on the topic is not to be missed.
Between even the sharpest conservative analysis, and anything that would
pass muster amongst reactionaries, a daunting gulf yawns. As Codevilla
muses in the new Forbes piece:
Representation is the distinguishing feature of democratic government.
To be represented, to trust that one’s own identity and interests are
secure and advocated in high places, is to be part of the polity. In
practice, any democratic government’s claim to the obedience of citizens
depends on the extent to which voters feel they are party to the polity.
No one doubts that the absence, loss, or perversion of that function
divides the polity sharply between rulers and ruled.
The confusion between legitimate republican government and political
representation (‘democracy’) has been the disaster of modern
history. Until this error is thoroughly purged from statecraft, reason
will belong with kings.
ADDED: Sickness unto death
February 24, 2013The Unraveling
A democracy cannot survive as a permanent form of government. It can
last only until its citizens discover that they can vote themselves
largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority
(who vote) will vote for the candidates promising the greatest benefits
from the public purse, with the result that a democracy will always
collapse from loose fiscal policies, always followed by a
dictatorship.
— Macaulay [or the ‘Tytler Calumny‘ (thanks Matt)]
From the Urban Dictionary,
Democracy:
1) A common system of government directed by the whims of mobs and
marked by a low tolerance for basic human rights and common sense;
primarily used to incrementally transition a government ruled by common
law (Republic) to a government ruled by the political law of a few elite
(Oligarchy).
As the slide continues, the perennial understanding of anti-demotic
statecraft (and initiatory insight of the new reaction) appears to be
going mainstream. Alex Berezow writes
at
Realclearworld‘s The Compass blog:
It’s been a rough few years for democracy. Despite that, Westerners
always seem to assume that the most highly evolved form of government is
democratic. The trouble with that notion is that, at some point, a
majority of voters realize they can vote for politicians who promise
them the most stuff, regardless of whether or not it is good policy or
financially sustainable. And once that occurs, the country is (perhaps
irreversibly) on a pathway to decline.
Whilst glibly insubstantial by Moldbug standards (of course), the article
never retracts this initial premiss, and concludes with the suggestion
that the whole world could profitably learn arts of democracy inhibition
from China. Interesting times.
[Note: the two articles immediately below Berezow’s at the RCW site are
‘Is Cameron’s EU Strategy Unraveling?’ (by Benedict Brogan) and ‘Libya Is
Still Unraveling’ (by Max Boot) — just noticed (consciously). Contemporary
news: all unraveling, all the time.]
Will the ‘post-democratic world’ have a clear principle of political
legitimacy? The most elegant, by far, would be the introduction of
commutativity to the slogan of Anglosphere colonial rebellion: ‘No
taxation without representation.’
No representation without taxation restricts legitimacy to those
regimes in which those who fund government determine its structure, scope,
and policy, in direct proportion to their contribution. The improvements
that would result from this integration of the State’s fiscal and
electoral feedback circuits are too profound and numerous to readily
outline, but they can be summarized in a single expectation: radical,
irreversible, and continuous shift to the right.
Among the most obvious anticipated objections:
(1) It’s impractical (Oh yes, only horrors are practical)
(2) It’s unjust (For soldiers and cops, perhaps, but the
deleterious effects of complication outweigh the benefits of moral
nuance)
(3)
In the West, at least, Brahmin plutocrats would undo it at the first
opportunity
(A sadly plausible prediction — perhaps no Abrahamic culture is capable of
supporting a sane social order, and will always choose to resolve policing
problems through expansion of the franchise.)
Granting all of these objections, and more, the principle of
commutative tax-politics still provides one very valuable
service: it explains what went wrong. Representational hypertrophy
destroyed the modern constitutional order, based on a one-sided
interpretation of the demand that government be made accountable for its
exactions. Balance (commutativity) might well be unobtainable, but it
isn’t difficult to understand what it would be.
April 2, 2013The Program
According
to Mark Waser, the project of replacing human politicians with algorithms
would yield positive results, far in advance of its nominal
accomplishment. As he concludes: “I think that AI leadership is a
tremendous idea, not the least because the path towards it necessarily
improves human leadership (and civic debate).”
The extent to which the deep Anglo tradition tends in this direction is
easy to under-estimate. Magna Carta was already a beta version
draft of machine governance, as every serious initiative at
constitutionalism has been. The principle of
limited government finds its consummation in the ideal of rigid
algorithmic constraint, and the impracticality of such an objective in no
way diminishes the well-springs of motivation behind it. The programmatic
erosion of political charisma is one obvious spin-off benefit.
In the Anglophone world — at least, until the most recent spasms of its
degeneration — the call to empower the people has always been an
unfortunate derivation from attempts to
disempower government authority, by subjecting it to structural
checks, and subtracting its discretion to the greatest possible extent.
Computerizing a fast food restaurant gets you a cheaper hamburger.
Computerizing government promises something far more deeply attuned to
ancient political-economic impulses.
As Waser suggests: Merely letting politicians know that their definitive
abolition is in prospect sends a valuable signal in its own right.
Perhaps, in the interim, it could even train them to behave more like
machines.
August 4, 2015Protocols
“Protocol governance can come in many forms, these include bureaucratic
rules, literal interpretations of religious texts, democracy, proposed
block chain or P2P governance, statistics based governance, rule of law,
and any other form of governance which seeks to provide a protocol as
being ultimately sovereign as opposed to ultimate human judgement,”
writes
NIO.
The meaning of ‘protocol’ here? I’m assuming, until corrected, that it’s
something like: A formalized procedure. If so, it elides a
critical difference, because while “bureaucratic rules, literal
interpretations of religious texts,” and constitutions tell people what to
do, “proposed block chain or P2P governance” doesn’t.
A set of instructions opens itself to derision, if it ‘demands’ human
compliance, without possessing the means to compel it. Constitutions,
laws, and bureaucracies are massively — and demonstrably — vulnerable to
subversion, because they require what they cannot enforce. It is
exactly this problem that has propelled the development of
software protocols that are intrinsically self-protective. The longest
section of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin
paper (#11) is devoted to an
examination of the system’s automatic defense capabilities. The problem is
a serious and complicated one, but it is certainly not susceptible to
resolution by armchair philosophizing about the essence of sovereignty,
however much this latter
proclaims
its possession of the truth.
Claims to ‘truth’ demand trust, and trust is a social and technical
problem (of ever increasing urgency). Mere assertion is certainly
incapable of generating it. Only a trust engine can, and that has
to be built, if it cannot be simply preserved, which — on this at least we
are surely agreed? — it could not.
Bitcoin is only a stepping stone, and the scale of the step it enables
remains obscure at this point. What is already clear, however, is that the
principle of trustless (or open-source, automatically self-policing)
protocols is concrete, in large part technical, and invulnerable to
a priori dismissal. The theoretical difficulties involved have
been largely solved, based upon a series of radical innovations in
cryptography — public key systems and proof-of-work credentials, among
others — compared to which the recent ‘advances’ of political philosophy,
let alone governmental institutions, have been risible at best. If
Byzantine
Agreement is realizable, protocol subversion is exterminable. What then
remains is productive work, in the direction of automatic or autonomized
agoras.
Carlyle is a lament (admittedly, a rhetorically attractive, and insightful
one). Satoshi Nakamoto has built something. The former is vindicated by
progressive socio-political decay, the latter by the escape of
self-protective catallaxy from the ruins.
Within a few decades, most of what still works on this planet will be on
the blockchain.
ADDED: This is excellent. (Adam Back, via Twitter, describes it as the “Best
article yet on what Bitcoin *is* & why decentralisation is
necessary”.) The proposal of this post is that the conflict it outlines is
obviously of massive importance. Those who think the entire
problem of decentralized protocols is an irrelevant distraction from other
things, are surely compelled to disagree. The XS position here is that
trustless decentralization is worth defending. Clearly, that
presupposes it’s something real (and consequential). As far as the NRx
discussion is concerned, I’m going to assume that’s the matter at stake.
September 17, 2015Trichotomocracy
By 2037 the harsh phases of The Upheaval have finally ended. Western
Eurasia is ruined and confused, but the fighting has burnt out amongst the
rubble. In the Far East, the Chinese Confucian Republic has largely
succeeded in restoring order, and is even enjoying the first wave of
renewed prosperity. The Islamic civil war continues, but — now almost
entirely introverted — it is easily quarantined. No one wants to think too
much about what is happening in Africa.
The territory of the extinct USA is firmly controlled by the
Neoreactionary Coalition, whose purchase is strengthened by the flight of
20 million Cathedral Loyalists to Canada and Europe (incidentally toppling
both into terminal chaos). The Provisional Trichotomous Council, selected
primarily by a process of military promotion and delegation from within
the major Neoreactionary guerrilla groups, now confronts the task of
establishing a restored political order.
It quickly becomes obvious to each of the
three main Neoreactionary factions that future developments — even if
these are to include an orderly subdivision of the nation — will initially
depend upon the institution of a government that balances the three broad
currents that now dominate the North American continent:
Ethno-Nationalists (“Genies” or “Rockies”); Theonomists (“Logs” or
“Sizzlers”); and Techno-Commercialists (“Cyboids” or “Pulpists”). Now that
the Cathedral has been thoroughly extirpated, significant divergences
between these three visions of the nation’s future threaten to escalate,
unpredictably, into dangerous antagonisms.
Since practical realism, rooted in an understanding of path-dependency, is
a common inheritance of all three factions, there is immediate consensus
on the need to begin from where things are. Since a virtual triangular
order of partially-compatible agendas is already reflected in the make-up
of the Provisional Council, this is recognized as the template for an
emergent, triadically-structured government — the rising Neoreactionary
Trichotomocracy, or “Trike”. (A colossal statue of Spandrell — the revered
white-beard of the Trichotomy — has already been erected in the
comparatively radiation-free provisional capital of Omaha, gazing out
Mosaically into the new promised land, a glinting ceremonial Samurai sword
held triumphantly aloft.)
Within a few months, the basic formula for the Trichotomocracy has been
tweaked into place. It consists of three Compartments, each
comprehensively dominated by one of the principal factions. Procedures for
selection of officials is internally determined by each Compartment,
drawing upon the specific traditions of functional hierarchy honed during
the Zombie War.
Authority is distributed among the Compartments in a triangular circuit.
Each Compartment has a specific internal and external responsibility — its
own positive governmental function, as well as an external (and strictly
negative, or inhibitory) control of the next Compartment. This is
colloquially known as the ‘Rocky-Sizzler-Pulpist’ system.
Ethno-Nationalist ‘Rockies’ run the Compartment of Security, which
includes the essential functions of the Executive. It is controlled
financially by the Compartment of Resources. Its external responsibility
is the limitation of the Compartment of Law, whose statutes can be
returned, and ultimately vetoed (but not positively amended), if they are
found to be inconsistent with practical application. The structure of the
Compartment of Security broadly coincides with the military chain of
command. (The Rockies get to decide whether to describe the Commander-in
-Chief as a constitutional monarch, a supreme warlord, or a demi-god of
annihilation.)
Theonomist ‘Sizzlers’ run the Compartment of Law, which combines
legislative and judicial functions. For funding purposes, the Compartment
of Law is subordinated to the Compartment of Security, for obvious
constitutional reasons. This keeps it small, restricting its potential for
extravagant legislative activity. Since the Compartment of Security also
filters legislation (in accordance with a practical criterion), the Law of
the Trichotomocracy is remarkable for its clarity, economy, and concision.
The entire edifice of Law, by informal understanding, is limited to a
single volume of biblical proportions. Senior Sizzler officials are
expected to memorize it. The external responsibility of the Compartment of
Law is to restrain the Compartment of Resources, by strictly limiting the
legality of revenue-raising measures (informally bounded to a national
‘tithe’). Internal order of the Compartment is determined by the
ecclesiastical hierarchy of the Neoreactionary Church of the Cosmic
Triarchitect.
Techno-Commercialist ‘Pulpists’ run the Compartment of Resources, with the
‘power of the purse’. As the sole ‘self-funding’ Compartment, it is
minutely scrutinized by the Compartment of Law, which tightly controls its
revenue-raising procedures. Dominated by a cabal of extreme laissez-faire
capitalist and technologists, the Compartment of Resources is guided by
the mantra economize on all things. It does as little as
possible, beyond maximally-parsimonious funding of the Department of
Security, with its own internal operations restricted to rigorously
Pigovian tax-streamlining, statistical research, and the provision of
X-Prize-style development incentives. The board of the Compartment is
filled by the nine largest tax-payers, rotated every three years. The
board elects a CEO.
The ideological discrepancies between the Compartments make an important
contribution to the stability of the Trichotomocracy, since they limit the
potential for re-amalgamation into a tyrannical unity. This is one of the
twin principles by which its success is to be estimated — the perpetuation
of durable governmental plurality. The second principle — complete
immunity from populist pressure — is ensured automatically insofar as the
Trichotomocracy endures, since none of the Compartments are demotically
sensitive, and even if this were not the case, each is insulated from
demotic subversion affecting either of the others. The outcome is a
government answerable only to itself, with a self that is irreducibly
plural, and thus intrinsically self-critical.
Under the light-hand of Trichotomocratic rule, any ‘citizen’ who seeks to
participate in government, in any way whatsoever, has three choices open
to them: (a) Join the Security Services and rise through the ranks; (b)
Join the Church of the Holy Triarchy and become adept in the law; (c) Make
enough tax-vulnerable income that it earns a place on the National
Resources Board. There might, in addition, be career opportunities for a
very small number of professional administrators, depending upon the
internal staffing policies of the three Compartments. Any other ‘politics’
would be criminal social disorder, although in most cases this would
probably be treated leniently, due to its complete impotence. If
sufficiently disruptive, such “relic demo-zombie” behavior would be best
managed by deportation.
(Questions of local government diversity, secession, and micro-state
building exceed the terms of this initial Integral-Neoreactionary
settlement. Such potentials can only further strengthen external controls,
and thus further constrain the scope of government discretion.)
ADDED: Even this crude sketch has enough moving parts to breed bugs.
Glitch-1 (by my reckoning): Pigovian taxes and commutative tax politics
don’t knit together very well. In combination, they incentivize the
politically ambitious to move into business activities with high negative
externalities. Any neat patch for this?
ADDED: Anomaly UK will require some further persuasion.
October 9, 2013Lynch Law
This
is insanely great (second only to NeoCam for absolute attractiveness, and
arguably more suitable under predominant rough-and-ready social
conditions). First, a little scene-setting:
There is, to the best of my knowledge, no single right and proper
method to construct a gallows. A few elements are common to just about
every design, but the grim carpenters’ flourishes of the scaffold
reflect the tastes of the community and the eye of the builders. There
is always a raised platform; there are always stairs leading to the
platform, usually thirteen; there is always a crossbeam around which to
string the noose; and there is always a trapdoor to launch the condemned
into the hereafter. Beyond that, the timbers of the frame are a matter
of discretion. Supporting braces and thick beams are common for
permanent installations. Temporary gallows will often rely on a nock
rather than a full cleat to hold the bitter end of the killing rope. A
shoreside hanging can even rely on a high tide and the scuttling claws
of the merciless deep to clean up the turgid mess left by a dead man
dancing. …
Then the carpentry of refined-incentives
governance:
Me: “I don’t know if they still do it that way, but that’s how it used
to be. What’s more, even speaking up at a rulemoot can be a death
sentence.” It was clear she thought I was pulling her leg. I wish I was.
Tolerance for two-bit tinpot tyrants was running awfully low, so
Sacramentarians decided to raise the stakes for would-be petty
autocrats. “Any citizen can propose any rule change at a rulemoot. To do
[so], you ascend the Black Gallows, loop a secured noose of your own
tying around your neck, and take the next five minutes and five minutes
only to deliver your proposal and your plea. Then there’s some sort of a
deliberation process. I think folks can line up to give brief comments
or something, after which the assembled crowd votes yea or nay. If the
motion passes, it is now law. If it fails, the lever is pulled and you
hang by your neck until you are dead, dead dead.”
Me: “You might be surprised. Plenty of laws get passed this way. Most
of them are pretty standard things: no murder, no theft, no rape, that
sort of thing. And nobody’s stupid enough to try to pass a new law if
they aren’t very sure they’ll have the support of the crowd.” I paused
to consider something. “I’d reckon they don’t have a lot of civic
participation on windy days.”
Excessive populism, certainly, but turned unambiguously in the right
direction. After a few generations, the genetic selection effects alone
would have justified it. The model, clear in context, is an
anti-California. If something like this isn’t tried somewhere,
social experimentation will have missed out.
December 7, 2015
SEQUENCE i - NEOCAMERALISM
CHAPTER ONE - PRIMERS
Meta-Neocameralism
First thing: “Meta-Neocameralism” isn’t anything new, and it certainly
isn’t anything post-Moldbuggian. It’s no more than Neocameralism
apprehended in its most abstract features, through the coining of a
provisional and dispensable term. (It allows for an acronym that doesn’t
lead to confusions with North Carolina, while encouraging quite different
confusions, which I’m pretending not to notice.)
Locally (to this blog), the “meta-” is the mark of a prolegomenon*, to a
disciplined discussion of Neocameralism which has later to take place. Its
abstraction is introductory, in accordance with something that is yet to
be re-started, or re-animated, in detail. (For existing detail, outside
the Moldbug canon itself, look
here.)
The excellent comment thread
here provides at least a
couple of crucial clues:
nydwracu (23/03/2014 at 6:47 pm):
Neocameralism doesn’t answer questions like that [on the specifics of
social organization]; instead, it’s a mechanism for answering questions
like that. … You can ask, “is Coke considered better than RC Cola?”, or
you can institute capitalism and find out. You can ask, “are
ethno-nationalist states considered better than mixed states?”, or you
can institute the patchwork and find out. …
RiverC (23/03/2014 at 3:44 am):
Neo-cameralism is, if viewed in this light, a ‘political system
system’, it is not a political system but a system for implementing
political systems. Of course the same guy who came up with it also
invented an operating system (a system for implementing software
systems.)
MNC, then, is not a political prescription,
for instance a social ideal aligned with techno-commercialist preferences.
It is an intellectual framework for examining systems of governance,
theoretically formalized as disposals of sovereign property. The
social formalization of such systems, which Moldbug
also advocates, can be parenthesized within MNC. We are not at
this stage considering the model of a desirable social order, but rather
the abstract model of social order in general, apprehended radically — at
the root — where ‘to rule’ and ‘to own’ lack distinct meanings. Sovereign
property is ‘sovereign’ and ‘primary’ because it is not merely a claim,
but effective possession. (There is much more to come in later
posts on the concept of sovereign property, some preliminary musings
here.)
Because MNC is an extremely powerful piece of cognitive technology,
capable of tackling problems at a number of distinct levels (in principle,
an unlimited number), it is clarified through segmentation into an
abstraction cascade. Descending through these levels adds concreteness,
and tilts incrementally towards normative judgements (framed by the
hypothetical imperative of effective government, as defined
within the cascade).
(1) The highest level of practical significance (since MNC-theology need
not delay us) has already been touched upon. It applies to social regimes
of every conceivable type, assuming only that a systematic mode of
sovereign property reproduction will essentially characterize each. Power
is economic irrespective of its relation to modern conventions of
commercial transaction, because it involves the disposal of a real (if
obscure) quantity, which is subject to increase or decrease over the
cyclic course of its deployment. Population, territory, technology,
commerce, ideology, and innumerable additional heterogeneous factors are
components of sovereign property (power), but their economic character is
assured by the possibility — and indeed necessity — of more-or-less
explicit trade-offs and cost-benefit calculations, suggesting an original
(if germinal) fungibility, which is merely arithmetical coherence. This is
presupposed by any estimation of growth or decay, success or failure,
strengthening or weakening, of the kind required not only by historical
analysis, but also by even the most elementary administrative competence.
Without an implicit economy of power, no discrimination could be made
between improvement and deterioration, and no directed action toward the
former could be possible.
The effective cyclic reproduction of power has an external criterion —
survival. It is not open to any society or regime to decide for itself
what works. Its inherent understanding of its own economics of power is a
complex measurement, gauging a relation to the outside, whose consequences
are life and death. Built into the idea of sovereign property from the
start, therefore, is an
accommodation to reality. Foundational to MNC, at the very
highest level of analysis, is the insight that
power is checked primordially. On the Outside are wolves, serving
as the scourge of Gnon. Even the greatest of all imaginable God-Kings —
awesome Fnargl included — has ultimately to discover consequences, rather
than inventing them. There is no principle more important than this.
Entropy will be dissipated, idiocy will be punished, the weak will die. If
the regime refuses to bow to this Law, the wolves will enforce it. Social
Darwinism is not a choice societies get to make, but a system of real
consequences that envelops them. MNC is articulated at the level — which
cannot be transcended — where realism is mandatory for any social order.
Those unable to create it, through effective government, will nevertheless
receive it, in the harsh storms of Nemesis. Order is not defined within
itself, but by the Law of the Outside.
At this highest level of abstraction, therefore, when MNC is asked “which
type of regimes do you believe in?” the sole appropriate response is
“those compatible with reality.” Every society known to history — and
others beside — had a working economy of power, at least for a while.
Nothing more is required than this for MNC to take them as objects of
disciplined investigation.
(2) Knowing that realism is not an optional regime value, we are able to
proceed down the MNC cascade with the introduction of a second assumption:
Civilizations will seek gentler teachers than the wolves. If it is
possible to acquire some understanding of collapse, it will be preferred
to the experience of collapse (once the wolves have culled the ineducable
from history).
Everything survivable is potentially educational, even a mauling by the
wolves. MNC however, as its name suggests, has reason to be especially
attentive to the most abstract lesson of the Outside — the (logical)
priority of meta-learning. It is good to discover reality, before
— or at least not much later than — reality discovers us. Enduring
civilizations do not merely know things, they know that it is important to
know things, and to absorb realistic information. Regimes — disposing of
sovereign property — have a special responsibility to instantiate this
deutero-culture of learning-to-learn, which is required for intelligent
government. This is a responsibility they take upon themselves because it
is demanded by the Outside (and even in its refinement, it still smells of
wolf).
Power is under such compulsion to learn about itself that recursion, or
intellectualization, can be assumed. Power is selected to check itself,
which it cannot do without an increase in formalization, and this is a
matter — as we shall see — of immense consequence. Of necessity, it
learns-to-learn (or dies), but this lesson introduces a critical tragic
factor.
The tragedy of power is broadly coincident with modernity. It is not a
simple topic, and from the beginning two elements in particular require
explicit attention. Firstly, it encounters the terrifying (second-order)
truth that practical learning is irreducibly experimental. In going ‘meta’
knowledge becomes scientific, which means that failure cannot be precluded
through deduction, but has to be incorporated into the machinery of
learning itself. Nothing that cannot go wrong is capable of teaching
anything (even the accumulation of logical and mathematical truths
requires cognitive trial-and-error, ventures into dead-ends, and the
pursuit of misleading intuitions). Secondly, in becoming increasingly
formalized, and ever more fungible, the disposal of sovereign power
attains heightened liquidity. It is now possible for power to trade itself
away, and an explosion of social bargaining results. Power can be
exchanged for (‘mere’) wealth, or for social peace, or channeled into
unprecedented forms of radical regime philanthropy / religious sacrifice.
Combine these two elements, and it is clear that regimes enter modernity
’empowered’ by new capabilities for experimental auto-dissolution. Trade
authority away to the masses in exchange for promises of good behavior?
Why not give it a try?
Cascade Stage-2 MNC thus (realistically) assumes a world in which power
has become an art of experimentation, characterized by unprecedented
calamities on a colossal scale, while the economy of power and the
techno-commercial economy have been radically de-segmented, producing a
single, uneven, but incrementally smoothed system of exchangeable social
value, rippling ever outward, without firm limit. Socio-political
organization, and corporate organization, are still distinguished by
markers of traditional status, but no longer strictly differentiable by
essential function.
The modern business of government is not ‘merely’ business only because it
remains poorly formalized. As the preceding discussion suggests, this
indicates that economic integration can be expected to deepen, as the
formalization of power proceeds. (Moldbug seeks to accelerate this
process.) An inertial assumption of distinct ‘public’ and ‘private’
spheres is quickly disturbed by thickening networks of exchange, swapping
managerial procedures and personnel, funding political ambitions,
expending political resources in commercial lobbying efforts, trading
economic assets for political favors (denominated in votes), and in
general consolidating a vast, highly-liquid reservoir of amphibiously
‘corporacratic’ value, indeterminable between ‘wealth’ and ‘authority’.
Wealth-power inter-convertibility is a reliable index of political
modernity.
MNC does not decide that government should become a
business. It recognizes that government has become a business
(dealing in fungible quantities). However, unlike private business
ventures, which dissipate entropy through bankruptcy and market-driven
restructuring, governments are reliably the worst run businesses in their
respective societies, functionally crippled by defective,
structurally-dishonest organizational models, exemplified most prominently
by the democratic principle:
government is a business that should be run by its customers
(but actually can’t be). Everything in this model that isn’t a lie is a
mistake.
At the second (descending) level of abstraction, then, MNC is still not
recommending anything except theoretical clarity. It proposes:
a) Power is destined to arrive at experimental learning processes
b) As it learns, it formalizes itself, and becomes more fungible
c) Experiments in fungible power are vulnerable to disastrous mistakes
d) Such mistakes have in fact occurred, in a near-total way
e) For deep historical reasons, techno-commercial business organization
emerges as the preeminent template for government entities, as for any
composite economic agent. It is in terms of this template that modern
political dysfunction can be rendered (formally) intelligible.
(3) Take the MNC abstraction elevator down another level, and it’s still
more of an analytic tool than a social prescription. (That’s a good thing,
really.) It tells us that every government, both extant and
potential, is most accessible to rigorous investigation when apprehended
as a sovereign corporation. This approach alone is able to draw
upon the full panoply of theoretical resources, ancient and modern,
because only in this way is power tracked in the same way it has actually
developed (in tight alignment with a still-incomplete trend).
The most obvious objections are, sensu stricto, romantic. They
take a predictable (which is not to say a casually dismissible) form.
Government — if perhaps only lost or yet-unrealized government — is
associated with ‘higher’ values than those judged commensurable with the
techno-commercial
economy, which
thus sets the basis for a critique of the MNC ‘business ontology’ of
governance as an illegitimate intellectual reduction, and ethical
vulgarization. To quantify authority as power is already suspect. To
project its incremental liquidation into a general economy, where
leadership integrates — ever more seamlessly — with the price system,
appears as an abominable symptom of modernist nihilism.
Loyalty (or the intricately-related concept of asabiyyah) serves
as one exemplary redoubt of the romantic cause. Is it not repulsive, even
to entertain the possibility that loyalty might have a price? Handle
addresses this directly in the comment
thread already cited
(24/03/2014 at 1:18 am). A small sample captures the line of his
engagement:
Loyalty-preservation incentivizing programs are various and highly
sophisticated and span the spectrum everywhere from frequent flier miles
to ‘clubs’ that are so engrossing and time consuming in such as to mimic
the fulfillment of all the community, socialization, and identarian
psychological functions that would make even the hardest-core
religious-traditionalist jealous. Because lots of people are genetically
programmed with this coordination-subroutine that is easily exploitable
in a context far removed from its evolutionary origins. Sometimes brands
‘deserve’ special competitive loyalty (‘German engineering’!) and
sometimes they don’t (Tylenol-branded paracetamol).
There is vastly more that can, and will, be said in prosecution of this
dispute, since it is perhaps the single most critical driver of NRx
fission, and it is not going to endure a solution. The cold MNC claim,
however, can be pushed right across it. Authority is for sale, and has
been for centuries, so that any analysis ignoring this exchange nexus is
an historical evasion. Marx’s M-C-M’, through which monetized capital
reproduces and expands itself through the commodity cycle, is accompanied
by an equally definite M-P-M’ or P-M-P’ cycle of power
circulation-enhancement through monetized wealth.
A tempting reservation, with venerable roots in traditional society, is to
cast doubt upon the prevalence of such exchange networks, on the
assumption that power — possibly further dignified as ‘authority’ — enjoys
a qualitative supplement relative to common economic value, such that it
cannot be retro-transferred. Who would swap authority for money, if
authority cannot be bought (and is, indeed, “beyond price”)? But this
‘problem’ resolves itself, since the first person to sell political office
— or its less formal equivalent — immediately demonstrates that it can no
less easily be purchased.
From the earliest, most abstract stage of this MNC outline, it has been
insisted that
power has to be evaluated economically, by itself, if anything like
practical calculation directed towards its increase is to be
possible. Once this is granted, MNC analysis of the governmental entity in
general as an economic processor — i.e. a business — acquires irresistible
momentum. If loyalty, asabiyyah, virtue, charisma and other
elevated (or ‘incommensurable’) values are power factors, then
they are already inherently self-economizing within the calculus of
statecraft. The very fact that they contribute, determinately, to an
overall estimation of strength and weakness, attests to their implicit
economic status. When a business has charismatic leadership, reputational
capital, or a strong culture of company loyalty, such factors are
monetized as asset values by financial markets. When one Prince surveys
the ‘quality’ of another’s domain, he already estimates the likely
expenses of enmity. For modern military bureaucracies, such calculations
are routine. Incommensurable values do not survive contact with defense
budgets.
Yet, however ominous this drift (from a romantic perspective),
MNC does not tell anybody how to design a society. It says only
that an effective government will necessarily look, to it, like a
well-organized (sovereign) business. To this one can add the riders:
a) Government effectiveness is subject to an external criterion, provided
by a selective trans-state and inter-state mechanism. This might take the
form of Patchwork pressure (Dynamic Geography) in a civilized order, or
military competition in the wolf-prowled wilderness of Hobbesian chaos.
b) Under these conditions, MNC calculative rationality can be expected to
be compelling for states themselves, whatever their variety of social
form. Some (considerable) convergence upon norms of economic estimation
and arrangement is thus predictable from the discovered contours of
reality. There are things that will fail.
Non-economic values are more easily invoked than pursued. Foseti
(commenting
here,
23/03/2014 at 11:59 am) writes:
No one disputes that the goal of society is a good citizenry, but the
question is what sort of government provides that outcome. […] As best I
can tell, we only have two theories of governance that have been
expressed. […] The first is the capitalist. As Adam Smith noted, the
best corporations (by all measures) are the ones that are operated for
clear, measurable and selfish motives. […] The second is the communist.
In this system, corporations are run for the benefit of everyone in the
world. […] Unsurprisingly, corporations run on the latter principle have
found an incredibly large number of ways to suck. Not coincidentally, so
have 20th Century governments run on the same principle. […] I think
it’s nearly impossible to overstate the ways in which everyone would be
better off if we had an efficiently, effective, and responsive
government.
* I realize this doesn’t work in Greek, but systematic before-after
confusion is an Outside in thing.
[Yes, I know I have to get my commenting system updated with comment
permalinks — thanks to everybody for the reminder.]
ADDED: Anarcho-Papist is on the synthesizer.
March 24, 2014Eight-Point Neo-Cam
A
reminder
of where NRx came from:
Let me quickly explain my reactionary theory of history, which comes
from reading weird old forgotten books such as the above. Note that this
theory is quite simple. Depending on your inclinations, you may regard
this as a good thing or a bad thing.
In order to get to the reactionary theory of history, we need a
reactionary theory of government. History, again, is interpretation, and
interpretation requires theory. I’ve described this theory before under
the name of neocameralism, but on a blog it never hurts to be a little
repetitive.
First: government is not a mystical or mysterious institution. A
government is simply a group of people working together for a common
aim, ie, a corporation. Whether a government is good or bad is not
determined by who its employees are or how they are selected. It is
determined by whether the actions of the government are good or bad.
Now let’s look – from this reactionary perspective – at what actually
did happen. …
March 11, 2015Quote note (#200)
Crypto-core of the XS
Moldbug:
Internal security can be defined as the protection of the shareholders’
property against all internal threats — including both residents and
employees, up to and certainly including the chief executive. If the
shareholders cannot dismiss the CEO of the realm by voting according to
proper corporate procedures, a total security failure has occurred.
Thus, any fragment of the security force which remains loyal to the
shareholders can use its operational weapons to defeat any coalition of
disloyal, and hence disarmed, employees and/or residents. Ouch! Taste
the pain, traitors. (Needless to say, the dependence of this design on
21st-century technology is ample explanation of why history has not
bequeathed us anything like the joint-stock realm. It was simply not
implementable — any more than our ancestors could build a suspension
bridge out of limestone blocks.)
(Emphasis in original.)
Crypto-sovereignty is huge (and on the to-do list here). ‘Formalism’ is a
place-holder for crypto-architecture. ‘Sovereignty’ means
keys.
November 17, 2015Neocameralism #1
Clippings from
this, end-2007 Moldbug Neocameralism essay (with minimal commentary):
It is very hard to show that any new form of government is superior to
that practiced now. It is even harder to show that any new form of
government is superior to any practiced ever. […] Nonetheless, unless
these problems are not just hard but actually unsolvable, innovation in
the form of government is possible. … Certainly, the very idea of
innovation in government should not frighten you. If it does, there is
no point at all in thinking about government. This is conservatism to
the point of mental disorder. I simply cannot contend with it, and I
refuse to try. If you cannot set yourself outside your own beliefs and
prejudices, you are not capable of normal civilized discourse.
Neocameralism is not (simply) reactionary because it has never been fully
instantiated up to this time. It is a proposed political-economic
innovation.
Let’s start with my ideal world – the world of thousands, preferably
even tens of thousands, of neocameralist city-states and ministates, or
neostates. The organizations which own and operate these neostates are
for-profit sovereign corporations, or sovcorps. For the moment, let’s
assume a one-to-one mapping between sovcorp and neostate. […] Let’s pin
down the neocameralist dramatis personae by identifying the people who
work for a sovcorp as its agents, the people or
organizations which collectively own it as its
subscribers, and the people who live in its neostate as
its residents.
A Neocameral ‘neostate’ is not owned by its residents
or its agents. Its ‘monarch’ (or ‘CEO’) is
an executive appointment. (90% of all confusion about
Neocameralism, and Neoreaction in general, stems from a failure to grasp
this elementary point.) Note: ‘subscribers’ (plural). More coming on this
immediately.
Every patch of land on the planet has a primary owner, which is its
sovcorp. Typically, these owners will be large, impersonal corporations.
We call them sovcorps because they’re sovereign. You
are sovereign if you have the power to render any plausible attack on
your primary property, by any other sovereign power, unprofitable. In
other words, you maintain general deterrence. […]
(Sovereignty is a flat, peer-to-peer relationship by definition. The
concept of hierarchical sovereignty is a contradiction in terms. …) […]
The business of a sovcorp is to make money by deterring aggression.
Since human aggression is a serious problem, preventing it should be a
good business. Moreover, the existence of unprofitable governments in
your vicinity is serious cause for concern, because unprofitable
governments tend to have strange decision structures and do weird,
dangerous things. […] (Nuclear deterrence (mutual assured destruction)
is only one small class of deterrent designs. To deter is to render
predictably unprofitable. Predictably unprofitable violence is
irrational. Irrational violence is certainly not unheard of. But it is
much, much rarer than you may think. Most of the violence in the world
today is quite rational, IMHO.) […] General deterrence is a complex
topic which deserves its own post. For the moment, assume that every
square inch of the planet’s surface is formally owned by some sovcorp,
that no one disagrees on the borders, and that deterrence between
sovcorps is absolute.
Patchwork is a (transcendentally) flat network. No global
sovereign. At the ultimate level of its instantiation, it consists of P2P
connections between independent nodes.
This does not solve the problem of constructing a stable sovcorp. The
central problem of governance is the old Latin riddle: who guards the
guardians? The joint-stock corporate design solves the central problem
by entrusting guardianship in the collective decisions of the
corporation’s owners, voting not by head but by percentage of profit
received. […] The joint-stock model is hundreds of years old. It is as
proven as proven can be. […] … However, in the sovereign context, the
corporate joint-stock ownership and decision structure faces serious
challenges which do not exist for a conventional secondary corporation.
[…] In the conventional secondary corporation, the control of the owners
is unchallenged and unchallengeable, at least as long as the sovereign’s
rule of corporate law is functioning properly. The corporation is
incorporated under the oversight of a sovereign protector, or
sponsor. This is what makes it a secondary corporation.
…
The Neocameral organizational problem is here defined.
… classical political thought concurred in considering
imperio in imperium, ie, internal subauthorities
powerful enough to resist or even control the center, a political
solecism. In case you are not too special to have ever worked in a cube,
you are probably aware that imperio in imperium is a
solecism in Powerpointia as well. One small difficulty, however, is that
imperio in imperium means basically the same thing as
separation of powers. Hm. […] Internal management in
modern Western corporations is pretty good. At least by the standards of
modern government, imperio in imperium is nonexistent.
(It should not be confused with the normal practice of internal
accounting, which does not in any way conflict with an absolute central
authority and a single set of books.)
The model for avoidance of imperio in imperium is joint-stock
business organization. It is thus equivalent to the
control of executives, or the
preservation of sovereign capital imperatives (through effective
resolution of the principal-agent
problem). Solution of the P-A problem at the level of State governance is the
task of Neocameral administrative design.
Briefly, there are two options for sovcorp governance on a
neocameralist patchwork planet. One is
cross-listing and the other is
cryptogovernance. In cross-listing, sovcorps list on
each other’s secondary exchanges, taking great care to select only the
most reputable sponsors, and demanding a backdoor in which they can
switch sponsors at the slightest hint of weirdness. […] Cross-listing
can probably be made to work. However, it is dangerous as a single line
of defence. For an ideal sovcorp, it should be combined with some degree
of cryptogovernance. […] Cryptogovernance is any system of corporate
government in which all formal decisions are endorsed and verified
cryptographically. A sponsor can still be very useful for
cryptogovernance, but it is not required. Shareholders in a
cryptogoverned corporation – known as subscribers – use
private keys to sign their contributions to its governance. They may or
may not be anonymous, depending on the corporation’s rules. […] If you
are an American, have you ever wondered what the letters SA, or similar,
which you see all the time in the names of European companies, mean?
They mean “anonymous society.” If this strikes you as weird, it
shouldn’t.
Do any #HRx types still
think this is their universe?
The neat thing about cryptographic government (which is actually much
easier than it sounds – we’re talking a few thousand lines of code, max)
is that it can be connected directly to the sovcorp’s second line of
defense: a cryptographically-controlled military. […] Cryptographic
weapons control, in the form of permissive action links, is already used
for the world’s most powerful weapons. However, there is nothing in
principle preventing it from being extended down to small arms – for
example, with a radio activation code transmitted over a mesh network.
Military formations loyal to the CEO will find that their weapons work.
Rebel formations will find that theirs don’t. The outcome is obvious.
Moreover, the neocameralist state has no incentive to deal kindly with
traitors, so there is no way for an attacker to repeatedly probe the
system’s weaknesses. […] The one difficulty with cryptographic weapons
control is that it fails, and devolves into simple military rule, if the
authorization keys are kept anywhere near the weapons. Weaponholders can
gather unlocked or noncryptographic weapons secretly, and use them to
arrest the keyholders – for example, the directors of the sovcorp. […]
The solution is simple: keep the sovcorp’s directors, or whoever has
ultimate control of the highest grade of military keys, outside the
sovcorp’s neostate. Even if the CEO himself rebels, along with all of
his subordinates, any formation loyal to the directors can defeat them.
The result is internal military stability.
Agree with where Moldbug is going with this, or not, the line of thought
is profoundly illustrative of the Neocameral problem, as originally
conceived, which lies within the general framework of
cryptographic property protection (and not that of romantic
political attachment).
June 29, 2016Owned
Hurlock has a valuable
post
on the concept of property, especially in its relation to sovereignty, and
formalization. Since (Moldbuggian) Neocameralism can be construed as a
renovated theory of property, crucially involving all three of these
terms, the relevance of the topic should require no defense. The profound
failure of enlightenment philosophy to satisfactorily determine the
meaning of property has been a hostage to fortune whose dire consequences
have yet to be fully exhausted. (Within the NRx generally, the question of
property is deeply under-developed, and — with a very few exceptions —
there is little sign of serious attention being paid to it.)
The enlightenment failure has been to begin its analysis of property from
the problem of justification. This not only throws it into
immediate ideological contention, submitting it to politics, and thus to
relentless left-drift, it also places insurmountable obstacles in the path
of rigorous understanding. To depart from an axiom of legitimate original
property acquisition through work, as Locke does, is already proto-Marxist
in implication, resting on philosophically hopeless metaphor, such as that
of ‘mixing’ labor with things. It is property that defines work (over
against non-productive behavior), not the inverse. As Hurlock notes,
Moldbug’s approach is the correct one. ‘Property’ — as a social category —
is a legitimation of control. It cascades conceptually from sovereignty,
and not from production.
These matters will inevitably become intellectually pressing, due to the
current technocommercial restoration of money, exemplified by the
innovation of Bitcoin (in its expansive sense, as the blockchain). Control
is undergoing cryptographic formalization, from which all consistent
apprehension of ‘property’ will follow. Property, in the end, is not
sociopolitical recognition of rights, but keys. What you can lock
and unlock is yours. The rest is merely more or less serious talk, that
only contingently compiles. This is what hacker culture has
already long understood in its specific (thedish) usage of ‘owned’.
There’s no point crying to the government about having paid good money for
your computer, if Nerdgodz or some other irritating 15-year-old is running
it as a Bitcoin-mining facility from his mother’s basement. The
concreteness of ‘might is right’ once looked like a parade ground, but
increasingly it is running functional code.
Formalization isn’t a detached exercise in philosophical reflection, or
even a sociopolitical and legal consensus, it’s functional
technocommercial cryptography. Defining property outside the terms of this
eventuation is an exercise in arbitrary sign-shuffling. Those with the
keys can simply smile at the surrounding senseless noise. As Moldbug
anticipates, with rigorously coded control, there’s nothing further to
argue about.
ADDED: Three recommended links from
Bitstein; Locke’s
mistake, blockchained
title,
crypto and contracts (video
discussion).
November 15, 2014Legitimacy
As the conclusion to a quality
piece
of Singapore gloating, Kishore Mahbubani outlines the crucial principle of
regime legitimacy that liberal-autocratic East Asia is honing for the
world:
Singapore has its fair share of detractors. Its political system was
widely viewed as being an “enlightened dictatorship,” even though free elections have been held every five years. Its
media is widely perceived to be controlled by the government and
Singapore is ranked number
153 out of 180 by Reporters
Without Borders in 2015 on the Press Freedom Index. Many human rights
organizations criticize it. Freedom House ranks Singapore as “partially free.” […] Undoubtedly, some of these criticisms have some validity. Yet,
the Singapore population is
one of the best educated populations
and, hence, globally mobile.
They could vote with their feet if Singapore were a
stifling “un-free” society. Most choose to stay. Equally importantly,
some of the most talented people in the world, including Americans and
Europeans, are
giving up their citizenship
to become Singapore citizens. Maybe they have noticed something that the
Western media has not noticed: Singapore is one of the best places to be
born in and to live in.
[UF emphasis]
Jacobinism is typically too lost in its own evangelical universalism to
recognize its limits in political philosophy and in space, if not yet
quite so demonstrably in time.
August 5, 2015Laffer Drift
One dark and fearsome crag, half-lost among the Himalayan mountain range
of uncleared obligations stretched out before this blog, is a promise to
devote a post (or several) to Mencius Moldbug’s Neocameral regime model.
The opportunity to make a small payment against this debt having arisen, I
am eagerly seizing it.
A relatively marginal but consistent feature in Moldbug’s model is the
tendency of Neocameral tax rates to approximate to the Laffer maximum.
Since Moldbug aims to rationalize the theory of government, under the
presumption of its ineliminably self-interested nature, this suggestion
scarcely requires an argument (and in fact does not receive one).
Government will always tend to maximize its resources, and Arthur Laffer’s
graph of optimum revenue-raising tax rates seems to show the way this is
done. A Neocameral regime tends the economy of a country exactly as a
farmer tends a herd of animals — without ever forgetting that ultimate
redemption occurs in the abattoir.
There is a problem with this assumption,
however, which is that the very idea of a Laffer maximum tax rate is
incomplete. By coordinating tax rates (on the x-axis) with tax revenues
(on the y-axis), the Laffer curve demolishes the crude economic intuition
that revenue rises continuously with tax rates. Through the
a priori postulate that a 100% tax rate yields zero revenue,
Laffer demonstrates that revenue maximization has to be located somewhere
in the central region of the curve. Its exact location — as determined by
the shape of the curve — is dependent upon empirical factors, such as
incentive effects, and cannot be deduced by pure theory.
Missing from the Laffer curve is time, and thus
dynamic revenue projection. This is especially important to the
Neocameral model, since a central failure to be rectified through
reactionary democracy-suppression is the systematic heightening of
time-preference, or collapsing economic time-horizons, with which
democracy is inextricably bound. The Neocameral state is justified by its
capacity for time-extended economic rationality, and this is not something
that the simple Laffer curve can reflect.
Adding time to Laffer graphs is not a complex task. All that is required
is a multiplication of curves, constituting a time series, with each curve
corresponding to a time-horizon. Rather than a single curve, such a graph
would consist of a 1-year curve, a 2-year curve, a 3-year curve … and out
to whichever extended prospect was considered appropriate.
If levels of taxation were irrelevant to economic growth rates, then each
curve would be identical, and this exercise would lack all significance.
If, alternatively, taxation effected growth in a predictable direction,
then the Laffer curves would steadily drift as time-horizons were
expanded.
To begin with the improbable case, assume that extraction of resources
from private property owners tends to increase economic growth. Then each
successive Laffer curve would drift to the right, as the tax base expands
under the beneficent impact of lavish government spending. A small and
efficient government, by depriving the economy of its attention, would
steadily shrink the tax base relative to its potential, and thus reduce
the total level of takings (as a function of time).
If, far more plausibly, taxation suppresses growth, then each successive
curve will drift to the left. The Laffer maximum tax rate for a 1-year
time horizon will be revealed as ever more excessive as the horizon is
dilated, and the shortfall of the depredated economy is exposed with
increasing clarity. The more extended the time-horizon, the further to the
left the dynamic Laffer maximum has to be. As economic
far-sightedness stretches out into the distance, an authoritarian-realist
regime converges with anarcho-capitalism, since growth-maximization
increasingly dominates its revenue projections.
Of all the reasons to distrust the Neocameral model, an intrinsic tendency
to short-term Laffer-max revenue raising cannot be among them.
[Apologies for the link famine — trawling the Moldbug archive through the
GFC is a nightmare undertaking, and it’s 3:30 in the morning. I’ll try to
punch some in over the next few days.]
August 6, 2013
CHAPER TWO - IMPLEMENTATION
Undiscovered Countries
After (re)reading Adam Gurri’s critical
analysis
of the core problem of Neoreaction (a tragedy of the political commons),
read the surgical
response
by Handle. The calm intelligence on display from both sides is almost
enough to drive you insane. This can’t be happening, right? “In a way,
it’s a bit sad, because I can guess that Gurri’s article will be the
zenith and high-water mark of coverage of neoreaction which means it will
only get worse from here on in.” Enjoy the insight while it lasts.
My own response to Gurri is still embryonic, but I already suspect that it
diverges from Handle’s to some degree. Rather than defending the
‘technocratic’ element in the Moldbug Patchwork-Neocameral model, I agree
with Gurri that this is a real problem, although (of course) I am far more
sympathetic to the underlying intellectual project. Unlike Gurri — who in
this crucial respect represents a classical liberal position at its most
thoughtful — Moldbug does not conceive democracy as a discovery process,
illuminated by analogy to market dynamics and organic social evolution. On
the contrary, it is a ratchet mechanism that successively distances the
political realm from feedback sensitivity, due to its character as a
closed loop (or state church) sensitive only to a public opinion it has
itself manufactured. As the Cathedral expands, its adaptation to reality
progressively attenuates. The result is that every effective discovery
process — whether economic, scientific, or of any other kind — is
subjected to ever-more radical subversion by political influences whose
only ‘reality principle’ is internal: based on closed-circuit social
manipulation.
Democracy is thus, strictly speaking, a
production of collective insanity, or dissociation from reality. Moldbug’s
solution, therefore, can only be an attempt to re-embed
governance in an effective feedback system. Since it is already evident
that democratic mechanisms, rather than providing such feedback, reliably
deepen dissociation, reality signal has to come from elsewhere. To return
to an adaptive condition, governance has to simultaneously disconnect from
popular opinion (voice) and reconnect to a registry of actual — rather
than ideologically spun — performance. The communication medium for the
uncontaminated feedback required by sensible government is exit
traffic within the Patchwork (comparable in its operation to revealed
consumer preference within marketplaces).
The great difficulty that then emerges — casting the entire Neocameral
schema into question — is the requirement for an ‘undiscovered’ or
‘technocratic’ leap, from an environment of progressively decaying
discovery or selection pressure, into one in which discovery can once
again take place. Neoreaction confronts a very real transition problem,
and Gurri is quite right to point this out. Handle is no less right when
he insists that the ‘conservative’ option of accommodation to the
democratic social process in motion is profoundly untenable, because
discovery deterioration is essential to the democratic trend.
Maladaptation to reality ceases to be correctable under Cathedral
governance, and recognition of this malign condition is the defining
neoreactionary insight.
If we stay on the train we will be smashed into a consummate insanity, but
to leap is technocratic error (unsupported by discovery). As for
prevarication: The intensification of this dilemma can be confidently
expected from the mere continuance of the democratic process, dominated by
the degenerative politics of the madhouse, and scrambling all social
information. It is in this precarious position that the task of a rigorous
evaluation of the Neocameral schema, along with its prospects for
renovation or replacement, has to take place.
“… it will only get worse from here on in.”
February 14, 2014The Deal
NRx repudiates public politics. Turn that around, and it’s the thesis:
Politics happens in private.
Specifically — as a political philosophy — NRx advocates the privatization
of government. It makes a public case for that, in the abstract, but only
for purposes of informational and theoretical optimization. It is not,
ever, doing politics in public, but only thinking about it under
conditions of minimal intelligence security. Concrete execution of
political strategy occurs through private deals.
The currency of such deals was
formalized
by Mencius Moldbug, as primary (or fungible sovereign)
property. It corresponds to the conversion — whether notional or
actual — of hard power into business assets. This conversion is what
‘formalism’ means. It’s an important contribution to political philosophy,
and political economy, but it’s also a negotiating position.
Cries for (public) Action! will always be with us, at least until
things are radically sorted out. They should be ignored. No public action
is serious.
The serious thing is the deal, which substitutes for any
semblance of revolution, and also for regime perpetuation. Shadow NRx —
which acts outside the sphere of public visibility — is a political
vulture fund. This blog does not want to know who, or what, it is. Its
deep secrecy is the same as its reality. Our concern is restricted to the
way it necessarily acts, in compliance with an absolute principle. We ask
only: What does the deal have to be like?
In its essence it is this:
Stand down effective capabilities for regime preservation in exchange
for primary property stock. The form thus indicates the relevant principals — holders of the keys
to hard power. What is on offer for them, as NRx develops in reality (the
shadows), is formalization of their implicit social authority, through the
emergence of a new — ultimate or ‘transcendental’ — commercial medium. The
whole of Neocameral transition is realized through this.
“Turn everything you have into rigorous code, and everything changes. We
can help with the technicalities.”
“Why should I do that?”
“It will be worth it.”
That’s the vulture fund aspect. Hard power capability is systematically
under-valued under conditions of Cathedral-demotic degeneracy, since it is
squandered on the ever-more inefficient preservation of an insane
religious establishment — the Atheo-Oecumenic Ecclesiocracy — and
compensated accordingly, from the charred scraps of chronic policy
disaster. After dysfunctional domestic social programs, election buying,
and Jacobin foreign policy crusades have been paid for, what remains to
reward competent governance?
Administrative capability is slaved to the Cathedral, which means to a
zealous pursuit of impossible objectives, and thus accelerating waste. As
a business opportunity (“We can help with the technicalities”), the
attraction of defection grows, therefore, in strict proportion to the
triumph of progressivism. This is critical, because the threshold risks of
transition are immense, and the deal has to cover them.
The Cathedral is
the Peoples
Temple.
ADDED: The Political Omnivore responds (to the twitter precursor).
January 23, 2016The Sad Left
It’s probably unrealistic right now to think the non-demented Left is
going to be able to cut the hysterical weeping long enough to realize:
You’re going to have to put your social ideals into Neocameral format
if you want to play in the 21st century.
They really could do that. Sovereign stock distribution could be wholly
egalitarian. If Neo-Maoism seeks a sensible sized patch, they should
clearly be given one. (That would be a Neo-Maoist garbage disposal
program, as far as everyone else is concerned.) At the highest
level, NRx is
first-order politics neutral. Do whatever you want, within
precisely formalized bounds.
There’s no audience for this point yet. Eventually there will be.
“But … but .. the whole point of the Left is that we don’t think
government is a business!” — Then call it a ‘co-op’ or some equivalent
bullshit. Jesus, use some imagination.
March 4, 2017Startup Cities
Michael Anissimov is
no
friend of
Neocameralism, but he’s got a good sense for the kind of things we like:
Here‘s a good introduction.
Here‘s Paul Romer on
Charter Cities (video), the more institutionally-respectable predecessor
conception (or perhaps the same conception, with a more established
brand).
The Startup Cities blog
promotes
China’s Special Economic Zones as a model of success.
July 31, 2014Quote note (#111)
SoBL
on
the next stage for Japan:
The Japanese had their
forty-first straight month of trade deficits. This is the problem when a nation imports raw materials and energy
and exports finished goods in a world of sluggish demand. The Japanese
are one of the export dollar recyclers. They are not reliable anymore,
which might be why tiny Belgium holds hundreds of billions of US
Treasuries now. The Japanese are now moving to
invest more abroad, but curiously, they are not investing in hot spots like China but
instead in America. The Japanese are
investing in US insurance companies
as a proxy for investing directly in the US. They want to use insurance
companies as a way to learn about the US market more before digging in
deeper. This is beyond direct purchases of manufacturing firms and what
not. They did this in the ’80s when Japanese automakers partnered with
US firms to learn the psychology of the US worker as they then invested
in US sitused plants.
At the core of all of this is finding ways to earn non-yen denominated
revenue. Currency diversification to prepare for a domestic shock. They
are preparing for the devaluing of the yen, and they expect it to happen
to the yen first and the dollar later. Many have bet against the yen and
lost, including recently Kyle Bass, but if the Japanese themselves are
starting to bail, the end must be approaching. It is an interesting
island culture shaping up. Greying and shrinking population, growing
robotics industry, worlds’ largest creditor nation with trillions in net
assets, “xenophobic” immigration policy, shrinking working population…
it is like they are setting up an island of a homogenous, rentier
class.
If this analysis is correct, it suggests that Japanese capital is set to
become a major resource for world-wide trends with an NRx (anti-demotic
propertarian) orientation. Sustaining foreign investment revenue streams
will become an existential necessity for a grayed Japan, which is enough
to establish a definite agenda regarding governance models in the
functional fragments of the world system.
Does a ‘rentier nation’ spontaneously produce a Neocameral geopolitical
entity?
September 22, 2014Clandestine NeoCam
This
is huge:
The most intriguing secrets of the “war on terror” have nothing to do
with al-Qaeda and its fellow travelers. They’re about the mammoth
private spying industry that all but runs U.S. intelligence operations
today. […] Surprised? No wonder. In April, Director of National
Intelligence Mike McConnell was poised to publicize a year-long
examination of outsourcing by U.S. intelligence agencies. But the report
was inexplicably delayed — and suddenly classified a national secret.
What McConnell doesn’t want you to know is that the private spy industry
has succeeded where no foreign government has: It has penetrated the CIA
and is running the show. […] Over the past five years (some say almost a
decade), there has been a revolution in the intelligence community
toward wide-scale outsourcing. Private companies now perform key
intelligence-agency functions, to the tune, I’m told, of more than $42
billion a year. Intelligence professionals tell me that more than 50
percent of the National Clandestine Service (NCS) — the heart, brains
and soul of the CIA — has been outsourced to private firms such as
Abraxas, Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. …
Of course, read it all, but especially:
Outsourcing has provided solutions to personnel-management problems
that have always plagued the CIA’s operations side. Rather than tying
agents up in the kind of office politics that government employees have
to engage in to advance their careers, outsourcing permits them to focus
on what they do best, which boosts morale and performance.
Under the conditions of a ruined public sphere, trends to the
commercialization of government are re-routed around the back. When the
time is right for the dismantling of the terminally deteriorated Cathedral
Empire — a.k.a. ‘the International Community’ — its power structures will
default to the Deep State, which is already undergoing business
re-organization. Identify the private agencies who at that point will
own the only chunks of security apparatus still working, and you
know who’s political ideas will matter. It follows, naturally, that it
would be unrealistic to expect these directors to be voluble
about their thinking, or anything else. They’re not politicians. That’s
over.
The public sphere is already dead. It’s time now to shift all serious
attention into the dark.
(Thanks to VXXC for the WaPo
link.)
May 12, 2015NRx Disneyworld
Never underestimate the capacity of modern history’s neo-cyberpunk oddity
to reach the place you thought you were heading ahead of time, and in a
way that doesn’t seem … quite right. Glenn Beck has set his
heart (and checkbook) on a version of neoreactionary
secessionism, based on a restoration of the House of Disney. Once you see
the
plan, it’s immediately obvious that nothing in the reactosphere will ever be
the same again:
While Independence is very much a dream at this point, the proposed
city-theme park hybrid would bring several of Glenn’s seemingly
disconnected projects into one place. Media, live events, small business
stores, educational projects, charity, entertainment, news, information,
and technology R&D – all of these things would have a home in
Independence. With the rest of the country and the world going away from
the values of freedom, responsibility and truth, Independence would be a
place built on the very foundation of those principles. A retreat from
the world where entrepreneurs, artists, and creators could come to put
their ideas to work. A place for families to bring their children to be
inspired. […] The ambitious project, projected to cost over two billion
dollars,
has been heavily influenced by Walt Disney. As Glenn has been explaining throughout the week, Disneyland was
originally intended to be a place where people would find happiness,
inspiration, courage and hope. Over time, Walt Disney’s original vision
has been lost. While hundreds of thousands still flock to the town, it’s
become commercialized and the big dreams and the heart have been
compromised. […] Glenn believes that he can bring the heart and the
spirit of Walt’s early Disneyland ideas into reality. Independence, USA
wouldn’t be about rides and merchandise, but would be about community
and freedom. The Marketplace would be a place where craftmen and artisan
could open and run real small businesses and stores. The owners and
tradesmen could hold apprenticeships and teach young people the skills
and entrepreneurial spirit that has been lost in today’s entitlement
state. […] There would also be an Media Center, where Glenn’s production
company would film television, movies, documentaries, and more. Glenn
hoped to include scripted television that would challenge viewers
without resorting to a loss of human decency. He also said it would be a
place where aspiring journalists would learn how to be great reporters.
[…] Across the lake, there would be a church modelled after The Alamo
which would act as a multi-denominational mission center. The town will
also have a working ranch where visitors can learn how to farm and work
the land.
Gnon
giveth
in overwhelming
abundance, and also takes away.
“Neoreaction? Wasn’t that some kind of precursor to the Glenn Beck thing?”
June 16, 2015Disney NRx
It looks as if
this was a lot
more flippant than it needed to be.
Via @asilentsky (via), the question: Was Walt Disney practically exploring a prototypical
Neoreaction in the 1960s? Such anachronism typically merits extreme
skepticism, but here are some videos to hone your doubt upon: Walt
Disney’s original plan for EPCOT (his Experimental Prototype Community of
Tomorrow), parts
1,
2, and
3. Plus some select tweet support:
(That last is a Gibson
quote, btw.)
From the EPCOT videos: “Whatever worked became the code … We’re ready to
go right now.”
There has to be a discussion about this.
July 20, 2015
SECTION B - FASCISM
CHAPTER ONE - THE BASICS
Triumph of the Will?
If it were never necessary to adapt fundamentally to reality, then fascism
would be the truth. There could be no limit to the sovereignty of
political will.
If — pursuing this thought further into vile absurdity — even tactical
concessions were unnecessary, then nothing would obstruct a path of joyous
degeneration leading all the way to consummate communism. That, however,
is several steps beyond anything that has been
seriously advocated for over half a century.
Since the 1920s, communism has been the ideal form of socio-economic
impracticality, as evidenced by that fact that whenever communism becomes
practical, it becomes — to exactly the same extent — fascist (‘state
capitalist’ or ‘Stalinist’). Fascism on the other hand, and as everyone
knows, makes the trains run on time. It represents
practical subordination of reality to concentrated will.
Fascism understands itself as the politics of the ‘third position’ —
between the anti-political hyper-realism of the market on the one
(invisible) hand, and super-political communist fantasy on the
(clenched-fist) other. The fascism that thrives — most exceptionally in
the American tradition through Hamilton, Lincoln, and FDR — is a
flexi-fascism, or pragmatic illiberalism, that marries the populist
desires of coercive collectivism to a superceded, subordinated, or
directed ‘realism’ — grasping economic dispersion as
a technocratic management problem under centralized supervision.
Insofar as this problem proves to be indeed manageable, the basic fascist
intuition is vindicated. Fragmentation is mastered, in a triumph of the
will (although we are more likely to call it ‘hope and change’ today).
That fragmentation cannot be mastered is the sole essentially
anti-fascist proposition, and also the distinctive thesis of Austrian
economics. Whilst deductively obtainable, within the axiomatic system of
methodological individualism, it is a thesis that must ultimately be
considered empirically sensitive. Fascism can discredit individualist
assumptions simply by prolonging itself, and thus practically asserting
the superior authority of the social super-organism. Reciprocally, the
fragility of collective identities can only be convincingly demonstrated
through historical events. It does not suffice to analytically ‘disprove’
the collective — it has to be effectively broken. Nothing less
than a totally unmanageable economic crisis can really count
against the fascist idea.
Yet, obviously and disturbingly, the predictable political response to a
gathering crisis is to
slide
more
deeply
into
fascism. Since fascism, beyond all brand-complexity, sells itself as ultimate
managerial authority — heroic dragon-slayer of the autonomous (or
‘out-of-control’) economy — there is absolutely no reason for this to
surprise us. To break fascism is to break the desire for fascism, which is
to break the democratic or ‘popular will’ itself — and only a really freed
economy, which has uncaged itself, spikily and irreversibly, can do that.
The shattering of human collective self-management from the Outside, or
(alternatively) triumphal fascism forever. That is the fork, dividing
reaction from itself, and deciding everything for mankind. Patchwork or
New Order — but when will we know?
NOTE: Among the glories of
this
comments thread is Vladimir’s indispensable contribution to the schedule
of decision: “Meanwhile, the Austro-libertarian prophets of doom are
necessarily unable to give any accurate timing for these crashes and
panics, even when they unfold exactly according to their theory. The
reason is simple: the obvious truth of the weak efficient markets
hypothesis.”
ADDED: Ex-Army on why
Communism ≠ Fascism: “When you’re given a choice between living under a communist dictator
or a fascist dictator, everything else being equal, take the fascist
dictator. Interestingly, communists in general are safer under a fascist
dictator than they are under a communist dictator.”
March 25, 2013AIACC
Moldbug’s
latest
has triggered a wave of discussion by emphatically re-stating the
long-standing thesis:
America is a communist country.
The supporting argument is richly multi-threaded, and I won’t attempt to
recapitulate it here. Its dominant flavor can be appreciated in these
paragraphs:
When the story of the 20th century is told in its proper, reactionary
light, international communism is anything but a grievance of which
Americans may complain. Rather, it’s a crime for which we have yet to
repent. Since America is a communist country, the original communist
country, and the most powerful and important of communist countries, the
crimes of communism are our crimes. You may not personally have
supported these crimes. Did you oppose them in any way?
Whereas actually, codewords like “progressive,” “social justice,”
“change,” etc, are shared across the Popular Front community for the
entire 20th century. They are just as likely to be used by a Cheka
cheerleader from the ’20s, as a Clinton voter from the ’90s.
‘Progressives’ aren’t called out on their
all-but-overt communism for ‘reasons’ of tact, rooted in a complex
structure of intimidation, which itself attests to comprehensive Left
triumph. It’s rude to call a ruling communist a communist, and being rude
can be highly deleterious to life prospects (it’s a communist thing, which
everyone understands all too well).
Despite all this, Outside in probably won’t be stepping up its
counter-communist rhetoric in any obvious way, because there’s a criticism
of the AIACC analysis that remains unanswered — and which Moldbug seems
averse to recognizing. Fascism is the highest stage of communism.
Already in the 1930s — which is to say with the New Deal — even small-c
‘communism’ had been clearly surpassed by a more advanced model of slaving
the private economy to the state.
Yes, America is a communist country, in much the same way that it is a
protestant, and puritan one. The ideological lineage of its governing
establishment leads through communism, in exactly the way Moldbug
describes. The evolution of this lineage, however, has long passed on into
politically incorporated pseudo-capitalism. This is a fact which
can only be obscured by excessive attention to preliminary — and now
entirely extinct — political forms.
There is absolutely nobody on the empowered Left seeking to dismantle the
co-opted oligarchy in order to establish direct ‘public’ administration of
the American industrial base. In this respect America is no more communist
than the Third Reich (and also no less). Central planning is restricted to
the monetary commanding heights, with a pragmatic apparatus of regulatory
coercion enforcing political conformity among private businesses. This
arrangement is accepted as far more consistent with effective direction of
society through Cathedral teleology, in which the accumulation of cultural
power is acknowledged as the supreme goal. Furthermore, it enables
government insiders and allies to be rewarded relatively openly,
economizing on the administrative, political, and psychological costs of
extensive subterfuge.
Understanding that fascism is an advanced communist ideology is at least
as important as recognizing AIACC, with more significant consequences, on
the ‘right’ as well as the Left. Progressives progress. Communism was just
a stage they went through.
September 19, 2013Quote notes (#59)
John Michael Greer
on
the triumph of fascism (spot on):
National socialist parties argued that business firms should be made
subject to government regulation and coordination in order to keep them
from acting against the interests of society as a whole, and that the
working classes ought to receive a range of government benefits paid for
by taxes on corporate income and the well-to-do. Those points were
central to the program of the National Socialist German Workers Party
from the time it got that name— it was founded as the German Workers
Party, and got the rest of the moniker at the urging of a little man
with a Charlie Chaplin mustache who became the party’s leader not long
after its founding — and those were the policies that the same party
enacted when it took power in Germany in 1933.
If those policies sound familiar, dear reader, they should. That’s the
other reason why next to nobody outside of specialist historical works
mentions national socialism by name: the Western nations that defeated
national socialism in Germany promptly adopted its core economic
policies, the main source of its mass appeal, to forestall any attempt
to revive it in the postwar world.
(via @PuzzlePirate)
ADDED: A point of clarification and a question:
Fascism isn’t a problem because it triggers scary feelings about the
Nazis. It’s a problem because it’s running the world.
Question: Is there anybody among the critics of this contention who seeks
to defend fascism against sloppy criticism and ‘spin’ who doesn’t also
want — at least partially — to defend elements of socialist governance?
The sample size of the commentary so far is too small to tell, but it’s
looking as if the answer is ‘no’. If so, it would suggest that Hayek and
even (*gasp*) Jonah Goldberg are right in suggesting that the fundamental
controversy is about
spontaneous social organization, and not about any unambiguous
argument of Left v. Right.
February 13, 2014Fascism
The whole of Robert O. Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism (2004) is
available
here. In the final pages (p.218), following detailed historical analysis, it
cautiously advances a cultural-political definition:
Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by
obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or
victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in
which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in
uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons
democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without
ethical or legal restraint goals of internal cleansing and external
expansion.
Since the topic regularly re-surfaces, it seems worth recording Paxton’s
formulation as a reference point, especially as its emphases differ
significantly from those this blog (and its critics) have tended to
stress. An important conclusion of Paxton’s study is that no purely
ideological account of fascism is able to capture what is an essentially
historical phenomenon, which is to say a process, rooted in the
degeneration of democracy. (Wikipedia offers some
background on his
work.)
June 12, 2014
CHAPTER TWO - NEOLIBERALISM: THE FASCISM THAT WON
‘Neoliberalism’
It’s absolutely obvious that any engagement with the most prominent
current
version
of accelerationist thinking — or indeed with any left-dominated discussion
today — is going to encounter the term ‘neoliberalism‘ as an omnipresent reference. Sheer irritability won’t serve as a
response for long.
Why irritation at all? Most immediately, because the reference of this
term is a sprawling mess. It is employed ambiguously to describe an epoch,
and an ideology. The evident duplicity of this lies in the tacit
assumption that the ideology defines the epoch — a vast historical and
political claim, as well as an implausible one — which evades systematic
interrogation through terminological sleaziness.
Worse still, the characteristics of the
‘neoliberal’ ideology are themselves pasted together, primarily by a
mish-mash of theoretically-impoverished anti-capitalist polemics from
around the world, with the consequence that its only consistent feature is
the mere fact of having a leftist opposition (somewhere). As the
Wikipedia explanation (linked above) makes clear, any economic
policy anywhere that is not positively hostile to the market, and which
finds itself talked about antagonistically by the left, is ‘neoliberal’.
When all of these compounding fuzz factors are taken into consideration,
it is easy to see why the meaning of ‘neoliberal’ can range — at the very
least — from marginally market-reformist Keynesianism (Clinton), through
autocratic capitalism (Pinochet), to extreme libertarian
‘hyper-capitalism’ (in our dreams). Its global application, to include —
for instance — the ethnic-Chinese dominated Pacific Rim (and post
Reform-and-Opening Mainland China), is more carelessly gestural still. If
Lenin’s 1921 New Economic Policy wasn’t ‘neoliberal’ it’s hard to see why
— unless the absence of a left opposition suffices as an explanation. A
word this sloppy — traditionally rooted in Latin American anti-market
demagoguery, but since adopted generally as the linguistic equivalent of a
Che Guevara T-shirt — has no serious analytical use.
Fashion is unpredictable, but it seems very unlikely that this word is
going anywhere. Its totemic meaning within tribal leftism is enough to
ensure its persistence — which is to say that
SWPL radical chic
signalling would be significantly inconvenienced without it. Might it then
be possible to rigorize it?
That would require delimitation, which is to say: specificity. Given the
political utility of the word, there are few grounds for optimism in this
respect. David Harvey, for instance, who has devoted a
book
to the ‘topic’ (A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 2005), produces
no clear definition beyond resurgent capitalism, as it occurred with the
partial recession of central planning from the late 1970s. Unsurprisingly,
therefore, the more classically liberal policy becomes, the more
‘neoliberal’ it is too. The ‘neo-‘, in the end, signifies no more than an
infuriated “you’re supposed to be dead, goddammit.” Neoliberalism is then
a capitalistic orientation that has outlived expectation, and since the
expectation has been sunk into immovable foundations, it is the outliving
that requires explicit designation.
Whatever slight (and strictly polemical) coherence might be drawn from
Harvey is thrown back into chaos by Benjamin Noys’
paper
‘The Grammar of Neoliberalism’ (2010). Far from describing the partial
reversion to market-oriented economic arrangements in the wake of
hegemonic Social Democratic assumptions, Noys identifies ‘neoliberalism’
with the state-supervised capitalism introduced in the 1920s-30s, i.e.
exactly that economic order which Harvey’s ‘neoliberalism’ overthrows.
Taken in its own terms — rather than as a defense of an intrinsically
misleading word — Noys’ argument is highly interesting. Its general
direction is captured in the following passage [citation marks
subtracted]:
What is the precise nature, then, of neo-liberalism? Of course, the
obvious objection to the ‘anti-state’ vision of neo-liberalism is that
neo-liberalism itself is a continual form of state intervention, usually
summarised in the phrase ‘socialism for the rich, capitalism for the
poor’. Foucault notes that neo-liberalism concedes this: ‘neo-liberal
government intervention is no less dense, frequent, active, and
continuous than in any other system.’ The difference, however, is the
point of application. It intervenes on society ‘so that
competitive mechanisms can play a regulatory role at every moment and
every point in society and by intervening in this way its objective will
become possible, that is to say, a general regulation of society by the
market.’ Therefore, we miss the point if we simply leave a critique of
neo-liberalism at the point of saying ‘neo-liberalism is as statist as
other governmental forms’. Instead, the necessity is to analyse how
neo-liberalism creates a new form of governmentality in which the state
performs a different function: permeating society to subject it to the
economic.
Setting aside the question of this argument’s persuasiveness (for another
time), the essential thing to note is that it represents a
contest over the mindlessly shambling term ‘neoliberalism’ which
Noys has little realistic chance of winning — ‘winning’, that is, with
sufficient comprehensiveness to salvage the word. If ‘neoliberalism’
generally meant a highly statist variant of ‘capitalist’
organization, first originating in the era of high-modernism, in which —
in contrast to the statism of the left — the role of the state was
specifically directed to imposing an administrative simulacrum of
catallactic social order, it would become a valuable,
theoretically-functional word. This would be so even if the theory itself
were criticized, amended, or rejected — and in fact the very possibility
of such engagement presupposes that ‘neoliberalism’ becomes a
locally intelligible concept (local, that is, to Noys’ argument
and whatever halo it has managed to extend beyond itself).
Even here on the Outer Right, almost all terminological irritability would
immediately subside if the expression repeatedly encountered was — even
implicitly — Neoliberalism in the Noysean sense. It would then be
a term with relatively precise limits, clarifying more than it obscured.
Consequently, it would mark a limit on the right as well as the left,
distinguishing anti-statist or laissez-faire capitalism — with
its model in Hong Kong — from the dominant political-economic formation of
our age. For that reason alone, it can be confidently anticipated that
‘neoliberalism’ will not be permitted to mean any such thing.
ADDED: Complete PDF of David Harvey’s
A Brief History of Neoliberalism.
February 21, 2014‘Neoliberalism’ II
Paul Mason
thinks
he’s being helpful:
There’s a meme that keeps resurfacing in the genteel world of rightwing
financial thought: that the term “neoliberalism” is in some way just a
term of abuse, or a catch-all phrase invented by the left. […] Well, as
the UK steel industry faces instant closure — and let’s be clear that’s
what Tata would do if it had to — we about to get a textbook lesson in
what neoliberalism actually means. It means, when market logic clashes
with human logic, the market must prevail and you must not give a shit
about the social consequences.
Ummm … you know that was just straight-up liberalism, before they wrecked
the word. (Socialism is the other thing.)
ADDED: Some precious lucidity
here.
April 21, 2016The Fascism that Won
Calling somebody a fascist tends to be a great way to end a
conversation. First on the Left, and more recently on the Right, the abuse
value of this term has been eagerly seized upon. Insofar as such usage
merits the attribution of a ‘logic’ it is that of
reductio ad absurdum — an argument or position that can be
identified as fascist by implication is thereby immediately
dismissed. Fascism is analyzed only as far as required to stick the label
on the other guy.
Among the reasons to regret this situation is the veil it casts over the
triumph of fascism as the decisive historical fact of the 20th century.
While the defeat of the core ‘fascist’ axis in the Second World War left
the ideology bereft of confident defenders, reducing it to its merely
abusive meaning, it also fostered the illusion that the victorious powers
were essentially ‘anti-fascist’ — to the point of extreme military
exertion. The historical reality, in contrast, is described far more
accurately by dramatic convergence upon fascist ideas, from both Left and
Right, as exemplified by the ascendency of pragmatic nationalism over
radical collectivism in the communist world, and by social-democratic
state-managerialism over
laissez-faire ‘classical liberalism’ in the West. With calm
discussion of this ‘third-position’ formation rendered next to impossible,
the crucial attempt to understand its socio-historical specificity is
diverted into sterile polemics.
American Arch-Druid John Michael Greer is
perhaps sufficiently distanced from predictable Left-Right controversy to
make a difference with his
three
part
series
of blog posts on the historical reality of fascism. Rather than attack
fascism (from the Left) for its residual capitalism, or (from the Right)
for its innovative anti-capitalism, Greer prioritizes the philosophical
task of a rectification of words:
Greer’s discussion is so eloquent and penetrating that it would be
redundant to repeat it here. It deserves the widest possible careful
reading, and subsequent reflection. (Urban Future endorses the
entire argument, with only the most marginal reservations on comparatively
insignificant points.)
Instead of pointless repetition, a question. Given that history has
conspired to make the word ‘fascism’ illegible, and has thus not only
obscured the dominant trend in social organization worldwide, but also
stripped away all effective antibodies to resurgent movements of classical
fascist type, is there any realistic path to a restoration of political
lucidity? Is the world doomed to persistent blindness about what it is,
and what it might still more dismally become? If there are any grounds for
encouragement in this regard, the evidence for them is thin.
Greer’s conclusion seems no less bleak. Approaching it, he comments:
ADDED: (For the
Fregeans out
there) Different Sinn, same Bedeutung: ‘morning star’
and ‘evening star’;
‘Neoliberalism’
and The Fascism that Won.
March 3, 2014The Fascism that’s Winning
John Michael Greer’s
grasp of the
fascist phenomenon is much stronger than Samir Amin’s. As might be
expected from a voice so unambiguously aligned with the Left, Amin is
entirely indifferent to the essentially populist nature of fascism and its
erosion of property rights.
Property has no meaning apart from free disposal, equivalent to an Exit
option on a particular instantiation of wealth. Fascism’s statist
subordination of the independent ‘plutocracy’ — realized through
more-or-less severe restrictions on the free disposal of assets, both
formal and informal — is therefore inconsistent with the protection of
private property, which is rather eroded from its foundations. (Where
communism expropriates, fascism — more efficiently — attenuates.)
Amin is therefore
writing
from a position of structurally-unobservant Marxist dogma when he remarks
of “fascist regimes” in general:
… they were all willing to manage the government and society in such a
way as not to call the fundamental principles of capitalism into
question, specifically private capitalist property, including that of
modern monopoly capitalism. That is why I call these different forms of
fascism particular ways of managing capitalism and not political forms
that challenge the latter’s legitimacy, even if “capitalism” or
“plutocracies” were subject to long diatribes in the rhetoric of fascist
speeches. The lie that hides the true nature of these speeches appears
as soon as one examines the “alternative” proposed by these various
forms of fascism, which are always silent concerning the main point —
private capitalist property.
On the contrary — every fascist regime qualifies the liberal right to free
disposal of ‘strategic’ economic assets, and thus subverts “private
capitalist property” at the root. Indeed, the forms of property most
radically affected by fascist governance are precisely those identifiable
with a capitalistic (i.e. productive) character. In the case of
large-scale capital assets determined as the ‘commanding heights’ of a
modern industrial economy, especially those of clear military
significance, utilization is directed as stringently under fascist
conditions as communistic ones (although typically with considerably
greater administrative competence and pragmatic flexibility). When
socialism emphasizes practicality, it tends to adopt fascistic traits —
such as nationalism and state-supervised bourgeois management —
automatically.
Amin’s essay, however, is far from
uninteresting. It’s most striking analysis, which also seems to have been
its motivating topic, concerns political Islam. Amin’s disdain for this
rising ideology is classically Marxist, and entirely untainted by New Left
opportunism. In consequence, he is positioned as a voice in the
wilderness, addressing a sympathetic audience that has been marginalized
to the edge of disappearance.
After formulating a four-fold typology of fascist regimes, Amin resolutely
folds Islamism into it, stating:
… the Western powers (the United States and its subaltern European
allies) … have given preferential support to the Muslim Brotherhood
and/or other “Salafist” organizations of political Islam. The reason for
that is simple and obvious: these reactionary political forces accept
exercising their power within globalized neoliberalism (and thus
abandoning any prospect for social justice and national independence).
That is the sole objective pursued by the imperialist powers.
The anti-democratic option of the imperialist powers (which gives the
lie to the pro-democratic rhetoric found in the flood of propaganda to
which we are subjected), then, accepts the possible “excesses” of the
Islamic regimes in question. Like other types of fascism and for the
same reasons, these excesses are inscribed in the “genes” of their modes
of thought: unquestioned submission to leaders, fanatic valorization of
adherence to the state religion, and the formation of shock forces used
to impose submission. In fact, and this can be seen already, the
“Islamist” program makes progress only in the context of a civil war
(between, among others, Sunnis and Shias) and results in nothing other
than permanent chaos. This type of Islamist power is, then, the
guarantee that the societies in question will remain absolutely
incapable of asserting themselves on the world scene. It is clear that a
declining United States has given up on getting something better — a
stable and submissive local government — in favor of this “second
best.”
Beyond an appeal for “vigilance”, Amin has little to propose in practical
response to this predicament. Given the near-total evaporation of
secular-leftist constituencies in the Muslim world, accompanied by the
disappearance of a confident anti-Islamist Left outside it, this absence
of practical direction is scarcely surprising.
September 2, 2014Capitalism Today
… the American version, at least, which is probably why it’s going to die.
Apple’s Tim Cook
opines:
America’s business community recognized a long time ago that
discrimination, in all its forms, is bad for business.
Charitably, I’m going to assume this isn’t a direct quote from
Stormfront. It’s a mess, but
not an
unanticipated one.
ADDED: Any connoisseur of tangled irony knots has to appreciate this:
March 30, 2015Man in the High Castle
The TV series
trailer.
Could it be that people are beginning to understand that fascism won the
20th century? (With no sign of a major reverse so far in the 21st.)
Since ‘fascism’ tweaks people’s Godwin nerves, it might be better to talk
about ‘pragmatic populism’ — so long as it is initially understood that no
substantial semantic revision is thereby taking place. Whatever we call
it, it’s what has ruled the earth for close to a century, as the
culmination of democracy, and the way classical liberalism is actually
destroyed. It plays on basic human traits in a way that leaves every other
ideology in the dust — tribalism, resentment, vicarious identification
with authority, extreme susceptibility to simple propaganda, and all of
the remaining highly-predictable, easily manipulable, aspects of hominid
social emotion. Ultimately, it’s what humanity deserves, strictly
speaking, since it is nothing other than the cynical exploitation of what
people are like. The fact that the most insultingly trivial redecorations
of this mode of social organization suffice to convince even articulate
intellectuals that something else is taking place serves as an ample
demonstration of its tidal historic momentum.
Fascists Pragmatic
populists think that people, as a general political phenomenon, are
irredeemably moronic tools, and they’re right.
The more politics we get, the deeper pragmatic populism digs in.
ADDED: Background to the Times Square shot. “The more familiar it is, the more
terrifying it is.” (Quite.)
September 25, 2015Twitter cuts (#124)
(Massive tweet-storm follows that is too long to reproduce, but well worth
your time.)
The “national capitalist” is a concept that arises in the Marxian
tradition, but has also (recently) acquired a very different valency
elsewhere. Countries come to appear as estates.
July 14, 2016Horseshoe Quiz
Nazism is the only political form that corresponds to the soul of the
European people.
— Without peeking, see if you can guess which ‘end of the political
spectrum’
this
comes from.
ADDED: Relevant —
July 9, 2017
CHAPTER THREE - EURASIANISM, THE ALT-RIGHT AND CURRENT EVENTS
The Eurasian Question
Within the great spans of history, domestic ideological controversy is
something close to a luxury good. Whenever it isn’t to same extent ‘on
hold’ the global environment is untypically benign. Under more normal —
which is to say stressed — conditions, it either folds down into
pragmatism, or explodes into cosmic, eschatological drama. In today’s
unmistakably stressed world, Alexander
Dugin‘s ‘Eurasianism‘ exemplifies the latter eventuality.
As with Jacobinism and Bolshevism before it, Eurasianism matters to you
whether you want it to or not. The grandeur of its scope is undeniable. It
is concerned with nothing less than the fate of the the earth. In this
sense, nothing that anyone cares about falls outside it. (People are
beginning to get
scared.)
Shelving moral and partisan responses, it is merely realistic to
acknowledge that Dugin is an ideological genius of the first order.
Synthesizing Russia’s native Eurasianist
traditions with
geopolitcal
theory
and deep currents of occult
mythology, he has restructured the political imagination of his homeland, whose
leader is
paying
obvious
attention. When history is integrated with myth, things can easily begin to get
exciting.
The fact that Atlantis is unmistakably
sinking makes the rising
wolf-howls of Eurasianism all the more penetrating. Decadence is a dilemma
or a delight for those involved in it. For those looking on, it is
food. Eurasianism has the initiative, while the West
reacts.
The Eurasian Question, then, is not whether this ideology will shake the
world. That is already
baked
into the cake. The open question concerns
China. In a re-ignited Hyperborean /
Atlantean
forever war, which way does China
tilt?
For China, the ideological and geostrategic landscape opened by the
Eurasian challenge to the present global order offers extraordinary
leverage. A civilization that has
long
understood triangular
diplomacy
as the optimal context for the exercise of strategic intelligence can
scarcely fail to find encouragement in this complex
pattern
of widening fractures. In comparison to the cramped and dangerous position
of a world geostrategic challenger, that of a triangular balancer presents
advantages that are difficult to over-estimate.
China cannot plausibly be described as an ‘Atlantean’ power (despite the
great historical importance of its ‘Singlosphere‘). Yet, neither is it ‘Hyperborean’ in any persuasive sense. These
options both belong to a dirempted Occident — understood according to an
expansive, rather than Eurasian definition, attentive to common classical
and Christian roots. The Eurasian mythos is not inherently Sino-sensitive.
China’s moves will be made upon a still greater gaming table.
Both a (geographically) Eurasian and a Pacific-maritime power — already,
perhaps, a super-power — China has free options within the conflicted
global space that Dugin’s ideology so convincingly, or at least
compellingly, portrays. The next stage of Chinese geopolitical evolution
will occur within an environment of dynamic, triangular tensions. The
course of the world depends upon how this opportunity is played.
August 7, 2014Mash
Among the very many reasons to revere Jim is that he doesn’t
mess
about.
There’s a sizable constituency on the ‘alt right’ whose self-understood
differentiation from the Marxist left is entirely reducible to its own
heightened appreciation for authoritarian hierarchy and racial solidarity.
Since actually existing Marxist-Leninist regimes have been, uniformly,
authoritarian-hierarchical ethno-nationalists, this isn’t in fact the
basis for any real difference at all.
ADDED: What I’m seeing —
June 28, 2014White Dindus
“Our entire history is something that’s been done to us by tricky
outsiders — especially the bad stuff!”
When anybody else sounds like this, it’s rightfully categorized as
pathetic whining.
ADDED: “Can we criticize (the extraordinarily large number of) Jewish
Leftist freaks without going completely insane about it?”
“No! Go completely insane about it!”
October 8, 2015What is the Alt-Right?
Topic of the week, it seems. XS will carve out a Chaos Patch space for
targeted links on Sunday, but for impatient types, here’s a taster (1,
2,
3,
4).
This blog, I’m guessing predictably, takes
a count me out position. Neoreaction, as I understand it,
predicted the emergence of the Alt-Right as an inevitable outcome of
Cathedral over-reach, and didn’t remotely like what it saw. Kick a dog
enough and you end up with a bad-tempered dog. Acknowledging the fact
doesn’t mean you support kicking dogs — or bad-tempered dogs. Maybe you’d
be happy to see the dog-kicker get bitten (me too). That, however, is as
far as it goes.
A short definition, that seems to me uncontroversial:
The Alt-Right is the populist dissident right. Set theoretically,
NRx is therefore grouped with it, but as a quite different thing. Another
obvious conclusion from the definition: the Alt-Right is almost inevitably
going to be far larger than NRx is, or should ever aim to be. If you think
people power is basically great, but the Left have just been doing it
wrong, the Alt-Right is most probably what you’re looking for (and NRx
definitely isn’t).
For the Alt-Right, generally speaking, fascism is (1) basically a great
idea, and (2) a meaningless slur concocted by (((Cultural Marxists))) to
be laughed at. For NRx (XS version) fascism is a late-stage leftist
aberration made peculiarly toxic by its comparative practicality. There’s
no real room for a meeting of minds on this point.
As a consequence of its essential populism, the Alt-Right is inclined to
anti-capitalism, ethno-socialism, grievance politics, and progressive
statism. Its interest in geopolitical fragmentation (or Patchwork
production) is somewhere between hopelessly distracted and positively
hostile. Beside its — admittedly highly entertaining — potential for
collapse catalysis, there’s no reason at all for the techno-commercial
wing of NRx to have the slightest sympathy for it. Space for tactical
cooperation, within the strategic framework of pan-secessionism, certainly
exists, but that could equally be said of full-on Maoists with a
willingness to break things up.
None of this should be taken as a competition for recruits. The Alt-Right
will get almost all of them — it’s bound to be huge. From the NRx
perspective, the Alt-Right is to be appreciated for helping to clean us
up. They’re most welcome to take whoever they can, especially if they shut
the door on the way out.
ADDED: Preserving this just to thrash myself
senseless:
If you think God coming out as an Anime Nazi is going to stop me being
obstreperous, you’ve no idea what you’re dealing with.
January 22, 2016What is the Alt-Right? II
There’s a Wikipedia
answer to the
question now. It doesn’t strike me as obviously dishonest, or any more
inchoate than the phenomenon itself. Building Trump-adoration into the
definition will ensure that it dates fast — but it’s not hard to see why
that seems necessary.
There’s a lot of Wikipedia disdain around, in our neck of the
woods, but I’m usually hard-pressed to find serious cause for complaint.
After taking a look at RationalWIki — which
folds the
Alt-Right into its “Neoreactionary movement” rant presently — returning to
Wikipedia is like taking a bath.
(Alt-Right
at XS, for
future reference.)
March 5, 2016Quote note (#286)
The Guardian
goes
Alt-Right:
Those still in work might be less grumpy about funding a more generous
welfare state if beneficiaries are deemed to be enough like them: fellow
tribesmen, people of similar background and therefore felt to be
deserving of charity.
It’s the Sweden attractor at work. (“Sure, fascism isn’t great, but if
that’s what’s needed to protect the welfare state …”)
September 27, 2016The Alt-Right is Dead
It might stagger on for a bit longer, but it has nothing left to do.
Annoying the (impending) Trump Regime at this point would be pointless, so
that prospect isn’t any source of leverage. The 1488 nut cases, due to
their marriage of convenience with the legacy media, have the ability to
define it in the public mind, so those supporters without a Nazi-fetish
will gradually drift away. It’s done.
Fascism isn’t cool, and Anglosphere cultures will never find it so. In
Continental Europe it’s different, but that’s a whole other topic. We’re
not them, which is one of the crucial things the Alt-Right ultras won’t
ever get. We’re
Atlanteans. There’s expanded space for a right-populist American nationalist
movement, but it won’t call itself the Alt-Right, and if it’s remotely
sensible it will be pre-emptively immunized against ruinous European
ideas. It will probably be far more Tea-Party flavored, though a lot
tougher. (This blog will still find its populism unappetizing.)
That’s the XS prediction. (RamZPaul, who liked the Alt-Right much more
than I did,
agrees
with the central point.)
Jim has a very different
take.
(As does
Amerika.)
Here‘s someone
who’s building something more solid.
November 24, 2016What is the Alt-Right? III
Late to
this, which is what the comparatively honest faction of the Cathedral is
seeing.
Main XS-specific quibbles:
(1) No, I didn’t have anything to do with The Dark Enlightenment
blog. Nor, I’m highly confident, did Curtis Yarvin. I’m especially
confident that the Open Letter was not written as an introduction to the
DE.
ADDED: See this TDE
statement.
(2) I have no social connections at all with the Lesser God-tier
of SV. (If I did, I’d brag about it all the time.)
(3) Anyone who thinks
this
usage of echoes is non-ironic needs a Kek-check.
(4) The RamZPaul link is complete black-thread and duct tape conspiracism.
(C’mon, seriously, that’s obvious, isn’t it?) A little reciprocal linkage
isn’t a social relationship. We both merely acknowledge that the other guy
exists.
Induction would suggest there are some other howlers beyond my
epistemological horizon. Frankly, though, I don’t see much deliberate
malevolence here. Cramer seems to be doing his best to understand what’s
going on, and to remain as calm as possible about it. If he’s primarily
interested in the Alt-Right, I’d recommend much more attention to Richard
Spencer, and much less to Neoreaction. My recommendation to NRx,
naturally, is to vindicate that suggestion.
March 3, 2017Hoppe on the Alt-Right
Speech delivered at PFS 2017. Consistently
sound,
naturally.
October 16, 2017The Fear
Ryan
Cooper:
I made the case just a couple months back that Republican presidential
frontrunner Donald Trump is a sort of
fledgling Mussolini, nurturing an incipient fascist movement. As the first primaries
approach, and Trump’s lead in the polls is actually widening, his
development toward outright fascism is progressing faster than I feared.
[…] As of August, Trump had most of the ingredients for a fascist
movement: the victim complex, the fervent nationalism, the obsession
with national purity and cleansing purges, and the cult of personality.
He was missing the organized violence, a left-wing challenge strong
enough to push traditional conservative elites into his camp, support
for wars of aggression, and a full-bore attack on democracy itself. He’s
made much progress on all but the last one.
The last one is the only point of NRx intersection, but if he takes The
White House, there’s going to be plenty of deranged: “See, this is what
the Dark Enlightenment leads to!” analysis (among the upper echelons of
the leftist commentariat). No, this is what democracy leads to. It’s
called radical populism. (Unfortunately, that’s a message that
isn’t going to be heard.)
The Left would rather hand lurid fascism the keys than stop what they’re
doing (they’re already doing the non-lurid
version).
That would count as a perverse moral vindication — cooking up the enemy
they always said they wanted to stop. Eventually, they’ll manage it. The
Ancients already knew that’s how this thing ends.
It goes without saying that NRx should back away as far as possible, while
scattering signs of protection (not that it will do any good).
ADDED:
Trump speaks.
November 25, 2015Merkel’s Mess
Damon Linker
paints
the gruesome picture almost perfectly. (Read the whole thing — it’s not
long.)
In the course of a few months, Angela Merkel was transmogrified from a
moderately talented German politician, into one of the most destructive
leaders in world history. If that sounds like an exaggeration, it’s only
because her responsibility for dragging the European continent back into a
new 1930s still awaits the unfolding of events. Even without complete
relapse
into a dark age of authoritarian anti-capitalism, the wave of rape,
pillage, and terror she has unleashed will now — inevitably — devastate
millions of lives, and structurally degrade the quality of life for tens
of millions more as they seek to protect themselves in markedly more
adverse social circumstances. It will all get extremely ugly. As Linker
dryly remarks, “let’s just say it’s unlikely to end well. … And the storm
has only just begun to gather.”
What was she thinking? Assuming — as seems fair — that she doesn’t
positively want to usher in Hitler 2.0, her catastrophic policy decisions
have to be misguided. It’s probably no easier for the readers of
this blog than it is for me to cognitively sympathize with the deranged
path she has taken. One can only infer that she genuinely believed a vast
flood of predominantly young, male, Islamic, tribalistic, and
historically-traumatized incomers, with a hallucinatory sense of
(unrealizable) cultural and material
entitlement, would immediately transmute into fungible production units and
contribute to European pensions financing. The Economist
pretends
to believe the same thing. I’m forced to accept it’s possible to believe
it, despite finding the flying spaghetti monster significantly more
plausible. If this depth of delusion really has a grip on the minds of
Western elites, any outcome other than utter disaster is most probably
unobtainable. A cynical lie would be far less dangerous.
In a single stroke, Merkel has converted the
Raspail
and
Houellebecq
scenarios into vivid contemporary predicaments. European collapse has been
radically accelerated. For that, a certain dark gratitude is due.
August 6, 2016Post-Democratic Politics
Apparently
we’re already in the next phase:
To call Trumpism fascist is to suggest that it demands from us a unique
response. We can deploy the “fascism” moniker to
Trump’s ascendance by recognizing features like selective populism,
nationalism, racism, traditionalism, the deployment of Newspeak and
disregard for reasoned debate. The reason we should use
the term is because, taken together, these aspects of Trumpism are not
well combated or contained by standard liberal appeals to reason. It is
constitutive of its fascism that it demands a different sort of
opposition.
I doubt whether they’ve thought this through, but don’t let that get in
the way of progress.
January 22, 2017
SECTION C - STRATEGICS
CHAPTER ONE - ROUGH TRIANGLES
The Unspeakable
To prepare for an excursion into the real-world workings of strategic
triangles,
this
harshly illuminating conversation between David P. Goldman (‘Spengler’)
and the ghost of Cardinal Richelieu is worth recalling:
“We are a bit confused about Syria,” I began. “Its leader, Bashar
al-Assad, is slaughtering his own people to suppress an uprising. And he
is allied to Iran, which wants to acquire nuclear weapons and dominate
the region. If we overthrow Assad, Sunni radicals will replace him, and
take revenge on the Syrian minorities. And a radical Sunni government in
Syria would ally itself with the Sunni minority next door in Iraq and
make civil war more likely.”
“We can’t go around saying that,” I remonstrated.
ADDED: DrewM at
AoS channels Richelieu from the id: “Personally, I’m happy to let
[the Syrians] fight it out amongst themselves for a good long time. Hell,
let’s arm both sides.”
March 21, 2013Rough Triangles
The elementary model of robust plural order is the
tripod. Whether
taken as a schema for constitutional
separation of powers, a deeper
cultural matrix
supporting decentralized societies, or a pattern of ultimate
cosmic equilibrium,
triangular fragmentation provides the archetype of quasi-stable disunity.
By dynamically preempting the emergence of a dominant instance, the
triangle describes an automatic power-suppression mechanism.
From the
Romance of the Three Kingdoms
to
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, triangular fragmentation has been seen to present an important and
distinctive strategic quandary. In power balances of the
Mexican Standoff
type, initiation of force is inhibited by the triangular structure, in
which the third, reserved party profits from hostilities between
the other two.
The Cold War, schematized to its basics, is the
single most telling example. Rather than a binary conflict between East
and West, the deep structure of the Cold War was triangular, making it
intractable to two-player game-theoretic calculations. Catastrophic damage
that might be rationally acceptable within a binary conflict, as the price
for total elimination of one’s foe, becomes suicidal in a three-player
game, where it ensures the victory of the third party.
MAD-reason is no longer readily applied, once ‘mutual’ is more than two.
Even brilliant
chess
players
lose their way in the triangle, where the economy of sacrifice has to be
radically reconsidered. Among the Cold War’s Three Kingdoms, it was the
chess masters who ‘won’ the race to defeat.
The lessons of the Cold War are no less relevant to its successor, which
also fostered binary illusions in its early stages. America’s chess match
with militant Islam resulted in a stalemate, at best.
Increasingly
fierce
Sunni-Shia rivalry recasts the current war as a rough triangle, captured
in its strategic essentials by the colloquialism
Let’s you and him fight. This was Cardinal Richelieu’s way with
triangles, as ‘Spengler’
reminds us:
The classic example is the great German civil war, namely the 30 Years’
War of 1618-48. The Catholic and Protestant Germans, with roughly equal
strength, battered each other through two generations because France
sneakily shifted resources to whichever side seemed likely to fold. I
have contended for years that the United States ultimately will adopt
the perpetual-warfare doctrine that so well served Cardinal Richelieu
and made France the master of Europe for a century (see
How I learned to stop worrying and love chaos, March 14)
To imagine this policy being pursued with cold deliberation is the stuff
of
conspiracy theory. Nevertheless, regardless of whether anybody is yet playing this game,
this is the game.
ADDED: A Couple of rough triangles links; George Kerevan
at
The Scotsman; and Clifford May
at
The National Post (who recalls Kissingers classic rough triangles
comment — on the Iran-Iraq War — “It’s a shame they can’t both lose.”)
ADDED: Daniel Pipes is
totally there: “Western powers should guide enemies to stalemate by helping whichever
side is losing, so as to prolong the conflict.”
ADDED: “With Western policy being so confused, ineffective, and ignorant, the
divisions among enemies may be the best thing going.”
March 27, 2013Rough Triangles II
On learning that Hamas and Hizbollah are now fighting each other in Syria,
Peter Ingemi
writes:
This sets up the possibility that the greatest threats to Israel and
the US will be clashing in Syria & Lebanon, in a long and bitter
struggle and moreover as Iran doesn’t want to lose their clients and the
Saudis and others want to bleed Iran this has the potential to become a
mass killing ground for the most vile and despicable enemies the western
world has faced.
For a foe of radical Islam it’s practically a wet dream, we just have
to sit back and let them slaughter each other and if one side starts to
lose, we aid third parties to reenforce
[Sic]
them enough to keep the fight going until the cream of the jihadist
crop finds themselves, shot, gassed or blown up.
And at this point where you contemplate the solution to so many
problems that pesky Christian belief comes in. … That’s when you look at
your glee at the death of your enemies and feel ashamed.
The Christianity angle isn’t basic to the
Outside in
analysis of
rough triangles, but since it’s important to Ingemi, and Ingemi sees the
pattern so clearly, we’ll do our best to remain sub-orgasmic about the
situation (even if it escalates into a regional humanitarian calamity of
apocalyptic
scale). Gnon is considerably less demanding than Jesus in this regard, but it
still tilts against indecorous exultation in mass slaughter. The view from
the side-lines calls for detachment, and the side-lines are the center
here.
In a rough triangle, the side-lines are decidedly the place to be. That
should be obvious, and if judged by the serial anecdotes of blog
commentary, it is indeed self-evident to the widely-disparaged ‘proles’ of
the right — among whom “please let them kill each other” amounts to common
wisdom. Adam Garfinkle, who doesn’t seem to approve, nevertheless
provides
a convincing political back-story to this state of mind. There’s a lack of
“affinity”, a loss of media purchase (i.e. live video), and too many
unhealed burns. Less than a quarter of Americans are
buying
what John McCain is selling (which shows that you can get almost a quarter
of Americans to buy anything).
The Syrian quagmire models a rough triangle with such extraordinary
exactness that it tempts us into Platonism. It could have been extracted,
essentially unmodified, from the notebooks of Cardinal Richelieu. It’s not
difficult to find these developments, as they unfold symmetrically in
Syria and Iraq, provocatively weird. If a strategic genius had
deliberately steered the ‘war on terror’ to this eventuality, his
world-historic stature would have been guaranteed. It is worth recalling
that when the Bush WoT went pear-shaped, John Derbyshire coined the phrase
“to-hell-with-them hawks” to describe dissent from the right, in
distinction from overseas state-building neoconservatism. To Hell they now
go.
Improbable conspiracy aside, none of this was planned, and that’s where
the most important lesson lies. The “to-hell-with-them hawks” had no
strategy to send America’s enemies to hell, but only inchoate grumbles
about the progressive welfarization of US military activity. For the harsh
right, the message of the early 21st century was that American military
power was no longer politically usable. It was time to clamber out of the
sandbox, because the Cathedral had filled it with huggy dolls. Doing
nothing was the only option left. (Fernandez, uncharacteristically, is
embarrassingly
slow
to grasp this point.)
In the field of right-populist international relations thinking,
therefore, there is already broad — if only partially articulate — support
for the neoreactionary stance, explored most lucidly by
Foseti, which might be characterized as de-activism. What we’re not on
board for is the primary consideration.
Under Cathedralized conditions, suspension of the act can be the only way
to let things happen. Just stop, and let ‘providence’ take over. Perhaps
inaction will even simulate strategic genius. We’ve seen that it can.
ADDED:
Jihad
(against Shi’ites) … and more
Jihad
(against Sunnis)
June 2, 2013Rough Triangles III
Déjà vu time at XS, courtesy of the Mesopotamian death spiral,
and Fernandez’s strategic
framing. The background is important, and relates the topic to a wider question
of conservation laws.
The collapse in the Middle East feels like
Black April, 1975, the month South Vietnam fell [*]. And it should, because just as the collapse of Saigon did not happen
in Black April, but in a political American decision to allow South
Vietnam to fall after a “decent interval”, so also is the ongoing
collapse rooted, not in the recent tactical mistakes of the White House,
but in the grand strategic decision president Obama made when he assumed
office. […] This is the plan. It would be crazy not to
acknowledge it.
A humanitarian foreign policy is as much a hostage to dark humor as any
other affront to Gnon. Hell doesn’t go away just because you don’t like
it. So instead it slides diagonally in the only direction left open, from
bloody (and incompetent) hegemonism into radically cynical catastrophe
tweaking:
Deep in their hearts the Washington Post and the New York Times must
realize they endorsed Obama precisely because they knew that when this
moment came he would harden his heart and refuse to re-engage, except
for show. Since this is the plan, the only effective strategy, the only
sane thing to do is to accept the liberal gambit and continue it. […]
The obvious continuation is not to dampen the sectarian conflict, but to
exacerbate it to the greatest degree possible. America, like Britain in
the Napoleonic age, should adopt the policy of supporting first one side
then the other, or preferably both at once, so that the combatants
inflict the maximum degree of damage on each other. […] … To a cynic,
what follows next is quite simple: to be the winner stand back and watch
while the Arabian peninsula, Levant and North Africa destroys itself.
Take every opportunity to make it worse. Clearly a humanitarian
catastrophe of unprecedented scale will result. Hundreds of thousands
are already dead and millions of displaced persons are on the road. That
will only grow in scale and number to millions of dead and tens of
millions of refugees. Therefore steps like preparing to sink the people
smuggling boats, as the EU is doing, are in order. […] If you can
stomach it, it can work like a charm. […] The main problem with this
strategy is that Obama may not be able to contain its effects. …
(For the Rough Triangles XS log, see
1,
2,
3.)
* Cited over-excitedly
here,
with walk-back
here.
May 19, 2015Natural Law
“Some critics of Morsi argue that the U.S. should let him fail,”
reports
David Ignatius, as Egypt spirals down the drain.
Let X fail is the cosmic formula for getting
policy right.
March 7, 2013Let It Burn …
… (the Middle East version):
Why can’t
America
be more like
China?
(a) Stay out
(b) If you have to interfere, help whoever’s losing (but not too much)
(c) Recognize there’s an intricate theological argument going on that we
can’t hope to understand:
ADDED:
June 20, 2014Savagery Management
The Left-Salafist
alliance:
… the cause of Salafist Islam has come to dominate the field of armed
struggle since 2001 and to be the most attractive option for people
inclined to practice insurgency. Salafist Islam also melds well with the
lessons in insurgency and terrorism previously taught by Marxist
theoreticians such as Carlos Marighella, especially when one factors in
the ideas and strategy of modern Islamist theorists such as Sayyid Qutb
and Abu Bakr al Naji, author of
The Management of Savagery. These concepts have also been quite attractive for many on the
radical left in the West, who may go so far as to be motivated by the
melding of a theory of armed revolution with an intact religious
tradition, thereby even converting to Islam. It may also mean that
support for jihad, particularly in Europe, may go well beyond Muslim
enclaves.
This process of amalgamation between the camps of the enemy is of the very
greatest advantage to the Outer Right. The model of domestic progressive
‘evolution’ is switched to one of stark foreign aggression. It thus
terminates all prospect of political compromise, and integrates a single
military security problem.
If the Right is incapable of recognizing what it is, it can at least
consolidate against what it has to stop. It is in the ashes of this
conflict that the toxic dream of political universality will have died.
The shattering of the Overton Window and the
elimination
of the Grayzone is the same thing.
April 16, 2016Sentences (#81)
Harsanyi:
… institutional media and white nationalists have formed a
politically convenient symbiotic relationship.
Is this seriously deniable?
There’s a lot of conspiracy-theorizing underway right now, but it seems
implausible, and superfluous. A spontaneous convergence of (perceived)
interests is capable of explaining everything. In the end, though, someone
is being played. In fact, it’s not only possible, but probable, that both
sides of this particular arrangement are being played, and not primarily
by each other.
November 23, 2016
CHAPTER TWO - INCENTIVES
Game Theory
Attempting to hold rationality and humanity together is an unenviable
task, if not simply an impossible
one:
In a series of interventions, Adil Ahmad Haque and Charlie Dunlap have
debated the Defense Department
Law of War Manual’s position on human shields (here,
here, and
here). Claiming that the manual does not draw a distinction between
voluntary and involuntary human shields, Haque maintains that it ignores
the principle of proportionality, thus permitting the killing of
defenseless civilians who are used as involuntary shields. Dunlap,
however, insists that the manual includes all the necessary precautions
for protecting civilians used as shields by enemy combatants, and argues
that the adoption of Haque’s approach would actually encourage the enemy
to increase the deployment of involuntary human shields. …
Sensitivity to the plight of ‘human shields’ directly increases their
tactical value. That is the ultimate ‘proportionality’ involved in the
discussion. Disciplined attention to incentives under conditions of
unbounded competition reliably heads into dark places.
October 26, 2015Twitter cuts (#41)
The disastrous incentive-effects would certainly be moderated. (That’s why
military-industrial pork waste is actually the least harmful element of
government spending — at least, for everything except defense capability
and industrial competence.)
January 5, 2016Quotable (#134)
In The New Yorker, John Cassidy lucidly
rehearses
the core game theoretic model of economic crisis:
… deciding whether to invest in financial assets or any other form of
capital can be viewed as a huge n-person game (one involving more than
two participants), in which there are two options: trust in a good
outcome, which will lead you to make the investment, or defect from the
game and sit on your money. If you don’t have a firm idea about what is
going to happen and the payoffs are extremely uncertain, the optimal
strategy may well be to defect rather than to trust. And if everybody
defects, bad things result.
Does anybody seriously expect honesty from the
status quo within this context? ‘Optimism’ is a fundamental
building-block of regime stability. Expect it to be very carefully
nurtured, with whatever epistemological flexibility is found helpful.
(Stay to the end of the article for the ominous nonlinear dynamics that
correspond to narrative dike-breaking.)
January 21, 2016Quotable (#191)
Nagel
on
(Gottlieb on) Hobbes, getting the critical point:
What was distinctive about Hobbes’s theory, and what led to his being
attacked as a moral nihilist, was his refusal to appeal to any concern
for the good of others or the collective good as a basis for moral
motivation. He demonstrated that the familiar rules of morality, which
he called the laws of nature, are principles of conduct such that if
everyone follows them, everyone will be better off. But the fact that
everyone will be better off if everyone follows them gives no individual
a reason to follow them himself. He can have a reason to follow them
only if that will make him individually better off. And there is no
natural guarantee that individual self-interest and the collective
interest will coincide in this way. […] Hobbes concluded that although
we all have a reason to want to live in a community governed by the
moral rules, we cannot achieve this unless we bring it about that it is
in each person’s individual interest to abide by those rules. And the
method of doing that is to agree with one another to support a powerful
sovereign with a monopoly on the use of force, who will use it to punish
violators. Only then can each individual be confident that if he obeys
the rules, he will not be laying himself open to assault and
dispossession by others. Without the trust engendered by the knowledge
that violators will be punished, civilization is impossible and
individual self-interest — the same rational motive that supports
morality — leads to perpetual conflict and constant insecurity. This is
the famous Hobbesian state of nature, and Hobbes was most notorious for
saying that in this condition, we are almost never obligated to obey the
moral rules, because it is not safe to do so.
The identification of a collective optimum does no
realistic theoretical work. Irrespective of the status of his
concrete conclusion, Hobbes’ methodical principle is impeccable.
September 22, 2016
CHAPTER THREE - MUTUAL INTENSIFICATION
Twitter cuts (#8)
(There’s a perfect sanity to this tweet, sarcasm of course included, that
would be hard to top. That is equally to say there is a perfect exposure
of our reigning moral-political insanity. The “C’est un chien sauvage
…” quote that should accompany it is escaping me for now … Something like:
“It is a fierce beast. When it is attacked, it bites.” No doubt one of my
cultivated readers can help.)
This elusive aphorism is driving me slowly
insane. The
closest
I can get right now: “A French philosopher once said that a dog is the
most dangerous animal in the world because when it is attacked it bites.”
(Voltaire?)
ADDED: Thanks to Harold (in the comments) for hunting this
down:
Cet animal est tres méchant;
Quand on l’attaque il se défend.
January 23, 2015Cui bono?
Terrorism is notoriously resistant to strict definition, and the most
obvious reason for this is generally understood. Unlike (for instance)
guerrilla warfare, ‘terrorism’ is not merely a tactic, but an
intrinsically abominated tactic. Whatever the technical usage of the word,
it adheres to the register of propaganda, as a partisan denunciation. It
is what the other side does.
This partisan skew is reinforced by technical considerations. Even more
than guerrilla warfare, terrorism is a tactic suited to relatively
disorganized non-state actors. When even guerrilla warfare is impractical,
terrorism is the mode of violent ‘resistance’ that remains. In the
sentimental language of the Left, it is the
warfare of the weak.
If these factors are recognized, a realistic definition of terrorism can
be constructed that coldly acknowledges both aspects of its positioning,
as an ideologically motivated atrocity without state legitimation.
Terrorism is violent partisan criminality. It is aggressive
violation of the law in the service of a political cause.
In a
post
written prior to the identification of the Boston Marathon bombers,
Richard Fernandez makes a point that is far from original, but all the
more important for being clearly true, and widely accepted as being true:
The ascription of guilt in public attacks has become highly
politicized. Each ideological side is rooting for its own set of
villains to be identified as guilty. The Left desperately want the
perpetrators to come [from] the Tea Party, White Supremacist Groups or
at least Christians while the conservatives want the perps to be Muslims
or drug addled lions of the Left.
Acts of terror taint a cause, its supporters, and its demographic base
with violent partisan criminality. Who benefits? In the case of
American domestic terrorism, at least, the answer is almost insultingly
obvious. Those identified with the target of terror are
strengthened by it, those pre-positioned as enemies of the terrorists even
more so. After the atrocity occurs, the cry immediately arises: please let
it not be ours.
This is distinctly odd. An act that is inherently political has a
valency that directly and explicitly contradicts its superficial partisan
motivation. Terrorism is not only something the other side does,
it is something that — when reptilian partisan considerations are all that
count — one wants the other side to do. How utterly delightful
(if unavowable) to be blessed with spectacular public confirmation that
one’s enemies are violent partisan criminals.
An inevitable consequence of this oddity is the proliferation of
conspiracy theories. If the guiding question is cui bono?, the inescapable
implication is that the target — ultimately, the State — is the only agent
with a rational interest in terror taking place. ‘False flags’ make much
more sense than raw terror ever could. This way lies madness, and perhaps
an ineluctable mass insanity.
The alternative to conspiracy theory can only be common sense, but it
finds itself surprisingly stressed. Is terror rationally explicable at
all? Are its proponents simply deranged? Or do they perceive subtle
advantage in sheer escalation — feeding their enemies, as a way to feed
the war? With the world becoming ever more Black Swan-compatible, this is
a story that has scarcely begun.
ADDED: Driven to kill by
brutalist architecture.
ADDED: ‘George Washington’ on False Flag Terror.
April 23, 2013Assassination Markets
Just in case there could be any doubt about it, the primary point of this
post is to insist that
this is a
really bad idea. It’s certainly
ingenious, and
highly
topical, but considered solely from a perspective of sub-reptilian amorality,
it’s still a really bad idea.
For one thing, it’s massively asymmetric, in the wrong way. Assassinate a
McKinley, and it pushes things hard to the left. Assassinate a Kennedy,
and it pushes things hard to the left. Assassinate pretty much anybody of
any public significance, and the result is the same. Leftists are simply
better at fantasy counter-factuals and martyrology, so the assassination
of a leftist produces an imaginary ultra-leftist of even greater
ideological purity (whilst killing a conservative works, or even turns
them into a post-mortuary leftist). We all know that if JFK hadn’t been
murdered by Texan capitalism we’d be basking in a socialist utopia by now.
(There’s a reason why assassination is the preferred tactic of left-wing
anarchists and
communists,
beside the fact these people are demented criminals.)
The reciprocal is even more compelling. Anything that spares leftists from
the consequences of participating in reality aids their cause. To consider
only the most prominent potential target, Barack Obama alive and in power
is the greatest single asset the Outer Right has ever known. Felled by an
assassin, he would become the capstone of progressive mythology, and
everything he’s aiming to achieve
would have turned out absolutely perfectly. If there’s a black
counter-assassination market, surreptitiously protecting key agents of the
Cathedral from acts of violence, it would be infinitely more effective to
invest in that.
November 20, 2013Chicken
When political
polarization
is modeled as a game the result is Chicken. The technical basics are not
very complicated.
Reiterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (RPD) is socially integrative. An
equilibrium, conforming to maximal aggregate utility, arises through
reciprocal convergence upon an optimum strategy: defaulting to trust,
punishing defections, and rapidly forgiving corrected behavior. Any
society adopting these rule-of-thumb principles consolidates. When
everyone norms on this strategy, individual and collective interests are
harmonized. Things work.
Chicken is very different. Someone blinks first, so the trust-trust mutual
optimum of RPD is subtracted in advance. Rather than the four possible
outcomes of a single PD round (A and B do OK, A wins B loses, B wins A
loses, A and B both lose) there are just three possible outcomes (A wins B
loses, B wins A loses, A and B both lose extremely). In Chicken, it is the
avoidance of outcome three, rather than the non-existent chance of PD
outcome one, that moderates behavior, and then asymmetrically (someone
always blinks first).
No less importantly, the time structure of
Chicken is inverted. In RPD, the agents learn from successive decisions,
and from their mere prospect. Each decision is punctual, Boolean, and
communicatively isolated. In Chicken, the decision is mutual,
quantitative, and anticipated by a strategically-dynamic introduction — an
interactive process, in advance of the decision, that is richly
communicative, complex, and even educational. In addition, when compared
to PD, Chicken reiteration is remarkably complicated (more on that in a
moment).
Consider the classic Chicken game. Two drivers accelerate towards each
other, and the one who swerves (‘blinks’) loses. If neither swerves, both
lose (worse). The lead up is everything, and the decision itself is a
matter of speed and timing (a non-Boolean ‘when’ rather than a Boolean
‘which’). The question is not “will the other player defect?” but rather
“how far will they go?”
Thomas
Schelling
made an intellectual specialism out of Chicken, and his understanding of
the classical version was sharpened by the concept of “credible
commitment” (“how far will they go?”). How could a player ensure that his
opponent does not win? The solution to this problem, if produced in
advance, has the strategic value of also maximizing the chance that the
opponent blinks first (thus avoiding the pessimal lose-lose outcome, and
generating a win).
Producing credible commitment looks like this. Upon climbing into your
car, conspicuously consume a bottle of vodka, thus communicating the fact
that your ability to enact a successful last second swerve is very
seriously impaired. Your opponent now knows that even were you inclined to
avoid mutual destruction at the brink, you might not be able to do so.
Then — once both cars have accelerated to a high speed — rip out your
steering wheel and throw it out of the window. (It is extremely important
that you do this before your opponent is able to — that’s what the vodka
was for.) Your communicated commitment is now absolute. Your opponent
alone can swerve. It’s death or glory.
The ‘mainstream’ neoreactionary account of American political history is
that of reiterated Chicken games between progressives and conservatives,
in which conservatives always swerve. This analytical framework,
despite its crudity, explains why conservatives consider their opponents
to be intoxicated lunatics (i.e. winners) whilst they are sober and
responsible (i.e. losers). As traditionally positioned, conservatives are
the principal social stake-holders, and thus primarily obligated to avoid
mutual destruction. It is essential to conservatism that it
cannot take things (domestically) to the brink. Its incompetence at
Chicken is thus constitutional.
When the Zeitgeist
starts
clucking, it can only be a sign that conservatism is coming to an
end. The Tea Party is not informatively described as a conservative
political movement, because its signal influence is the insistence that
the Right stop losing Chicken games. It demands “credible commitment”
through the minimization of discretion on the part of its political
representatives, along with whatever insanity is needed
not to fricking swerve. This is of course highly — even totally —
antagonistic. It is why the Left media now sound like
this. Before
all significance is consumed in partisan rhetoric, it is important to note
that the loser in a Chicken game — even the merely probabilistic virtual
loser — necessarily thinks that its opponent is insane. Any more
moderate response would be the infallible sign that losing was inevitable
(once again).
It isn’t hard to understand why this might be happening. In reiterated
Chicken, the loser no doubt acquires a predisposition to submissiveness
(“it’s hopeless, those lunatics always win”), but the objective
undercurrent of repeated defeat is a contraction of the distance between
relative (asymmetric) and absolute (mutual) defeat. Eventually, the
difference isn’t worth surrendering — or swerving –over. “If they keep on
winning, there will be nothing left anyway, so we might as well finish it
now.”
Reciprocally, incessant victory threatens to dull revolutionary fervor
into conservatism. Progressives now have many generations of substantial
victory to defend, so taking things to the edge has begun to seem
concerning. When the government shuts down, what does the Right really
lose? At the very least, it’s beginning to wonder, and by doing so, upping
its Chicken game (AKA “going insane”). Progressives don’t have to wonder.
They lose the government.
ADDED: Buchanan
argues
that surrender seldom works.
At
the NYT, Michael P. Lynch: “It is tempting to call this “crazy talk” and
unserious bluster. But it is serious, and it shows that some people
are thinking about what happens next. It is a plan that represents the
logical limit of the views now being entertained on the radical right, not
just in the dark corners of the Internet, but in the sunlight of
mainstream forums. After all, if the government is the problem, shutting
it down is a logical solution.”
ADDED: Jim
expects
a swerve.
ADDED: The swerve.
October 15, 2013Political Chicken
As a preliminary, a little XS
background, which I’ll
aim not to repeat.
The take on Trump’s advantage that seems under-emphasized:
He credibly signals a refusal to swerve. I’m not arguing here
that it’s realistic to trust that. The point is only, the Trump candidacy
looks to a substantial swathe of the electorate — at least comparatively —
like the strategic choice for not losing at chicken games. As noted in the
linked post, when democratic party politics becomes highly
polarized, that’s the game being played.
Anyone playing chicken through an agent prioritizes certain definite
virtues. Trump’s rhetoric reflects these uncannily. “Winning” — for
instance — is a word to watch.
To see what it is to be a chicken game loser, there’s no better model than
recent GOP presidential candidates. John McCain appeared to positively
delight in the honor of being defeated by Barack Obama in 2008, and Mitt
Romney followed quite faithfully in his footsteps. In both cases, which
can be extended to the GOP establishment generally, respectability is
defined by the sentiment: “Sure, winning would be nice, but we’re not
going to be crazy about it.” If there’s a single key to winning at
chicken, however, ‘crazy’ is it.
The greater the media onslaught against Trump, given only
that he doesn’t flinch, the stronger the signal that he’s not a
swerve kind of guy. In this respect, the specific content of the attacks
is almost irrelevant. The nastier the better. Best of all, if the message
gets communicated that this maniac would take us over the cliff,
he’s already won. From the perspective of this analysis, there’s simply
nothing else he has to get across. It translates to:
With Trump we either win, or at least don’t lose. (Objection:
“But ‘everyone dies’ is losing isn’t it?” — Thanks GOPe, but you’re not
getting this at all.)
Cruz and (to a parodic extent) Rubio look flexible next to Trump.
It’s not that people think they might swerve — it’s what they firmly
expect. They seem bendy, and specifically prone to compromise, concessions
to media-fabricated realities, back-downs, apologies, and pre-emptive
cringe.
Never, ever, even for a moment back-down, laugh at demands for
‘disavowal’, double-down on offense, concede nothing, and
never swerve. Regardless of what one thinks about this
orientation, it’s the one hungered for by the Trump constituency right
now. Trump’s instincts, if not perfect in this regard, are impressively
sound. We’ll know within 24-hours or so how it’s working out.
ADDED: It’s chicken all the way down.
ADDED: Trump poker.
March 1, 2016
CHAPTER FOUR - SUBVERSION AND CAMOUFLAGE
Subversion
Nyan Sandwich has a cunning plan:
Sister Sarah (@sarahdoingthing) suggests the “hard part is to be somehow
different from actual real leftist sites …”
Partly because there can simply never be enough of
this, but
also for other reasons, this idea is perfectly delicious. It would be like
a Sokal tar-baby, spreading sticky black paranoid confusion throughout the
redoubts of the enemy. To make this work, however, would require a very
exceptional type of genius (of exactly the kind demonstrated in the Shea
case). Judging the precise extent and flavors of absurdity that the left
will endorse — or at least find credibly non-parodic — is a rare and
delicate art, especially since they have to be taken to the very edge,
teetering prominently into gulfs of roaring madness. In addition, since
effectiveness would correspond closely with persistence, the work involved
would be immense.
If anyone is embarking on this, I do not (of course) want to know —
Omertà.
(Before anyone else brings it up (here) I
should perhaps also mention
this.)
Modeling strategy on espionage and the double-agent, rather than military
confrontation and the hero-warrior, would do much to burn-off ludicrous
romanticism, replacing theatrical attitude with realist cunning. As with
anything that involves demonstrated performance of a complex feat, rather
than grandiose proclamations of antagonism, it would require actual
cognitive achievement. Given basic facts about numbers and capabilities,
infiltration is almost certainly something that will eventually need to be
done.
Such subversion would also be an experiment in practical metaphysics. How
are identities assembled? What are agents? How do expressed values
coordinate with effective activity? These questions are destined to
explosive complication in the ragged, techno-psychological world to come,
so it is worth tangling with them early, and intricately. Making
biorealism an excuse to regress into paleolithic brotherhoods is a
temptation to be torched-out ruthlessly by Internet machinations. Turn
social Cyberspace into a jungle, where camouflage and complexity rule.
March 13, 2014Poe’s Law
Only a few months ago, I had never heard of Poe’s
Law. Now it’s a rare
day in which it doesn’t crop up several times. Invocations of the
Zeitgeist are inherently improbable, but if there were to be a
persuasive illustration of the phenomenon, it would be something like
this.
According to the succinct Wikipedia entry (already linked), Poe’s Law is
less than a decade old. Among it’s precursors, also relatively recent, a
2001 Usenet comment by Alan Morgan most closely anticipates it: “Any
sufficiently advanced troll is indistinguishable from a genuine kook.” In
other words, between a sincere intellectual position and its satirization,
no secure distinction can be made. (There is nothing about this thesis
that restricts it to ‘extreme’ opinion, although that is how it is usually
understood.)
The latest opportunity for raising this topic is, of course,
@Salondotcom. (There’s an entertaining interview with the pranksters behind it
here.) The offense of this account, which led to it being suspended by
Twitter last week, was clear beyond any reasonable doubt. Quite simply, it
was nearly indistinguishable from the original, a fact that has itself
been explicitly noted (and tweeted about) innumerable times. Parody
Salon slugs, so ludicrously over-the-top that they had
@Salondotcom readers in stitches, were funny precisely because they were
such plausible mimics of Salon‘s own. Readers were laughing
through @Salondotcom, at Salon. This is almost certainly
why the account was suspended.
Without wandering too deeply into the realm of speculation, it’s worth
noting this:
Poe’s Law is ultimately indistinguishable from another recent, rapidly
popularized rhetorical concept: the Ideological Turing
Test. An intellectual criticism can be said to understand its foe if it is
able to reproduce it with adequate fidelity. The ITT is therefore a
cultural procedure for winnowing-out straw-man arguments and other
misrepresentations. If you cannot imitate the enemy case, you cannot be
considered to have engaged it seriously.
Evidently, Poe’s Law can be construed as a filter of the same kind. Satire
is effective to exactly the extent it can be confused with the satirized.
(This can be taken in comparatively serious
directions.)
What Poe’s Law tells us, is that antagonism is irreducible to
argumentation. It is thus inherently anti-dialectical (and thus tacitly
secessionist). There can be perfect understanding of what the
enemy is saying, without even the slightest degree of approach to
consensus. In other words, there are discrepancies entirely indissoluble
in discussion.
Cutting satire does not reconstruct a cognitive position in order to make
it laughable. Instead, it re-states such a position, as faithfully as
possible, within the register of laughter — which is to say:
hostility. It asserts a dissensus that no process of
reconciliation can ameliorate. Our ‘disagreement’ is not the sign of a
missing conversation. It is the call for a coming split.
ADDED: Even Newsweek notices “… there was a problem: Few could tell
the difference between @SalonDotCom and the real thing.”
ADDED: So two Edgar Allan Poe twitterbots started following
me …
ADDED: Agree, Amplify, and Accelerate
July 18, 2014AAA …
… stands for agree, amplify, and accelerate. Initiated
here, and escalated
here, it opens an unexplored horizon for strategic discussion within NRx. No
analysis of cultural conflict on the Internet can bypass a reference to
trolling, and no
understanding of trolling is any longer complete without reference to AAA.
It raises the discussion of
parody to a new level.
(If it isn’t already obvious, this blog is seriously impressed.)
AAA works if strategic complication has favorable consequences. Whichever
cultural faction has the greater capacity for the tolerance of difficulty,
identity confusion, irony, and humor, will tend to find advantage in it. I
think that’s us. It’s inherently toxic to zealotry.
As a sub-theme — but one keenly appreciated here — it marks a critical
evolution in the Cthulhu Wars. (Check out the graphics on the TNIO post
for recognition of that.) Rather than arguing over whether “Cthulhu
swims
left” AAA proposes amphetaminizing the monster regardless.
If a “holocaust of freedom” is what you want, let’s go
there. Take this operation to the end of the river … and see what we find.
ADDED: Slate Star Scratchpad comments.
July 22, 2014#AAA UK-Style
The profound, utterly cynical contempt for the basic principles,
procedures, and personalities of democracy™ exhibited by
this
phenomenon is highly encouraging.
(#AAA)
With added meta-amusement:
June 17, 2015AAA … II
There follows an XS-endorsed
message
from Henry Dampier:
… we can’t make the omelet of perfect, universal justice without
breaking some eggs. […] The presence of White men in any classroom,
owing to their historical record, can be profoundly triggering to women
and people of color. To protect their historic victims – to give them
mental and physical space for them to flourish – we must keep White men
away from the university, and by blocking them from those institutions,
we must keep them far away from political power, also. […] We have tried
reform. We have tried patient education. It has not worked. Harsher
measures will be required. The world can’t wait.
(For reference, AAA …)
September 11, 2015Quote note (#218)
Libertarian in genesis, but strategically
sound:
“… those who consider themselves modern American revolutionaries often
envision manning barricades and mass revolt as the undoing of the
government. That attacks the government at its greatest strength — its
capacity to use force and violence. The US government has at its
disposal the most potent military and surveillance capabilities ever
assembled. … […] The idea that some sort of mass movement will rise and
by force of its inferior arms throw off the yoke of oppression is the
stuff of weak novels, not a real life strategy that has a chance of
success. Those who buy into it and attempt implementation commit the
biggest strategic failure: they have fooled themselves. Consequently,
their enemy — the government — profits. It uses their failure to justify
further tyranny and repression.
This outcome does not require a plan; it’s going to happen. Indeed,
it’s already happening.
When something is falling, push — but push intelligently. The fetish for
popular violence among certain factions of the Alt-Right is simple idiocy.
If a populace is still docile enough to support government deficit
spending, it’s not going to be waging a guerrilla war anytime soon.
February 9, 2016
CHAPTER FIVE - HEGEMONIC HEADEACHES
Peace Dividend
Glenn Reynolds notices an
emerging
interpretation of
PRISM as a phenomenon internally connected to geopolitical pacifism.
Making unilateral peace requires infinite vigilance.
First
Steyn:
The same bureaucracy that takes the terror threat so seriously that it
needs the phone and Internet records of hundreds of millions of
law-abiding persons would never dream of doing a little more
pre-screening in its immigration system … Because the formal, visible
state has been neutered by political correctness, the dark, furtive
shadow state has to expand massively to make, in secret, the judgment
calls that can no longer be made in public.
Then
WRM:
PRISM and similar programs aren’t a ghastly misstep or an avoidable
accident. They are the essence of Obama’s grand strategy: public peace
and secret war. To cool down the public face of the war, he must
intensify the secret struggle.
Richard Fernandez
comments.
There’s some kind of conservation law at work there, and they always have
the potential to trip people up.
Bad outcomes are conserved might be too harsh, but it gets close
to something.
June 8, 2013Broken Pottery
An irritated Pottery Barn
disowned
the Pottery Barn Rule — “you break it, you own it.” Colin Powell sought to
create some distance,
too:
It is said that I used the “Pottery Barn rule.” I never did it;
[Thomas] Friedman did it … But what I did say … [is that] once you break
it, you are going to own it, and we’re going to be responsible for 26
million people standing there looking at us. And it’s going to suck up a
good 40 to 50 percent of the Army for years.
Wikipedia
concurs
with Powell, in attributing the phrase to Thomas L. Friedman (in a
February 2003 column for the New York Times). Those with a
diligent sense for historical detail might be able to accurately trace its
spread amongst journalists and foreign policy officials, including Bob
Woodward, Richard Armitage, and John Kerry. Regardless of such specifics,
it captures the spirit of grand strategy during the Nullities, and
explains why the US military is no longer of use for anything.
In its rational usage, the military is a machine for the production of
negative incentives. It is designed to hurt people and break things, with
the understanding that in its optimal — deterrent and intimidatory —
function, the actual exercise of these capabilities will not be necessary.
When considered from a Clausewitzean perspective, as a policy instrument,
usable military power is directly proportional to a credible threat of
punishment. It sets boundaries to the behavior of (rational) potential
antagonists, by projecting the probability of extreme negative outcomes if
diplomatically-determined triggers are activated — or ‘red lines’ crossed.
Frederick the Great said “Diplomacy without
arms is like music without instruments” because there can be no discussion
of political limits among sovereigns unless menace gives them meaning.
“I’d really rather you didn’t do that” has no ‘really’ about it, unless a
threat lurks at the edge of the stage (visible, but reserved). It’s a
polite belch, at best. Positive incentives presuppose the boundaries set
by negative incentives — there can be no bargaining over that which can be
demanded without cost. Thus the words of the diplomat are refinements of a
message that military capability crafts in its essentials, either in the
first derivative (balance of power between armed alliances), or the second
(the ‘internal’ security economy of coalitions). The rest is empty
ceremony.
Imperialism tends to the radical degeneration of diplomatic reason,
because it dissolves borders, systematically effacing the ‘foreign’
sphere. When this process has developed to the point that foreign and
domestic policy are no longer distinguishable, the Pottery Barn Rule takes
over. ‘Mission creep’ is the operational symptom of something deeper: the
geostrategic abolition of proprietary boundaries, of a kind that allow for
the possibility of restricted sympathies, or the recognition of
alien interests. The mature empire cannot threaten anything or
anybody without immediately threatening itself. Hence its profound
alignment with universal moral ideologies, whose particular selves gush
unimpeded into the world soul.
When, in the early years of the new millennium, President ‘Godzilla’ Dubya
Bush unleashed Operation Pottery Barnstorm on various societies loosely
associated with the wreckage of the New York skyline, it was understood
from the beginning that the populations on the receiving end were already
honorary New Yorkers, absent from the Twin Towers on the morning of
September 11, 2001 only by insignificant sociological coincidence. This
‘fact’ was an explicit justification for the US response, which expressed
outrage at the victimization of a random sample of the world’s population
by ‘criminals’ so backward they didn’t realize they were only hurting
themselves. America’s ruling elite, in contrast, had attained this
realization definitively enough to articulate it, for domestic =
international consumption, as the Pottery Barn Rule.
Once the Pottery Barn Rule becomes authoritative, the military is
rationally unusable. It’s obvious why. Imagine a night-club bouncer
saying, “Clear out of here, or I’m going to thrash you within an inch of
your life – of course, I promise to take full responsibility for all the
damage you incur from this righteous beating, covering all medical
expenses, compensating you for loss of earnings, and negotiating in good
faith to make reparation for all reasonable claims of emotional distress
…” This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you. For the
global administrative class, this is a truly beautiful illustration of
evolved consciousness. Ordinary Americans, including the military, are
less spiritually
captivated
by the development.
This hurts me more than it hurts you.
In the Pottery Break Age, there are no threats that do not revert to
masochistic acts of solidarity. A decision to bomb or invade X now means
It’s time for us to share X’s pain. Unsurprisingly — except
amongst a weird sub-species of radically bellicose goofy idealist — this
type of imperial-altruistic enterprise is proving a tough sell.
Let’s take on the role of insurer for the Pottery Barn, and then trash
the place hard
(for the common good).
If Congress signs on for this, it will be one more sign that America’s
political class has wandered off into another world — or perhaps just
The World® — leaving the country’s once-distinguishable
neo-native population behind.
ADDED: Angelo M. Codevilla: “Some three fourths of Americans oppose making war
on Syria. Hence the Republican leadership class’ reflexive advocacy of
entry into Syria’s civil war is cutting one of the few remaining ties that
bind it to ordinary Americans.” (via)
ADDED: James Taranto: “As Congress returns and prepares to take up President
Obama’s request for an authorization to use military force in Syria,
William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, tries to reassure queasy Republicans
that “yes” is not only the right vote but the expedient one … This seems
to us a very bad misreading of the political environment.” (Even Kristol
starts to lose it after Kerry
makes
the “unbelievably small” promise.)
September 9, 2013Stalin’s Great Game
Either Stalin played the Anglosphere like a cheap piano in World War Two,
or something altogether more sinister was going on. Foseti
clarifies
the conundrum beautifully:
When the US finally joins the war, it does so with – as best as one can
decipher – only a few clear war aims: 1) demanding unconditional
surrender (of Germany and Japan – aka the only bulwarks against Soviet
domination of post-war Europe and Asia); 2) establishing the United
Nations; and 3) ending European (excluding Soviet) colonialism.
If you, gentle reader, can come up with a list of war aims that would
be more destructive to mankind at the time than those, the next round is
on me. Perhaps entirely coincidentally (or perhaps not) these aims would
seem to all work towards the direct benefit of the Soviets. It’s almost
like Soviets were making US foreign policy.
October 2, 2013“Which Falls First?” …
… William S. Lind asks in
this recent
panel discussion (third speaker, just after 43 minutes in). “The foreign
policy establishment, or the country?” The relevant thread of his
argument: The aggressive foreign policy posture of the United States is
counter-productively promoting global disorder, which eventually threatens
domestic calamity. When the US fights a foreign state, Lind argues, it
advances the chaotic “forces of the fourth generation” — a more formidable
opponent than even the most obdurately non-compliant state is able to be.
America’s “offensive grand strategy” — tied to a high-level of concern for
the internal political arrangements of foreign countries — is sowing
dragon’s teeth.
TNIO has been
coaxing
NRx
onto
a
path
of broadened geopolitical scope. There is an unavoidable irony here. The
Old Right tends naturally to a preoccupation with hearth-and-home, so that
its preferred policy posture (non-interventionism) is often accompanied by
— or even buried within — a retraction of mental energy from distant
questions. The Neoconservative synthesis of foreign policy activism and
cosmopolitan fascination with foreign affairs is far more psychologically
consistent, regardless of its errors. For anti-globalists to sustain a
panoramic perspective takes work.
This work is important, if realistic analysis is the goal, because distant
eventualities hugely impinge. The existence and fate of Neoreaction
depends far more upon the great churning machinery of world history than
upon the local decisions of its favored ‘little platoons’. To misquote
Lenin: Even if you are not interested in the system of the world, it is
interested in you.
The fall of any empire involves an interplay
of internal and external factors, knitted together in a relation of
reciprocal amplification. The whole picture can never be solely a domestic
one. By the time imperial destiny is a political question, it is already
historical fact. It is too late, then, for simple denial. The thing is in
motion. It cannot be asked not to have begun.
Consider only the most basic geopolitical structure of modernity — an
‘Atlantean’ world order consolidated, in succession, by the hegemonic
maritime-commercial republics of the United Provinces, the United Kingdom,
and the United States. Even from this core narrative, much is already
starkly evident.
(0) Modernity rests upon concrete foundations of world power.
(1) Global dominion has a distinctive ideological and cultural skew.
(2) The hegemonic role (and even, at its most abstract, ‘culture’) is more
stable, and intrinsically determinate, than the supremacy of any specific
power, which waxes and wanes over a shorter period. The role of the Modern
Hegemon is an autonomous ‘office’ with its own continuous tradition.
(3) When the United States inherited the role of Atlantean leadership, it
adopted a structure of responsibility that had not arisen from within the
USA itself. On the contrary, the USA had gown up and into it. How America
behaves in the world does not follow exclusively — and perhaps not even
predominantly — from anything that America, as a specific country, is.
(4) There is no precedent within modernity for global hegemony to pass
from a world power to its successor without a set of very distinctive
ethnic characteristics being held in common. (The leading culture of
modernity, to this point, has been consistently North-West European,
Protestant, Liberal, Maritime-Commercial, and — since the late 17th
century — English-speaking, rooted in Common Law tradition.) Since America
is the terminus of this sequence, a passage beyond precedent is
inevitable. This could take one of (only?) three possible forms:
(a) The USA immortalizes its hegemonic status
(b) The world passes into undirected anarchy
(c) Global hegemony departs from its multi-century cultural orbit into
unfamiliar ethnic territory.
None of this is separable from the fate of globalization, or modernity.
However attractive it may be, the idea that America, in particular, has
any purely domestic cultural, ideological, or political options of
significance is untenable. What happens to America happens, immediately,
to the order of the world.
Furthermore, geopolitical history has reached the edge of modern
precedent. There is no one to whom the torch of global leadership can be
passed in keeping with the inner tradition of modern torch-passing ritual.
In this very definite sense, modernity as it has been known reaches its
end. This no doubt accounts for the underlying tone of mounting hysteria
which accompanies America’s increasingly
disjointed
behavior upon the global stage.
It is an eventuality foretold in Miltonic
prophecy
— an encounter with the palpable obscure.
August 11, 2014Homeless
It is tempting to either embrace or reject the description of the United
States as an ‘empire‘ due to the clear rhetorical weight of this term. Partisan wrangling on
these grounds is sure to continue, and even to intensify. It is not,
however, the only basis upon which discussion can be pursued.
A global power, it might be plausibly suggested, tends inevitably to the
erosion of its domestic political space. As globalization is advanced
under its auspices, distinctions between domestic and international
concerns — ultimately uncertain in any case — become increasingly
unpersuasive. Globalized capital and talent markets operate with least
friction where they intersect the world’s economic core, while
international division of labor, trade, migration, and cultural exchange
wash over traditional localities. In the final analysis, the very notion
of political domesticity survives only as a residual rebuke to the project
of global ‘flattening‘.
While it can be convenient for moralists to interpret hegemonic power as a
bad decision, it’s far closer to a fate (and in very definite
respects a tragic
one). Any suggestion that America might have chosen not to lead
the world is more of an appeal to sentiment and tactical partisan
positioning than to realism. History has its tides, and eventually they
change.
America’s presently-ongoing
Ferguson
turmoil underscores the trend to political de-domestication of the
metropolis, through an explicit collapse of social order into a
problematic of ‘4GW‘ (or ‘Fourth Generation Warfare’). Twitter is congested with
observations of police militarization, friction-free transmission of
equipment from US expeditionary forces into the hands of its domestic law
enforcement agencies, and advisories from international irregular armies
on best-practice for dealing with counter-insurgency operations. Beyond
the partisan excitement, and euphoric tribalism, there is a recognition of
broken boundaries, and the consolidation of an integrated US security
machinery that no longer finds the discrimination between foreign and
domestic enemies of practical use.
This phenomenon, as such, has no unambiguous partisan implications. Even
were critique of the
Empire
unique to the left (which
it is
not), the application of an essentially domestic political optic (partisan
choice) to a matter of world-historic deep structure would remain a
laughable error. The fate of America is not an American problem, at least,
not exclusively. It concerns the order of the world.
Willard’s
words from
Apocalypse Now are prophetic:
“Someday this war’s gonna end”. That’d be just fine with the boys on
the boat. They weren’t looking for anything more than a way home.
Trouble is, I’d been back there, and I knew that it just didn’t exist
anymore.
ADDED: Re-importation of the ‘new military urbanism’. It quotes Foucault:
… while colonization, with its techniques and its political and
juridical weapons, obviously transported European models to other
continents, it also had a considerable boomerang effect on the
mechanisms of power in the West, and on the apparatuses, institutions,
and techniques of power. A whole series of colonial models was brought
back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice
something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself
…
August 14, 2014
CHAPTER SIX - RECENT EVENTS
Our Ally, the Enemy
It’s
not
exactly
a formal pact between the United States and Al Qaeda, but no one honestly
thinks it’s anything really different. Either it’s a
rough
triangles
play, or it’s sheer insanity.
Time won’t tell, but it will hint, as the intervention proceeds. If it
makes things worse, before guttering out into indecision, stalling
resolution, then it might make sense. In any case, it’s big.
(Drew M. at AoS is a
seriously hard-core rough triangles guy: “We should help whichever side is
losing at any given moment but only to the extant that it enables them to
fight on to take and inflict more casualties. There’s no scenario where
one side winning helps us.”)
June 14, 2013Quote notes (#24)
Adam Garfinkle
makes
an obvious point beautifully:
… whatever the Administration has said about the purpose of an attack
being to “degrade and deter” Syrian capabilities, but not to change the
regime, everyone expects the attacks to be modest and brief, thus not to
much affect the battlefield balance, and once ceased to stay ceased.
That is because the Administration’s reticence at being drawn into the
bowels of Syrian madness is both well established and well justified.
The attacks, then, will likely not degrade or deter anything really;
they will be offered up only as a safety net to catch the falling
reputation of the President as it drops toward the nether regions of
strategic oblivion.
This has all been so vividly sign-posted it is getting hard to see how
even a ‘cosmetic’ effect is going to work. How can an operation
pre-advertized as an awkward spasm of embarrassment be realistically
expected to restore honor and credibility?
Handle brims with sense
on
the
topic.
August 30, 2013Oil War
This
contrarian argument, on the resilience of America’s shale industry in the
face of the unfolding OPEC “price war”, is the pretext to host a
discussion about a topic that is at once too huge to ignore, and too
byzantine to elegantly comprehend. The most obvious complication —
bypassed entirely by this article — is the harsher oil geopolitics, shaped
by a Saudi-Russian proxy war over developments in the Middle East (and
Russian backing of the Assad regime in Damascus, most particularly). I’m
not expecting people here to be so ready to leave that aside.
Clearly, though, the attempt to strangle the new tight-oil industry in its
cradle is a blatantly telegraphed dimension of the present Saudi
oil-pricing strategy, and one conforming to a consistent pattern. If
Mullaney’s figures can be trusted, things could get intense:
… data from the state of North Dakota says the average cost per barrel
in America’s top oil-producing state is only $42 — to make a 10% return
for rig owners. In McKenzie County, which boasts 72 of the state’s 188
oil rigs, the average production cost is just $30, the state says.
Another 27 rigs are around $29.
If oil-price chicken is going to be exploring these depths, there’s going
to be some exceptional pain among the world’s principal producers. Russia
is being economically
cornered
in a way that is disturbingly reminiscent of policy towards Japan
pre-WWII, when oil geopolitics was notoriously translated into military
desperation.
Venezuela
will collapse. Iran is also under obvious
pressure.
How is it possible that a world run by manic
Keynesians gets to quaff on this deflationary tonic? It should hide a lot
of structural ruin, at least in the short term. Global economic meltdown
is deferred — and ultimately deepened — once again. (We’ll probably get
the war first.)
ADDED:
“Saudi Arabia, OPEC’s biggest oil producer, has reportedly said the oil
price should stabilize at about $60 per barrel … Many OPEC members have
been put under budgetary pressure by the lower oil price,as exporting
countries rely heavily on oil revenues. Iran needs a price at $140 per
barrel to balance its budget. Saudi Arabia needs a price of $90.70 per
barrel, as it can count on huge reserves. Qatar needs $77.60 per barrel,
and the United Arab Emirates $73.30 per barrel. […] In early November,
OPEC officials said the price of $70 per barrel is a threshold at which
other member countries could start panicking.”
ADDED: Some oil geopolitics musings from Fernandez.
December 4, 2014Kill the Chicken …
… to scare the monkeys.
Andrew Lilico
gets
the game over Syriza exactly right.
In current discussions of what Greece might or might not get in the way
of concessions from the Eurozone, there has so far been relatively
little appreciation of one basic political reality: as far as the
governments of Spain, Portugal, Ireland, probably Italy and perhaps even
France are concerned, Syriza must fail and must be seen to fail. … […]
And note: I haven’t even got on to the problem of how voters in Germany
or Finland or the Netherlands would react to being told that Syriza had
extracted concessions with its comic-book antics.
Unless Syriza-led Greece is hideously crucified, it wins — and what will
be unfolding is an extremely brutal zero-sum game (in which Greece cannot
be allowed to win). For the EU establishment, a Syriza success story would
be a catastrophe of almost incomprehensible magnitude. It would bring with
it an entire narrative of core institutional delegitimation, which in the
case of the peripheral nations (as glossed by Lilico) runs: “… what we
really should have done was to raise the minimum wage, hire back the
public sector staff that had been fired, say we weren’t going to pay our
debts to our eurozone partners, cosy up to the Russians and tell the
Germans they didn’t feel nearly guilty enough about World War Two. Then
everyone would have said we were ‘rock stars’ and and forgiven our debts.”
It’s unthinkable that Germany could let this story put down roots in the
fertile manure of renewed growth. Instead, there will be war by other
means. Crucially, the more calamitously things now turn out for Greece,
the more the EU will be strengthened, if only for a
while.
From the perspective of these eurozone governments, Syriza must fail.
The best way for it to fail would be for it to capitulate utterly and
crawl back to Greece with its tail between its legs and a few cosmetic
patronising “concessions” such as renaming the “Troika” the
“Consultative Committee” (or, if it makes them feel better, the
“Symvouleftiki Epitropi”). If it won’t do that — and there’s a good
chance that if it did try to do that then the Greek government would
collapse, anyway — then things get a bit more complicated. Because if
it’s bad and dangerous for Syriza to succeed inside the euro, it would
be disastrous for it to succeed outside the euro.
It’s
hard
to see
how
this
doesn’t
get
intense.
ADDED: The game (formalized)
February 12, 2015
SEQUENCE i - WAR
War and Truth (scraps)
“War is computation with tanks. War is truth revealing. As war proceeds
uncertainty collapses.”
— Konkvistador (on Twitter)
“You might not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”
— Lenin
“War is deception.”
— Sunzi
Neoreactionaries are often talking about ‘oikos’ tacitly, even when they
think they are concerned with something closer to the opposite. For there
to be an ‘economy’ much has already to have been settled. (Unlike his
liberarian precursors, Moldbug never assumes peace, but he betrays his
inheritance by conceiving it as an original task — a foundation.) “Begin
from the inside” — that’s the idea. The Outside is war.
War is the truth of lies, the rule of rulelessness, anarchy and chaos as
they are in reality (which is nothing at all like a simple negation of
order). It is the ultimate tribunal, beyond which any appeal is a
senseless prayer to the void. A ‘realism’ that resists such conclusions
makes a mockery of the name.
Peace is a certain way war can turn out, for a
while, and nothing more.
As the social institution oriented to reality in the raw, the military has
a latent authority that everyone recognizes (implicitly). Whenever
military government does not rule, it is because of a provisional
non-emergency (Schmitt). This is not seriously disputable.
An aristocracy is a social arrangement that was decided by war, and when
the war is forgotten the institution has no sustainable meaning. There is
only one thing that can ‘bring back’ a king, and that is the end of peace.
The East India companies (Dutch and English) ran armies, because war was
internal to economics as they practiced it. That was ‘colonialism’ (in the
James Donald sense). Once the separation between war and commerce has been
hardened into standard business procedures (and the imperialism that
screens them from the outside), capitalism has surrendered its
always-inexplicit claim to sovereignty, and thus to the future. There is
no way it can be re-animated except out of the raw. This, above all, is
why libertarianism cannot be saved from its own non-seriousness.
The horror of war is that there are ‘no rules’. Anything is permitted, and
the worst even becomes necessary. To think this is no lesser a challenge
than the metaphysical engagement with the ‘thing-in-itself’ — and perhaps
it is exactly the same thing. But then, it becomes important to ask: So
how does it work? There are rules, but we misunderstood what rules really
are (what ultimate rules are). In the end, it is the order of anarchy that
rules. In order to comprehend any of this the peacetime soul must be
reduced entirely to ashes, for something else to arise in its place. It is
this task that Neoreaction is compelled to take up, and which it has — in
several different ways — already taken up. Peace is the objective
correlate of the deluded mind.
If war is the worst thing in the world, and the truth, then everything
that isn’t horror is a lie.
January 19, 2014Conflict
Burroughs:
This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may
be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours
seems to be based on war and games.
Triggered by this:
It’s docile obedience to Gnon.
July 3, 2014War is God
Via
Landry, an
introduction
to the “new generation of unrestricted warfare”.
Colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui argued that war was no longer
about “using armed forces to compel the enemy to submit to one’s will”
in the classic
Clausewitzian
sense. Rather, they asserted that war had evolved to “using all means,
including armed force or non-armed force, military and non-military, and
lethal and non-lethal means to compel the enemy to accept one’s
interests.” The barrier between soldiers and civilians would
fundamentally be erased, because the battle would be everywhere. The
number of new battlefields would be “virtually infinite,” and could
include environmental warfare, financial warfare, trade warfare,
cultural warfare, and legal warfare, to name just a few. They wrote of
assassinating financial speculators to safeguard a nation’s financial
security, setting up slush funds to influence opponents’ legislatures
and governments, and buying controlling shares of stocks to convert an
adversary’s major television and newspapers outlets into tools of media
warfare. According to the editor’s note, Qiao argued in a subsequent
interview that “the first rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are
no rules, with nothing forbidden.” That vision clearly transcends any
traditional notions of war.
How ‘traditional’ are we talking? “War is the Father of all things, and of
all things King” (πόλεμος πάντων μὲν πατήρ ἐστι, πάντων δὲ βασιλεύς)
Heraclitus asserts at the dawn of philosophy. There seems little
indication of ‘restriction’ there.
Whatever the positive semantic associations accumulated by the word ‘war’,
its most rigorous meaning is negative. War is conflict without significant
constraint. As a game, it corresponds to the condition of unbounded
defection, or trustlessness without limit. This is the Hobbesian
understanding implicit in the phrase “war of all against all” (bellum omnium contra omnes), in which “the state of nature” is conceived – again negatively –
through a notional subtraction of limitation. Treachery, in its
game-theoretic sense, is not a minor theme within war, but a horizon to
which war tends – the annihilation of all agreement. Reciprocally-excited
mutual betrayal in departure from an implicit ‘common humanity’ is its
teleological essence. This is a conclusion explicitly rejected by Carl von
Clausewitz is his treatise On War, even as he acknowledges the
cybernetic inclination to amplification (or “tendency to a limit”) which
drives it in the direction of an absolute. “War is the continuation of
politics by other means,” he insists, because it is framed by negotiation
(book-ended by a declaration of war, and a peace treaty). According to
this conception, it is an interlude of disagreement, which nevertheless
remains irreducibly communicative, and fundamentally structured by the
decisions of sovereign political agencies. Even as it approaches its pole
of ultimate extremity, it never escapes its teleological dependency, as a
means (or instrument) of rational statecraft.
The reduction of war to instrumentality is not immune to criticism.
Philosophical radicalization, alone, suffices to release war from its
determination as ‘the game of princes’. The Clausewitzean formula is
notoriously inverted by Michel Foucault into the maxim “politics is war by
other means”. If political sovereignty is ultimately conditioned by the
capability to prevail upon the battlefield, the norms of war can have no
higher tribunal than military accomplishment. No real authority can
transcend survival, or survive a sufficiently radical defeat. There is
thus a final incoherence to any convinced appeal to the ‘laws of war’. The
realistic conception of ‘limited war’ subsumes that of ‘war lawfully
pursued’ (with the latter categorized as an elective limitation). Qiao’s
words bear emphatic repetition: “the first rule of unrestricted warfare is
that there are no rules, with nothing forbidden.” The power to forbid is —
first of all — power, which war (alone) distributes.
Between peace and war there is no true symmetry. Peace presupposes
pacification, and that is a military outcome. There is no authority —
moral or political — that cannot first assert itself under cosmic
conditions that are primordially indifferent to normativity. Whatever
cannot defend its existence has its case dumped in the trash.
Cormac McCarthy’s Judge Holden
provides
us with a contemporary restatement of the ancient wisdom:
Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives. Who
has not heard such a tale? A turn of the card. The whole universe for
such a player has labored clanking to his moment which will tell if he
is to die at that man’s hand or that man at his. What more certain
validation of a man’s worth could there be? This enhancement of the game
to its ultimate state admits no argument concerning the notion of fate.
The selection of one man over another is a preference absolute and
irrevocable and it is a dull man indeed who could reckon so profound a
decision without agency or significance either one. In such games as
have for their stake the annihilation of the defeated the decisions are
quite clear. This man holding this particular arrangement of cards in
his hand is thereby removed from existence. This is the nature of war,
whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification.
Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of
one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because
it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game
because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is
god.
“War is the truest form of divination” it
turns out, is the Revelation of the Aeon.
May 9, 2016The Dark Forest
Volume
two
of Cixin Liu’s science fiction trilogy.
The universe had once been bright, too. For a short time after the big
bang, all matter existed in the, and only after the universe turned to
burnt ash did heavy elements precipitate out of the darkness and form
planets and life. Darkness was the mother of life and civilization.
The dark forest is the universe, but to get there — with insight — takes a
path through Cosmic Sociology:
“See how the stars are points? The factors of chaos and randomness in
the complex makeups of every civilized society in the universe get
filtered out by distance, so those civilizations can act as reference
points that are relatively easy to manipulate mathematically.”
“But there’s nothing concrete to study in your cosmic sociology, Dr. Ye.
Surveys and experiments aren’t really possible.”
“That means your ultimate result will be purely theoretical. Like
Euclid’s geometry, you’ll set up a few simple axioms at first, then
derive an overall theoretic system using those axioms as a
foundation.”
“It’s all fascinating, but what would the axioms of cosmic sociology
be?”
“First: Survuival is the primary need of civilization. Second:
Civilization continuously grows and expands, but the total matter in the
universe remains constant.”
…
“Those two axioms are solid enough from a sociological perspective … but
you rattled them off so quickly, like you’d already worked them out,”
Luo Ji said, a little surprised.
“I’ve been thinking about this for most of my life, but I’ve never
spoken about it with anyone before. I don’t know why, really. … One more
thing: To derive a basic picture of cosmic sociology from these two
axioms, you need two other important concepts: chains of suspicion, and
the technological explosion.”
The derivation from these axioms is the
Exterminator.
Resource conflicts between civilizations follow strictly from the two
axioms. Game-theoretic tension is added by irreducible suspicion, and
technological explosion.
“That’s the most important aspect of the chain of suspicion. It’s
unrelated to the civilizations’s own morality and social structure. …
Regardless of whether civilizations are internally benevolent or
malicious, when they enter the web formed by the chains of suspicion,
the’re all identical”
Which is to say, they are all threats to each other, intrinsically, and
irresolvably. Technological explosion means that any civilization
represents a potential menace of inestimable potential, escalating
massively within a span of mere centuries, and “On the scale of the
universe, several hundred years is the snap of a finger.” An intolerable
danger, then.
“That’s … that’s really dark.”
“The real universe is just that black.” Luo Ji waved a hand, feeding the
darkness as if stroking velvet. “The universe is a dark forest. Every
civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost,
gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread
without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be
careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him.
If he finds other life — another hunter, an angel, or a demon, a
delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod — there’s
only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest,
hell is other people. An eternal threat that any life that exposes its
own existence will be swiftly wiped out. This is the picture of cosmic
civilization. It’s the explanation for the Fermi Paradox.”
October 1, 2015Quote note (#296)
From Cixin Liu’s
latest
(and perhaps greatest), p.129:
When the deterrent is the complete destruction of the deterrer and the
deteree, the system is said to be in a state of ultimate deterrence. […]
Compared to other types of deterrence, ultimate deterrence is
distinguished by the fact that, should deterrence fail, carrying out the
threat would be of no benefit to the deterrer. [..] Thus, the key to the
success of ultimate deterrence is the belief by the deteree that the
threat will almost certainly be carried out if the deteree thwart’s the
deterrer’s goals …
Hence the drive to mechanization of commitments. Trust evo-psych
and cultural tradition passes the torch to game-competent machines.
ADDED: Who could he possibly be talking about
(p.284)?
Of course, without exception, these “anti-intellect” organizations
wanted to maintain the intelligence of their own members, arguing that
they had the responsibility to be the last of the intelligent people so
they could complete the creation of a society of low-intelligence humans
and direct its operation.
October 23, 2016Quote note (#298)
Cixin Liu (op.
cit.), p.558:
“… It’s very possible that every law of physic has been weaponized.
It’s possible that in some parts of the universe, even … Forget it, I
don’t even believe that.”
“What were you going to say?”
“The foundation of mathematics.”
Cheng Xin tried to imagine it, but it was simply impossible. “That’s …
madness.” Then she asked, “Will the universe turn into a war ruin? Or,
maybe it’s more accurate to ask: Will the laws of physics turn into war
ruins?”
“Maybe they already are …”
(All ellipsis after the first in original.)
Among the points here, the (Herakleitean) thesis: Cosmology does not
transcend war. Strategy belongs to the infrastructure.
October 31, 2016War Without End
‘Eurasianist’ Alexander Dugin
interviewed
by (liberal) Vladimir Posner on the fundamental structure of global
geopolitical antagonism. (Video, in Russian with English subtitles.)
While he is clearly the sort of person who tends to bring my co-ethnics
out in hives,
Dugin
is without question among the most important thinkers of the new
millennium. (The UF position on this, beyond simple interest in
what might very easily be the most dynamic ideological
development of our time, is close to inverted, or ‘Atlantean’,
Eurasianism.)
July 27, 2014Twitter cuts (#110)
There’s nothing about this tweet I don’t like.
Memes are ideas that manage their own security. In the Internet Era they
get stronger every day (and mobs get weaker).
February 4, 2017
SEQUENCE ii - THE ISLAMIC VORTEX
Premature Ejection
As Napoleon famously advised: “Never interrupt your enemy when he’s making
a mistake.” Understandably, but still unfortunately, the Egyptian army
have just done exactly that.
Daniel Pipes has pipped me to the post on this (here
or
here).
The short summary that pre-empts me most specifically is
this: “Morsi was removed from power too soon to discredit Islamism as much as
he should have.” It took seven decades of chronic failure to associate the
Marxist command economy with hopeless dysfunction in the eyes of the
world, and even then, the lesson remains far from complete. It can
scarcely be imagined that a few months of Muslim Brotherhood misgovernment
is going to sear any lasting scars into the global Islamic soul. So: an
opportunity missed.
Clearly, the forces of the Egyptian deep state were in no position to be
as utterly indifferent to humanitarian considerations as
Outside in. Their hand was forced, since whatever the educational
virtues of mass starvation, it takes a certain distance to fully
appreciate them. In any case, with Egypt now clearly unsprung, it is at
least possible to find entertainment in the spectacle of popular
anti-democratic protest, concluding in firework celebrations of
authoritarian restoration.
Adam Garfinkle
covers
the
nuts-and-bolts
well. Goldman’s regional analysis
is
highly convincing. Steyn
does
the quick historical overview, no less persuasively.
July 6, 2013The Islamic Vortex (Part 1)
When confronted by large-scale — and thus complex – historical events, it
is inevitable that attempts at understanding will be dominated by analogy.
Even among experts, with access to abstract models of generic processes
(‘revolution’, modernization, escalation, phase-change …), it is only
through reference to concrete historical episodes that such intellectual
tools acquire the richness necessary for successful application to actual
world events. Even the most conceptually-refined historiographical
language is honed for analogical usage. There is no ‘idea’ of ‘revolution’
truly separable from the examples of revolution provided by the historical
record, and even if there was, it could have no use. Since history is
rhythmic, but never exactly repetitive, such analogies can be more or less
relevant, but only ever roughly suggestive. They are, in any case,
unavoidable.
During the years immediately following 9/11, Western perceptions of the
new global reality were controlled by analogy with World War II, and even
those who rejected this template were locked into a negative relationship
with it. If 9/11 was not Pearl Harbor, or anything like it, it remained
necessary to say so, repeatedly, and to little immediate effect. The term
‘Islamofascism’ was inherited from this period, and its fading currency is
significant (as we shall see).
On the Left, resistance to the WWII analogy was
relatively frictionless, because it was already, from the moment of its
inception, outweighed by an alternative analogy, drawn from Cold War
‘anti-imperialist’ revolution. Bin Laden could never be a new Hitler, to
those who had already recognized him as a new Ho Chi Minh. On the Right,
however, intricate ironies abounded. Those on the paleo-libertarian end of
the political spectrum, who most vehemently denounced the ‘Axis of Evil’
as a cynical fabrication, were propelled by events into an accelerated
rediscovery of the Old Right, and thus found themselves – quite
self-consciously — reviving 1930s American isolationism. Through the very
rejection of the (WWII) analogy, they found themselves confirming its
rough historical message.
Is the West returning to the 1930s? That is another topic, although it can
be noted that evidence in support of this analogy has accumulated over
recent years at least as rapidly as it has dissipated. To the extent that
the ‘War on Terror’ is World War II revisited, however, it is only under
the conditions of a profound counter-factual revision, in which the
American Old Right was ultimately triumphant, and vindicated. The Islamic
world simply lacks the military capability to serve as model fascists,
posing a robust existential threat that feeds continuous escalation.
America has not remotely approached a 1940s war economy in the new
millennium, and there is nothing that any Islamic power — formal or
informal — can do to stimulate this outcome. A few ragged, frustrating
counter-insurgencies do not make a world war. For America, the War on
Terror — in any sense that has analogical force — is over.
The opportunity thus exists to shelve the Western perspective on
international affairs, a methodical step that tracks the concrete
draw-down of interventionist commitment, and one that — by further irony —
promises a far deeper comprehension of what current global events will
mean for the West (down the road). The critical first point is this: the
end of the ‘War on Terror’ is not the end of the war wracking the world of
Islam, but something far closer to its beginning. If the Arabs, too, are
returning to the 1930s, it is in a very different way, in accordance with
a far more comprehensive structure of history.
Anybody who has been hanging out in Al Jazeera recently (and,
right now, there’s no excuse not to), might have come across an extremely
significant
essay
by Murtaza Hussain, entitled
Iraq, Syria, and the death of the modern Middle East. Hussain has
no doubts that a back-to-the-1930s moment is unfolding in Mesopotamia, or
rather — the truly crucial insight —
a back through the 1920s moment, with reverse time signature. The
Middle East is not so much recapitulating history from the early 20th
century, as undoing it, revisiting the origins of the Arab state
system on a hardening, backwards trajectory:
The Sykes-Picot Agreement – which divided the Ottoman Empire after
World War I and created the Middle East as we know it – is today
violently breaking apart in front of the eyes of the world. The
countries of Syria and Iraq; formerly unified Arab states formed after
the defeat of their former Ottoman rulers, exist today only in name. In
their place what appears most likely to come into existence – after the
bloodshed subsides – are small, ethnically and religiously homogenous
statelets: weak and easily manipulated, where their progenitors at their
peaks were robustly independent powers.
Such states, divided upon sectarian lines, would be politically
pliable, isolated and enfeebled, and thus utterly incapable of offering
a meaningful defence against foreign interventionism in the region.
Given the implications for the Middle East, where overt foreign
aggression has been a consistent theme for decades, there is reason to
believe that this state of affairs has been consciously engineered.
Hussain’s conviction of alien manipulation — however plausible or
implausible it may seem — is itself a crucial part of the equation. The
Arab world is being propelled backwards, out of political modernity, by
forces of such consistent directionality and monumental implacability that
they suggest conspiratorial or providential workings, against which
resistance is futile. Raw history, in all of its nightmarish, occult
compulsion, is exposed like a buried city, as the facile myths of
collective, institutionalized agency are blasted away by the flood. A
dismal century of second-hand lies is being ripped away, revealing
something old and terrible beneath. Eventually, this cannot but matter,
for everyone.
The World War II analogy was tightly bound to the (‘neoconservative’)
project of democracy promotion. After all, the original Axis powers were
all transformed, through military defeat, occupation, and political
reconstruction, from fascist states into model democracies. Hussain’s
vision is far more accurately applicable to the current process-in-motion,
which does not climax in an affirmation of political modernity, but
accelerates back through its comprehensive demolition. Global democracy
will not easily or rapidly die in the wake of the ‘Arab Spring’, but
global
democratization, or democracy promotion, assuredly will.
From the War on Terror to the Arab Spring, there is a shift in analogy of
seismic consequence. It is no longer World War II that impinges forcefully
on historical intuition, but
rather
the Thirty Years’ War,
approached through momentous regression. The collapse of the
Sykes-Picot order, when analogized, is an undoing of the Peace of
Westphalia — and the international state system — by sectarian religious
warfare without respect for borders or institutions of national
self-determination. The conditions for democratizing social progress are
being ripped out at the level of their foundations. This was not what
‘internationalism’ was supposed to mean …
July 30, 2013The Islamic Vortex (Part 2)
The central contention advanced by
part 1
in this series is that the basic trend manifested in the Middle East today
– most evidently across its northern arc — is the disintegration of the
modern state system (and with it all the questions of political progress
that have been incrementally globalized since the Treaty of Westphalia in
the mid-17th century). To continue to discuss this process in
terms of ‘Lebanon’, ‘Syria’, and ‘Iraq’ is becoming increasingly quaint.
Within this region, in particular, states no longer conform to contiguous
territories, but rather to hubs, characterized by the inheritance of a
comparatively organized security apparatus, a vestigial international
status (also inherited, from the dissolving state system), and
specifically a recognized Westphalian-era territorial sovereignty,
stripped of domestic credibility. A realistic political geography of the
emerging northern Middle East begins from this point.
Because the names of nation states can only suggest (Westphalian)
contiguous jig-saw pieces, it is essential to understanding that we start
elsewhere. The Crescent, stretching from western Iran, through
Iraq, and Syria, to the Lebanese Levant, spilling – no doubt – into
south-eastern Turkey to the north, and down into the northern Gulf states
and Jordan to the south, can be considered an exaggerated Fertile
Crescent, a (Sunni-paranoiac) Shia Crescent, a Crescent of Disintegration,
it doesn’t matter. What is important is that the state apparatuses (and
international political sovereigns) existing in this area occupy it in the
manner of islands, populating or inhabiting it — among other
collective bodies of strategic consequence — rather than dividing it
effectively among themselves.
If the Crescent is maximally extended to the eastern borders of Iran (and
perhaps further into the Hazara areas of Afghanistan, and Quetta in
Pakistan), northwards into Azerbaijan and blurrily into the areas of
Anatolian Alevi ethnicity, and south along the western Gulf coast,
encompassing Bahrain (but stretched further along the Saudi Gulf coast and
beyond, into Yemen), it incorporates the entirety of Shia Islam as a
strategically potent entity. Beyond this area, the Shia exist only as
pogrom-fodder
among overwhelmingly dominant Sunni populations. Constituting something
over 15% of Moslems worldwide, but over a third of those in the Middle
East, the Shia either prevail in the Crescent, or go under. (For our
purposes here Alawites / Alevi are Shia by strategic affiliation and
adoption.)
The Crescent is the site of fitna,
Islam’s unsettled business, and the time of settlement is now due. How
does the balance of forces appear?
Almost dead center in the Crescent, are spread the – characteristically
stateless – Kurds, divided between Iran, Turkey, ‘Iraq’, and ‘Syria’, and
numbering perhaps 30 million (compared to a world Shia population of
roughly 200 million). Although predominantly Sunni by confession, Kurdish
nationalist aspiration dominates over sectarian identity. It comes as
relief to our cognitive overload that they are playing a long game. We can
bracket them for the moment
To the north lies Turkey, a powerful, comparatively competent Sunni state,
marginalized by its non-Arab ethnicity. The pursuit of neo-Ottoman
ambitions at this point would draw Turkey into a snake-pit of unimaginable
pain. I think we can assume defensive hedging from Turkey in the immediate
future. If we can bracket the Kurds – who are central to Turkey’s
interests and calculations — we can cautiously bracket Turkey as well.
To the east lies Iran, another capable state, as territorially secure as
anyone gets to be in this environment, and the wellspring of global Shia
power. Iran is already heavily invested in the Crescent War, but it has
the luxury of involvement from without, as a firm ally of Hizbollah, a
major stakeholder in the Iraqi Shia regime, and the local ‘superpower’
ally of Assad’s Alawite rump state. (We shall get to examine Iran more
closely when examining the nuclear proliferation aspect of this story,
further down the road.)
To the south things get very complicated. Jordan, an extremely fragile
Sunni state, is almost certainly
doomed, but its collapse will widen the Crescent War into a far more
multidimensional conflict. If we ignore it now it is less because we
can ignore it, than because we simply have to ignore it. The
limits of our processing capacity are exceeded. Similarly, to the east,
where the tentacles of fitna snake down along the Gulf coast,
through rich, demographically fragile micro-states, tightly woven into the
US-dominated international system by hydrocarbon production. This is the
royal road to world war. It’s too much to deal with right now.
(Free-ranging commentary is, of course, welcome.)
Despite the transparent arbitrariness with which we have cropped the
Crescent down to something like a manageable zone of attention, the core
that remains has a number of coherent features. Most obviously, it is
already a battlefield, in which the return to a pre-Westphalian ‘order’ is
substantially accomplished. On the Mediterranean coast, a tenuous hybrid
Sunni-Christian Levantine statelet coexists with a Hizbollah (Shia)
para-state, awaiting the resumption of
hell. No one is under time-pressure to decide things there very soon. It is
in throughout the twin Sykes-Picot Frankenstein ‘nations’ of
‘Syria and
Iraq‘ that the unraveling begins.
This Crescent Core is occupied by two rump states, one clearly reduced to
a compressed fiefdom (under Assad), the other still able to pretend to
national authority. Each is an apparatus of Shia power, and thus a target
for a Sunni-Jihadist onslaught of
international
scope, in which
Al Qaeda
realizes its world historic mission. The local Sunni-Arab population
engaged in escalating holy war against these states is not meaningfully
differentiated by (Sykes-Picot) national identity. Humpty-Dumpty is
broken, irreparably.
For the international Sunni-Jihadi movement, the destruction of these rump
states is now a matter of eschatological significance. Their defense is of
no less importance to their Shia supporters, for whom the Crescent Core
war is a zone of existential decision. The entire history of Islam, on
both of its dominant branches, is fully engaged in this conflict, whose
meaning, for the entire (split) Ummah is unsurpassable. It is
impossible to over-estimate the stakes, as Islam itself perceives them,
and the wider world has not yet seriously begun to apprehend what is
happening. (Palestine or Afghanistan mean nothing in comparison — as the
revealed pattern of practical Jihad makes clear.)
Does anybody seriously think they’re going to end this, with a
recognizable world order in place? If not … what’s next?
July 31, 2013The Islamic Vortex (Part 3)
The cartoon would look something like this:
An Egyptian (or it could be a Pakistani) walks into the Bank of America,
with a hand-grenade daubed ‘Radical Islam’ taped to his ear, and shouts
out: “Hand over the money or my head gets it!”
The teller looks up and says: “You don’t have to keep doing this. There’s
a standing order to pay you $1,500,000,000 a year.”
Offended, the Egyptian replies: “But the grenade is the only reason you
respect me!”
We could try to update the joke (… “then the black lesbian bank teller
says: ‘Why are you repressing that grenade?’”) but there’s going to be
more than enough torture in this story already. It suffices to note that
in the Egyptian version of the cartoon, the grenade was provided by the
bank, and its inscription read: ‘Democracy’. We can fast-forward straight
through the explosion stage, and begin on the far side of the ‘Arab
Spring’.
So to start over, with a serious question (even
if it doesn’t sound like one): How did the first comprehensively
Cathedralist administration in American history get to implement a
ruthlessly cunning neoreactionary Middle East strategy? In the Crescent,
it sleazed a situation in which Hizbollah and Al Qaeda are engaging in
reciprocal suicide attacks – even a hyper-hawk with liquid nitrogen blood
would have been hard-pressed to envisage such a scenario. And in Egypt?
There the dysfunctional ‘realist’ status quo – America’s multi-decade
hand-grenade cartoon of a foreign policy – has given way to something
quite different.
Assume, hypothetically, that in Middle Eastern affairs the Obama
Administration is by far the most mind-melting example of transcendental
strategic genius the Anglophone world has ever known. (Are you with me so
far?) Now add one straightforward corollary: In respect to Egypt, the goal
was to replace a parasitic, dysfunctional, passive-aggressive PITA state,
breeding Mohammed Attas like hogs in a factory farm, with a hard,
Islamophobic, neoreactionary security state, fundamentally immunized
against all democratic temptation, serving as a pole of attraction for
counter-Jihad tendencies throughout the region, and machine-gunning even
more Muslim Brothers in the streets than you really feel it needs to.
Then, if it all works out, as a bonus you even get to threaten the $1.5
billion standing order, whilst tut-tutting disapprovingly about the
naughty coup business.
To pull off this kind of unbelievable ju-jitsu requires a very special
skill set, starting with a mastery of deception. A Sahara-dry, perfectly
dead-pan sense of humor is not strictly necessary, but it adds to the
sense of panache.
You probably remember Dark-Lord Obama’s 2009 Cairo Speech, in very
approximate outline, but do you recall the title? Here it is (seriously):
A New Beginning. You’re forgiven a tingly ‘this is beyond awesome’
moment. (Probably Now for Neoreaction, or
Hard Reboot to the Future were considered too blunt even for this
Grand Imperial Wizard.) In an interview with Al Arabiya, Obama
explained
with his signature stylistic felicity: “My job to the Muslim world is to
communicate that the Americans are not your enemy.” From now on you’ll be
killing your own damn people.
The bottom-line problem isn’t difficult to see: the passably civilized
fraction of the Egyptian population is far too small to dominate their
society, unless tightly compressed by bonds of fear, thoroughly
disillusioned about the degraded state of their culture, invigorated by an
urgent sense of responsibility to secure their own existence, and
terminally freed of all democratic sentiment. Similarly, the regime itself
needed to be quickened by existential terror, and driven into nakedly
elitist alignment with a newly integrated, overtly anti-populist
constituency. For all this to happen, Egypt had to be locked in a cage
with itself, hardened by what it found there, until it had learned a
lesson as old as the pharoahs. The state had to cease being a pandering
platform and pan-handling operation, tailored to domestic populism and
correct international opinion, and begin ensuring security,
unapologetically, for the residue of civilization that still remained. But
we already know what was required: A New Beginning.
Mubarak was grenade-guy. He had to go. The fact that he was using the
Muslim Brotherhood in a groove-locked game of chicken with America was far
from the most serious problem. He was also playing grenade-guy chicken
with the local — uncondensed — non-Islamist demographic. By sheltering
Egypt’s educated elite from their own bearded brethren, he was sustaining
its most hopelessly sentimental illusions about the nature of the national
demos, perpetuating democratic teleology, giving credence to the
‘international’ reform agenda, and deferring to the country’s radically
corrupted (Islamo-populist) cultural template. Breaking with all this was
something far beyond the Mubarak-circle’s political imagination. The
country had to be sprung.
Of course, the Obama master-plan remains far from complete (even without
consideration of its application to Pakistan). The Egyptian economy is
still skewed towards ruin by a deep structure of populist subsidies, and
the recently installed order of neoreactionary legitimation has yet to be
overtly proclaimed, or constitutionally formalized.
It is nevertheless important to recognize how far things have come. The
Obamazing feint-revolutionary double-flip-back maneuver has, in rapid
succession, obliterated the accumulated credibility of the old
(‘grenade-guy’) regime, ‘moderate’ Islamist governance,
and democratic inclusion. A New Beginning already has the
educated middle classes clamoring for a harsher clampdown on the bearded
mob, and the security apparatus reaching out for robust political
integration with the country’s civilized minority (the ‘Tamarrod’).
In The Weekly Standard, surreptitious Obamanist Reuel Marc
Gerecht
captures
the situation adeptly:
The driving force behind the Tamarrod may be just too far removed
culturally from the Egyptian faithful. One thing is certain after the
coup: Secular liberals will want to be protected from vengeful
Islamists. And for that they will need the army. The ballot box will not
do.
August 1, 2013The Islamic Vortex (Part 3a)
This series was preparing for the flight out from Cairo International
Airport, to go WMD hunting in the Crescent, when a call arrived – from
Fotrkd (on
this
thread) – turning our plans back around. It was hard to pick out the exact
message from the stream of excited babble, but it was basically: “You’re
not going to believe what Kerry just said to the Pakistani’s …” (who, we
have to remember, are next in line for A New Beginning®.)
I’m guessing you’ve already heard it – since it’s all over the media. The
Israelis string it together well (notice the encrypted message to Kerry in the
URL: Ufu02Kzk2-k (!)):
“The military was asked to intervene by millions and millions of
people, all of whom were afraid of descendance into chaos, into
violence,” Kerry was quoted as having told Geo.
“And the military did not take over, to the best of our judgment – so
far. To run the country, there’s a civilian government. In effect, they
were restoring democracy,” he added.
The interviewer questioned him over
allegations that Egyptian troops have shot dead people in the
streets.
“Oh, no. That’s not restoring democracy, and we’re very, very
concerned… I’ve been in touch with all of the players there. And we have
made it clear that that is absolutely unacceptable, it cannot happen,”
Kerry said, according to AFP.
If history is being studied in human languages a thousand years from now,
these words will still be reverberating. They need to be carved on a
pyramid, or something. This is one of those rare moments in which
everything changes, and we have to catch up with it.
It’s all about democracy, obviously, but the improvised card-sharping
makes it easy to miss the way the trick plays out. The first important
thing to note — and the assumed context of the Geo interview —
is that the initial reference to democracy, as crudely, procedurally, and
up to this point pointedly understood, is scrubbed out and replaced. When
the interview question begins, we all know that what is being
talking about is the abrupt termination of Egypt’s brief and pitiful
experiment in Cathedral-inspired democracy. After Kerry’s initial words,
all that has already been shrouded. The topic has somehow slipped into
“descendance into chaos, into violence” — and we’re not supposed to
register that these words are translating
exactly the same thing that ‘democracy’ previously named, because
‘democracy’ is about to mean something else.
A lot of people (and they’re the people who matter) were asking the
military to intervene to shut down democracy
the descendance into chaos, into violence, and a deal was quickly
and efficiently done. The people who the military listen to got to borrow
the military, and the military got to borrow a civilian face. The intimacy
of this arrangement — and its deep neoreactionary sanity — has nothing at
all to do with democratic legitimacy in its previously accepted (and now
effaced) sense. Kerry clearly doesn’t think that anyone will care about
that. The right people took over, how could that possibly be a problem?
(It’s not as if anyone ever complained about that Pinochet business.) But
just in case some awkward memory of what we were supposed to believe last
week is still hanging around, we now get the most exquisite political
formula of the age: In effect, they were restoring democracy.
These words are too perfect. Sobbing with ecstasy could be embarrassing,
so I’ll quote a little
WRM
while getting it together:
Let’s get the obvious parts out of the way: No, the Egyptian military
is not restoring democracy in Egypt. You can’t “restore” something that
never existed … […] The army wasn’t trying to build democracy, either;
it was restoring order and protecting the deep state, more or less in
accordance with the will of a large number of middle class and urban
Egyptians. That’s the beginning and end of it. Americans desperately
want somebody to be the pro-democracy good guys. But right now at least,
democracy doesn’t seem to be on the menu at the Egypt café.
The structure of realization seems to go roughly like this:
(a) Democracy is the supreme Good, engraved eternally and universally in
the human heart, but
(b) When an attempt is made to implement it almost anywhere on earth it
immediately manifests as
a descendance into chaos, into violence, and
(c) This existentially threatens the demographic which might be actually
capable of sustaining a functional democracy, so
(d) In effect, the truly crucial step is the immediate cessation of
democracy what was previously known as democracy, which
therefore counts as
(e) A restoration of democracy.
We need to remember that John Kerry might have been President of the
United States, and the Muslim Brotherhood helpfully work with us in
thinking
that through:
Supporters of Egypt’s ousted president Mohamed Mursi today slammed US
Secretary of State John Kerry after he said the military was “restoring
democracy” by deposing the Islamist leader.
“Is it the job of the army to restore democracy?” asked Gehad
al-Haddad, a spokesman for Mursi’s Muslim Brotherhood in a
statement.
“Does Secretary Kerry accept Defence Secretary (Chuck) Hagel to step in
and remove (US President Barack) Obama if large protests take place in
America?
“Will the US army freeze the constitution and dismantle Congress and
(the) Senate? Can they appoint a president that they solely choose?”
Gehad al-Hadad still isn’t quite getting it. When invited by the right
people, whatever the army has to do in overthrowing the government now
defines the ‘restoration of democracy’.
Once we get to the stage where the Middle East is re-exporting Kerryist
democratic restoration, things could get extraordinarily interesting. At
the present rate of Cathedralist ideological implosion, however, there
might not be time for that.
Who’s going to print up the T-shirts?
We demand democratic restoration now!
August 2, 2013The Islamic Vortex (Part 3b)
“This time is different” is a slogan designed for derision. Greer set me
back
onto it again, but it’s familiar background hum, and could have come from
anywhere. In it’s most typical usage it applies to the psychology of
business cycles, as the epitome of bubble denial, which is to say:
investor hubris. (This
book might be the best known example.) With blunt irony, it is placed in
the mouth of a fool, who is prompted to declare that things won’t turn out
the same this time around (so of course they will). It’s what
somebody is expected to say shortly before losing their shirt.
There are a few quite simple things that can be said about the
presumption, whether learned or instinctive, that things will almost
certainly not be different ‘this time’.
— It is a cognitive stance that conforms almost perfectly with the
dominant sense of ‘wisdom’.
— It is strongly aligned with the heuristic that history has important
lessons to teach us (and that the lessons of deep history are especially
profound).
— It is skeptical with respect to Utopian schemes of improvement.
— It has an emotional correlate, in aversion to enthusiasm.
— Every civilized (or even merely cultural) tradition has an identifiable
version of it.
For all these reasons, it has a reactionary bias, due to its affinity with
everything that resists the progressive impulse and its fantastic
illusions. It remembers that change has happened before, and what happened
when it did. Even when explicit, relevant memory is lacking, it assumes
that tradition incorporates wisdom, and thus provides a bulwark against
reckless enthusiasm. It is unmistakably biased, because there has been
enough past to make it so.
The guiding maxim of Outside in –
Optimize for intelligence – is not primarily wise. Among the
readers of this blog, however, wisdom is the prevalent mode of realism,
and it is displayed in crushing abundance. When our
digression
into Egyptian practical neoreaction strayed into the exultant discovery of
a rare moment in which everything changes, the push-back commentary was quick, hard, and relentlessly
wise.
Learned wisdom, rooted in historical recollection, expects to be
countered, usually by fools. Of all the things that have happened before,
innumerable times, among the most common is a delirium of novelty,
accompanied by rationalizations of greater or lesser sophistication.
History is able to test doctrines of novelty, by excavating ancestral
anticipations whose very existence amounts to a refutation. For any claim
to the unprecedented, exposure to precedents is an embarrassment that
cannot easily be survived.
From an occluded future, the disturbance of wisdom can draw no sustenance,
but history offers it partial refuge, in two interconnected ways. Firstly,
it can contest the time-scale of normality, pushing expectations into
deeper and more expansive cycles, in order to relativize a formation of
wisdom to a long-settled innovation, whose ‘naturalness’ rests on nothing
beyond a comparative durability of change. Wisdom is challenged to deepen
its memory, and to recall the difference it has mistaken for a foundation.
If anything done can be undone – and even has to be – then what will not
be undone, in time? Every establishment was once established, and thus
rests upon some sub-basement of historical fragility.
Secondly, the precedents of innovation, when
abstractly apprehended, disturb wisdom more effectively than they
support it. Sometimes it has been different, unless growth itself
is an illusion. Everything, seized at the right scale, is new. Ultimately
invention envelopes wisdom, rather than the contrary. (This is not,
admittedly, an uncontroversial claim.)
Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed each said “this time it’s different.” A
sufficiently mechanical wisdom would even assert that, in this, they all
said the same. At the very least, as original founders of distinctive
establishments of wisdom, they each preclude a primordial refusal of
innovation. An absolute wisdom would judge each worthy of crucifixion, or
its equivalent in derision. If wisdom is to be the iron criterion, the
Abrahamic faiths are all the works of great comedians. How could it be
denied that — when strictly and consistently considered — religious
inspiration is inherently unwise? (This is not a judgment I am
dogmatically rejecting.)
The state, too, is an invention. It seems to be roughly as old as the
institution of literate priesthood, with canons of wisdom to match. That
time it was different, and recorded history began. Even then, a deeper and
more enveloping wisdom can be conceived, associated with a lost (and
unwritten) presumption: this nonsense is not going to last.
Perhaps proto-states had been tried, and failed, innumerable times before.
The prehistory of political abortions might even have exhibited sufficient
richness to make the birth of the state obviously foolish.
Equally, through a dilation of time-scales ultimately indistinguishable
from wisdom itself, we can still stubbornly presume that this nonsense is
not going to last. Or at least, if we refuse this presumption, judging it
unrealistic, we have to do so as defenders of innovation, rather than as
faithful voices of tradition.
So we return to the leading question of this series: what is the destiny
of the Islamic State? Clearly, wisdom offers us no answer. The modes of
reason engaged are quite different. We have to correctly identify the real
innovations in the history of the state, and come to an equally realistic
judgment about the relative priority of religious civilization and
political order. Is the Islamic State a state, that happens — incidentally
— to be Islamic? Or does Islam decide whether or not it is culturally
tolerable to sustain a modern state? These questions are open to revision,
and refinement, but the essential divergence of conclusions is
inescapable. Either universal political science is possible, or it is not.
If universal politics is judged impossible, that is — in the delicate
American turn of phrase — a BFD. The practical recognition of such a
reality would make a difference, a durable change, and a disintegration of
time. Islam either masters the state, or succumbs to it. That ‘choice’ is
a war.
August 3, 2013The Islamic Vortex (Part 4)
The story that follows was stolen from somewhere, but I’ve not been able
to recover the source. It has a definite neoconservative edge to it, which
isn’t surprising given the early-nullities brain-feed it was no doubt
extracted from, but it’s neat enough to be passed on.
If Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires in space, the First World War
was the equivalent burial ground in time. The German Second Reich, the
Austro-Hungarian (Habsburg) Empire, the Russian (Romanov) Empire, and the
Turkish (Ottoman) Empire were all interred by it. In their place arose new
geopolitical entities based upon an unstable mixture of ethno-nationalist
self-determination and moral-universalist internationalism. The role of
American ideas in the New Order – most immediately conveyed by the vehicle
of ‘Wilsonism’ – was both substantial and ambiguous. A tight swirl of
Americanization and Anti-Americanism would be essential to everything that
followed.
If Austro-Germanic imperial collapse can be considered one thing, for the
sake of elegance, the true narrative marvel of this story can unfold,
because each dead empire was the germ of a world war, structuring history
in its fundamentals up to the present day. From each imperial grave, in
succession, came a challenge to the Anglophone global order, distinct in
certain respects, but also displaying common, recognizable features.
Given what is being said of their origins, we
can think of these sequenced global challenges as Undead Empires,
re-animated from the ruins of the old order. In each case a supra-national
ideological wave was radiated from an extinct crater of traditional
authority, married in complex ways to ethno-nationalist impulses, and
self-defined in explicit opposition to Anglo-Jewish planetary capitalism.
First Central-European National-Socialism (1933-45), then Russo-centric
Bolshevism (1946-89)*, and finally – because this narrative implies
completion – from out of the Arabian hinterland of the broken Ottoman
empire came the last of the great Undead Empires, the one that concerns us
still.
The Eurasian Undead Empires have ceased to moan. Ghoulishly re-animated,
then re-broken, and rebuilt, Germany dominates Europe once again, and
Russia has re-established itself as an assertive autocracy with
extensive, but strictly finite, reach. Neither any longer pursues its
interests in the name of a cosmic ideology, as if its traumatic grievance
deserved to shake the heavens. Neither still aches to burn down the world,
in order to share the ruin it has known. The sullen grumbles they might
still nurse have ceased to awaken the dead. Only normal disgruntlements
remain.
Islam remains in a very different place. The collapse of its last —
Ottoman — Caliphate was constitutionally formalized by Kemal Atatürk, the
first President of the new Turkish Republic, on March 3, 1924. The cosmic
ideology of Islamism is unintelligible without reference to that event.
What political Islam wants, centrally, is the revival of the Caliphate.
The Great War’s last curse thus determines it as an Undead Empire
dreaming, in the lurid crypt-chatter of blood and screams …
… which was the neoconservative nightmare, best articulated by center-left
hawk Paul Berman in his
Terror and Liberalism. In compliance with the pattern of historical analogy here outlined,
only one outcome was conceivable — a fourth world war. The ‘War on Terror’
was thus predicted, and promoted, until — after the best part of a decade
— it had bled out into a parody of itself. The grating disproportion
between the WoT’s tawdry squabbles on the one hand, and the apocalyptic
confrontation which the narrative demanded on the other, had become
unbridgeable. In a sense it was over. At least, attention wandered. Yet
nothing had been settled, or laid to rest.
Realism has to be more than ceasing to think, just as it must be more than
a call to action. The story of the Undead Empires, now freed of
neoconservative excitability, has either to be discarded
for a reason, or more thoroughly explored. Despite the
directionless adventures that have attached themselves to it, the
intrinsic plausibility of the narrative itself has not, by an iota, been
diminished.
This is most clearly demonstrated through simple elaboration of the
pattern. World War II was an extremely intense global conflict, with a
number of theaters simultaneously active, and total duration of less than
a decade (from the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 to the surrender of
Japan in 1945). World War III, in contrast, was so prolonged, and dilute
(or ‘cold’), that it is generally considered not to have happened at all.
Between the major hostile powers, deterrence predominated over active
engagements, with the latter generally conducted as peripheral, asymmetric
conflicts. (US military deaths approached 100,000 a year during WWII**,
close to the country’s total toll — almost entirely from Korea and Vietnam
— suffered over the 40 years of ‘WWIII’).
Of course, simple extrapolation into WWIV gets nowhere near to a forecast.
All it tells us is that there was never any reason to expect compact,
burning Armageddon. The crude trend line (counting for nothing) projects
30,000 US military deaths over the course of a 200 year hyper-diffuse
cryo-war. American narrative fundamentalist would depart from that as the
‘norm’. Not the ‘clash’, but the slow squelch of civilizations.
Perhaps more suggestive is the trend to involution. National Socialists,
despite the diversion of the Holocaust, spent most of their time killing
foreigners. The communist regimes of ‘WWIII’, in contrast, focused almost
entirely on massacring their own populations, reaching a 9-figure body
count over their ‘lifespans’. The vague narrative ‘prediction’, therefore
— which the word ‘war’ increasingly obfuscates — is that the long struggle
to revive the Caliphate is an opportunity for Islamo-demographic
self-cannibalization, on a scale that has only been delicately hinted at
so far. The default pattern points to an extended hideous occurrence that
is, almost entirely, inflicted by the
Ummah upon itself.
The only reason to be persuaded by this pattern is that, right now, it’s
the only pattern we have …
[Some involutionary carnage in detail next]
* These are Cold War dates, rather than internal Bolshevik regime dates
(1917-89). The latter would contribute to a more intricate time structure,
in which sequence took the form of historical envelopment, rather than
simple succession. I’m trying to keep things cognitively manageable, for
the moment.
** December 1941 – August 1945
August 5, 2013The Islamic Vortex (Part 5)
So – does Mecca get nuked? For the purpose of this series, that’s a
reasonable candidate for the terminal question.
A direct assault on this question stumbles quickly into a paradox of
stimulating profundity. Of all the geopolitical and religious agencies
determining the outcome, the one most theologically predisposed to the
vaporization of Islam’s spiritual center is the Wahhabi sect, which
presently controls it. The
case
can easily be made that, within the limitations set by peacetime
conditions, this objective has already been
pursued
with
spectacular
ardor. (If you noticed the Iranian media links there, save that observation.)
Also worth mentioning: it’s a necessary antecedent to the Islamic
Apocalypse (al-Qiyamah) that Mecca and the Kaaba be destroyed.
One of the factors supporting the Thirty-Years’
War analogy in the escalating conflict between Sunni and Shia Islam is the
confidence with which we can identify the ‘Protestants’ and ‘Catholics’ in
this re-run. In God and Gold (p.367), Walter Russell Mead outlines the
structure of parallelism:
Wahhabis seek to suppress the popular cults associated with saints and
others traditionally believed to intercede for believers with God. Every
soul is accountable to God for its own acts, and there is no human
mediator. Puritans similarly attacked the cults of the Christian saints,
and argued that it was vain and unbiblical to pray to the Virgin and the
saints for their intercession with God. To make sure such cults are
suppressed, the Saudi government under Wahhabi influence has recently
destroyed mosques and monuments in Mecca and Medina that had becomes
associated with cults and customs considered un-Islamic. Puritans, like
many radical Protestants across northern Europe, destroyed altar
screens, stained glass, statues, and other church furnishings which, in
their judgement, distracted the people from the worship of the one true
God.
Shia Islam, with its far greater tolerance for cultural ‘thickness’, has a
‘Catholic’ alignment with heritage, tradition, and mediation. Sunni Islam
— especially in its ‘Puritanical’ or radical Wahhabi, Salafi, and Takfiri
variants, interprets intermediary forms of cultural and political
organization as manifestations of impiety (to be erased). As with the
militant Protestantism of the seventeenth century, its mode of holy war
indissolubly fuses iconoclastic theology with the armed advance of the
faith.
Radical Sunni ‘desert religion’ projects a desert as (and at) the end of
faith. It cannot be realistically expected that cultural inhibitions on
the escalation of violence will find fertile soil in this terrain. A
geographically and demographically besieged Shiism shows every sign of
counter-bidding unreservedly in its own eschatological coin.
There are other inhibitions, however. When socially disorganized militants
engage in informal warfare, the requirement that they protect their own
neighborhoods from nebulous threats tends to what Gary Brecher
calls
the ‘cripple fight’ phenomenon. There’s a reluctance to stray to far from
home, when home is an informal war zone, which obstructs effective
military mobilization. More generally, mass killing is technically
difficult, and usually scales up with social competence (a few African
counter-examples notwithstanding). Disease is the traditional
mass-killer, supplanted by famine in modern times. Relatively
low-efficiency slaughter is the modern Islamic norm. Hence the fascination
with Weapons of Mass Destruction, and especially nuclear devices, as the
prospective solution to the Jihad escalation problem.
The dynamics of escalation can be modeled as a chain reaction,
which can in turn be translated into the geopolitics as a
domino theory. Such theories went out of fashion in the closing
stages of the Cold War, because their predictions regarding the contagious
virulence of communist regime-change began to look over-stretched. Where
domino models clearly excel, however, is in the explanation of nuclear
proliferation. Within such domino chains, the attainment of ‘nuclear
status’ by power A serves as the sufficient political explanation
for the subsequent attainment of nuclear status by power B, in a process
that can be prolonged indefinitely, given a suitable linear network of
threat links.
Consider the active chain of nuclear dominoes leading into the Middle East
(ignoring the non-contagious or here-irrelevant sub-branches, UK, France,
Israel, and North Korea). The path leaves little room for controversy. In
strict succession, driven by linear threat-response at each stage, it runs
USA, USSR, China, India, Pakistan … and already we have an
Islamic bomb. It is crucial to note at this point that each link
in nuclear dominoes (after the first) has to be Janus faced. The potential
conflict that provoked each stage of proliferation is quite different to
the one that triggers the next. For instance, the Indian bomb, clearly
responding to that of China, is now primarily understood through the
successor stage, in which the nuclear arsenals of India and Pakistan are
weighed against each other in strategic calculations. Similarly,
Pakistan’s Islamic bomb (when related to India’s Hindu bomb) has to be
re-conceived as a Sunni bomb on its other face, envisaged from
the Greater Middle East, where a Shia bomb is the obvious threat-response
— the next domino.
It is important to stress that this is where the Iranian nuclear program
comes from. American and Israeli optics tend to distract from the regional
logic of proliferation. However politically convenient it may be for
Iranian leaders to publicly proclaim that their bomb (which, of course,
they have no intention whatsoever of building) is designed solely to kill
Jews, or to drive Americans out of the Gulf, it is in fact overwhelmingly
necessitated by the fact that a Sunni bomb already exists, next door. A
nuclear Iran means, fundamentally, a balance of threat between Sunni and
Shia power in the Greater Middle East. It can also be assumed, with
extreme confidence, that a
Sunni Arab (Saudi) bomb would soon follow, according to the
wholly predictable domino-Janus sequence which exposes Iran from the
other side.
[There’s a lot more to say about all this, but I’m done for tonight]
August 10, 2013Quote Notes (#13)
Richard Fernandez
on
the importance of the Israeli-Palestinian ‘peace process’:
Perhaps the saddest thing about President Obama’s Middle East peace
initiative is how tangential it is.
R[e]uel Marc Gerecht
and
Anthony Cordesman
examine the upheavals in the region, focusing on Egypt and Syria
respectively, without even mentioning Palestine, the jewel in Kerry’s
crown. It is as if one were diagnosed with cancer, but the doctors says
“I can’t cure the cancer but I can manicure your nails.”
August 6, 2013Great Games …
… you have planned, shame if something bad were to happen to them.
Tyler Durden (of Zero Hedge)
casts
some harsh light on the lead up to WWIV recent diplomatic
engagement between Saudi Arabia and Russia — countries that seem to be
uniquely serious about the outcome of the Islamic civil(izational) war.
Roughly a month ago, these countries had a less than complete meeting of
minds on the future of the region. TD quotes Al-Monitor
on
the conclusion: “At the end of the meeting, the Russian and Saudi sides
agreed to continue talks, provided that the current meeting remained under
wraps. This was before one of the two sides leaked it via the Russian
press.”
Since we know all about this, it means no more talks, an implicit
warning that the Chechens operating in proximity to Sochi may just
become a loose cannon (with Saudi’s blessing of course), and that about
a month ago “there is no escape from the military option, because it is the only
currently available choice given that the political settlement ended
in stalemate.” Four weeks later, we are on the edge of all out war, which may
involve not only the US and Europe, but most certainly Saudi Arabia and
Russia which automatically means China as well. Or, as some may call it,
the world.
Russian leverage is aligned with inertia, so it can be exercised with some
subtlety. The Saudis, on the other hand, are in an awkward spot: they
either back down, or they have to make ‘a splash’. Anyone looking for
upcoming trigger events knows where to pay attention.
(For graphic context, try
this.)
August 28, 2013Quote notes (#24)
Adam Garfinkle
makes
an obvious point beautifully:
… whatever the Administration has said about the purpose of an attack
being to “degrade and deter” Syrian capabilities, but not to change the
regime, everyone expects the attacks to be modest and brief, thus not to
much affect the battlefield balance, and once ceased to stay ceased.
That is because the Administration’s reticence at being drawn into the
bowels of Syrian madness is both well established and well justified.
The attacks, then, will likely not degrade or deter anything really;
they will be offered up only as a safety net to catch the falling
reputation of the President as it drops toward the nether regions of
strategic oblivion.
This has all been so vividly sign-posted it is getting hard to see how
even a ‘cosmetic’ effect is going to work. How can an operation
pre-advertized as an awkward spasm of embarrassment be realistically
expected to restore honor and credibility?
Handle brims with sense
on
the
topic.
August 30, 2013Yesterday’s News
“The missile strikes the White House is contemplating would advance
Syria’s dissolution,”
writes
Steven A. Cook in the Washington Post.
What is this ‘Syria’ of which you speak?
Such senseless language should have been dismissed from the practical
lexicon by now. It belongs strictly to history books.
Between the Mediterranean coast of the northern Levant and the Iranian
border, the internationally-recognized state system exists only as a set
of tokens in diplomatic games. It isn’t coming back.
This
article
(and
book) will be seen as astonishingly prescient soon, and deserves to be
already.
September 1, 2013Quote notes (#33)
Rough Triangles
analysis
from William Lind:
… we think of jihad as something waged by Islam against non-Muslims,
but quite often it has been between one Islamic sect and another. Now
Islamists are once again declaring jihad on each other. In June the
New York Times reported on an influential Sunni cleric
who “has issued a fatwa, or religious decree, calling on Muslims around
the world to help Syrian rebels… and labeling Hezbollah and Iran” — both
Shi’ite — “enemies of Islam ‘more infidel than Jews and Christians.'”
David Gardner’s Financial Times piece tells of a
“conclave of Sunni clerics meeting in Cairo [that] declared a jihad
against what it called a ‘declaration of war on Islam’ by the ‘Iranian
regime, Hezbollah and its sectarian allies’.”
How should the West react to all this? With quiet rejoicing. Our
strategic objective should be to get Islamists to expend their energies
on each other rather than on us. An old aphorism says the problem with
Balkans is that they produce more history than they can consume locally.
Our goal should be to encourage the Muslim world to consume all its
history — of which it will be producing a good deal — as locally as
possible. Think of it as “farm to table” war.
All we should do, or can do, to obtain this objective is to stay out.
We ought not meddle, no matter how subtly; if we do, inevitably, it will
blow up in our faces. Just go home, stay home, bolt the doors
(especially to refugees who will act out their jihads here) …
September 26, 2013Buy/bye Petrodollar
The master jigsaw puzzle piece connecting US domestic and foreign policy
together is the petrodollar. Federal debt production depends upon
credibility in the US currency that is anchored by its privileged role in
global hydrocarbons commerce. Knock out that privilege, and US dollar
holdings become one speculative asset among others. The fiat house of
cards begins to tumble (perhaps with shocking rapidity).
In this context, US monetary policy begins to look like a side-line of
‘friendship’ with the Saudis, which is dissolving into quick sand. Pepe
Escobar
at
AToL explores some of the possible consequences. (It’s especially notable
that the fracking revolution could accelerate a petrodollar crisis, rather
than retarding it.) There’s also a China angle, which is always fun.
Disconcertingly for almost everybody, in different ways, the awkward
retraction of US power from the Middle Eastern wasps’ nest tends
inevitably to destabilize the global monetary regime. The more the Saudis
feel jilted, the less their commitment to the petrodollar pact, but if
this was ever a low-maintenance relationship, it certainly isn’t anymore.
Bomb Iran or your currency bombs. — Things might not quite reduce
to that yet, but it increasingly looks as if they will.
October 27, 2013The Saudi Bomb
Richard Fernandez
passes
along a BBC
report
that Saudi Arabia is already a virtual nuclear power. In collaboration
with Pakistan, the Kingdom has assembled a nuclear arsenal (complete with
CSS-2 delivery systems), which is presently distributed according to
diplomatic convenience, with the war-heads held in Pakistan. Assuming that
this report is roughly accurate, the chain-reaction of nuclear
dominoes
pushing the proliferation through South Asia into the heart of the Middle
East has been all but completed, with only superficial formalities yet to
be concluded.
It’s late, and I’m off to bed, so I’ll simply repeat: It’s late.
Everything people care about is going to be side-lined by international
events.
November 10, 2013Time of the Ass-assins
Islam asks the important
questions
(via):
“My question is whether I am permitted to allow one of the mujahideen
access to my anus, if my intentions are honorable, and the purpose is to
train for Jihad by widening my anus.”
The sheik praised Allah and said: “In principle, sodomy is forbidden.
However, Jihad is more important. It is the pinnacle of Islam. If sodomy
is the only way to reach this pinnacle of Islam, then there is no harm
in it.
Allahpundit
estimates:
Odds that this is a prank played on the credulous host by some viewer,
possibly the
MEMRI guys themselves, who simply
couldn’t resist: 40 percent. Odds that it’s a legit query, proof that
the mujahedeen’s willingness to sacrifice for jihad has taken on painful
new dimensions: 40 percent. Odds that the guy posing the question is the
world’s dumbest would-be terrorist, whose “recruiter” is really, really
eager to start “training” him: 20 percent.
December 11, 2013Played
Has Obama Administration geostrategy been based upon a cunning (and
secret) plan? Richard Fernandez
makes
the case that a covert American attempt to subvert radical Islam crested
with the September 11, 2012, Benghazi fiasco. Employing a mix of
infiltration, drone assassination (to clear promotion paths), and
calculated regime sacrifices (Egypt, Syria), the objective was to reforge
an international Jihad under covert US control. When the take-over plan
went south, nothing could be publicly admitted. Cascading failure has
continued in the shadows ever since, jutting into media consciousness as a
succession of disconnected — even inexplicable — foreign policy setbacks.
The curious thing about September 11, 2012 — the day of the Benghazhi
attack — is that for some reason it marks the decline of the Obama
presidency as clearly as a milepost. We are told by the papers that
nothing much happened on that day. A riot in a far-away country. A few
people killed. And yet … it may be coincidental, but from that day the
administration’s foreign policy seemed inexplicably hexed. The Arab
Spring ground to a halt. The secretary of State “resigned.” The CIA
director was cast out in disgrace. Not long after, Obama had to withdraw
his red line in Syria. Al-Qaeda, whose eulogy he had pronounced,
appeared with disturbing force throughout Africa, South Asia and the
Arabian Peninsula. Almost as if on cue, Russia made an unexpected return
to the world stage, first in Syria, then in the Iranian nuclear
negotiations.
Fernandez digs much deeper than Carney, but
this is still
worth adding.
May 14, 2014The Islamic Vortex (Map)
Having seen this a few times now (most recently
here, where it’s described as a “five-year plan”), I decided I just had to
have it.
FWIW I don’t expect Vienna to have been absorbed into the renascent
Caliphate by 2019.
(I don’t expect things to have calmed down, either.)
The Islamic Vortex series was not completed, so it needs re-visiting, but
I think it’s holding up quite well (parts
1,
2,
3,
3a,
3b,
4,
5).
July 12, 2014The Islamic Vortex (Map-2)
This
will be needed when we get back to the topic (eventually):
July 24, 2014The Islamic Vortex (Note-1)
An executive summary of Ali Khedery’s open
letter
to President Obama: Face it, ISIS is your ally bro.
August 13, 2014The Islamic Vortex (Note-2)
The claim that modern Sunni ‘fundamentalism’ (Salafism, Wahhabism)
is the Islamic Reformation is well-established (this blog
has grazed upon the background
here).
The persistence of this proposition attests to its significance, and is at
least suggestive of credibility. It can reasonably be placed alongside the
Moldbug Ultra-Calvinism
Thesis
(on the cladistic identity of ‘secular’ democratic progressivism) as a
central religious-historical argument, of profound relevance to the
cultural tendencies of our time.
A fairly recent
post
at Patheos by Philip Jenkins (via Henry
Dampier) presents this
proposition with remarkable force. Mustering its case in terms of
iconoclasm, it integrates the phenomenon helpfully, in particular
by emphasizing the essential unity of militant anti-idolatry and mass
violence. Smashing idols is no mere intellectual or doctrinal position.
Iconoclastic militancy is a social operation, which is not only
instantiated within the history of revolutionary turmoil, but occupies a
privileged position within it. The revolutionary — or
ideologically-mobilized — mob is epitomized by iconoclastic irruption,
which foreshadows its potential for violent abstraction.
Doctrinally-motivated vandalism, from the European Reformation, through
the Chinese Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, to the ravages of our
contemporary radical Islam, is the archetypal form of modern revolutionary
(com)motion.
Philips remarks:
For present purposes, it is the Wahhabi tradition that has unleashed
the savage destruction of shrines and holy places that has been so
widely deplored in the past half-century or so. This includes the
Taliban’s destruction of the Buddhas in Afghanistan, the attempted
eradication of the glorious shrines and libraries of Timbuktu, and the
annihilation of most of the ancient shrines and tombs around Mecca
itself. Some Egyptian Islamists fantasize about eradicating all the
ruins of pagan ancient Egypt, including the Pyramids themselves.
I am sometimes bemused to hear Western commentators call for
contemporary Islam to experience a “Reformation,” by which they mean an
opening to freedom and toleration. That is of course an extremely
distorted view of Christianity’s own Reformation. Arguably, Islam has
been going through its own Reformation for a century or so, which is
exemplified by the Wahhabis and Salafists. That’s the problem.
August 29, 2014The Islamic Vortex (Note-3)
Asabiyyah is an Arabic word for a reason. Unlike many of my
allies on the extreme right, I see no point at all in other cultures
attempting to emulate it. The idea of a contemporary Western
asabiyyah is roughly as probable as the emergence of Arabic
libertarian capitalism. In any case, ISIS has it now, which means they
have to keep fighting, and will probably keep winning.
Asabiyyah is useless for anything but war, and it dissolves into
dust with peace. The only glories Islam will ever know going forward will
be found on the battlefield, and it is fully aware of the fact.
Baghdad will almost certainly have
fallen
by the end of the year, or early next. The Caliphate will then be reborn,
in an incarnation far more ferocious than the last. Its existence will
coincide with a war, extending far beyond Mesopotamia and the Levant, at
least through the Middle East, into the Central Asia and the Indian
subcontinent, across the Maghreb, and deep into Africa. If the Turks are
not terrified about what is coming, they have no understanding of the
situation. This is what the global momentum behind militant ‘Islamism’
across recent decades has been about. Realistically, it’s unstoppable.
Eventually, it will bleed out, and then Islam will have done the last
thing of which it is capable. No less than tens of millions will be dead.
Other, industrially-competent and technologically-sophisticated
civilizations have no cause for existential panic, although mega-terrorist
attacks could hurt them. Any efforts they make to pacify the Caliphate-war
will be futile, at best. It is a piece of fate now. The future will have
to be built around it.
Patrick Poole writes (at the link above,
repeated
here):
The US Embassy in Baghdad is the largest embassy on the planet. And
after
Obama sent 350 more U.S. military personnel to guard the U.S. Embassy last month, there are now more than 1,100 US
service members in Baghdad protecting the embassy and the airport. That
doesn’t include embassy personnel, American aid workers, and reporters
also in Baghdad. ISIS doesn’t have to capture the airport to prevent
flights from taking off there (remember Hamas rockets from Gaza
prompting the temporary closure of Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport this past
summer). If flights can’t get out of Baghdad, how will the State
Department and Pentagon evacuate U.S. personnel? An image like the last
helicopter out of Saigon would be of considerable propaganda value to
ISIS and other jihadist groups. Former CNN reporter Peter Arnett, who
witnessed the fall of Saigon in April 1975,
raised this possibility
back in June. It’s not like the U.S. has prestige to spare
internationally, and the fall of Baghdad will mark the beginning of the
end of American influence in the Middle East, much like the case in
Southe[a]st Asia in 1975.
When the United States pulled back from anti-communist COIN in
1973,
Marxism-Leninism was left to consume itself in its own insanity. This is
the situation that was reached in relation to Islam by the election of the
Obama administration in 2008. Even were it desirable, it is sheer delusion
to imagine that the West — i.e. America — has the moral energy (or
asabiyyah) to pursue any other
course. The consummation of Jihad is going to happen. The more rapidly the
catastrophe develops, the sooner it will be done.
ADDED: “However many of them are killed, the ones who survive will keep
pushing on into Kobani and on toward the
Baghdad airport
feeling as alive as if they had just plunged into the river of history
itself. And they will keep telling themselves that this river flows with
the blood of the non-believers.”
ADDED: The War Nerd has a very different prognosis.
ADDED: So how
is
ISIS
doing?
October 15, 2014The Islamic Vortex (Note-3a)
This blog has doubtless generated rafts of unreliable predictions. The one
that has been nagging, however — ever since Scott Alexander called me out
on it in the comment thread there — was advanced in the most
recent
sub-episode of this series. Quote: “Baghdad will almost certainly have
fallen
by the end of the year, or early next.” Even if the time horizon for this
event is stretched out to the end of March 2015, I have very low
confidence in it being realized. The analysis upon which it was based was
crucially flawed. I’m getting my crow-eating in early (and even if — by
some improbably twist of fortune — ISIS is in control of Baghdad by late
March next year, it won’t be any kind of vindication for the narrative I
was previously spinning.)
Where did I go wrong (in my own eyes)? Fundamentally, by hugely
over-estimating the intelligence of ISIS. The collapse of this inflated
opinion is captured by a single word: Kurds.
Just a few months ago, ISIS enjoyed a strategic situation of extraordinary
potential. It represented the most militant — and thus authentic — strain
of Arab Sunni Jihad, ensuring exceptional morale, flows of volunteers from
across the Sunni Muslim world, and funding from the gulf oil-states, based
upon impregnable legitimacy. It was able to recruit freely from the only
constituency within Iraq with any military competence — the embittered
remnants of Saddam’s armed forces, recycled through the insurgency against
the American occupation, and then profoundly alienated by the sectarian
politics of the new Shia regime. It was also able to draw upon a large,
fanatically motivated, Syrian Sunni population, brutalized and hardened by
the war against the (Alawite, or quasi-Shia) Assad regime in that country.
Both enemy states were radically anathematized throughout the Sunni world,
deeply demoralized, incompetent, and patently incapable of asserting their
authority throughout their respective countries. In consequence, a
re-integrated insurgent Sunni Mesopotamia had arisen, with such historical
momentum that it served as a concrete source of inspiration for energetic
holy war, and a natural base for the eschatalogically-promised reborn
Caliphate.
The wider environment was more complicated,
but also highly encouraging. The Jihadi legitimacy of ISIS made opposition
from the Sunni Arab states to the south (Jordan, Saudi Arabia)
unthinkable. That left four major sources of substantial hostile
intervention: Israel, the United States, Turkey, and Iran. Taking these in
turn:
(1) Israel, by all game-theoretic sanity, was a de facto ally.
Perhaps it is. It had no intelligible motive for intervention, and were it
to do so the legitimacy of ISIS would be immediately elevated to
stratospheric levels. Baghdad or Damascus regimes dependent upon Israeli
support would be obviously politically unsustainable. (Israeli war against
ISIS puts it in objective collaboration with Iran — which isn’t going to
happen.)
(2) The USA was burnt out, directionless, strategically-conflicted to the
point of psychosis, and politically-toxic to near-Israeli levels. Relevant
at this point only as a Jihadi recruiting tool.
(3) As a NATO member, Turkey completes the troika of Westernized states,
whose intervention would naturally tend to reinforce a
clash-of-civilizations escalation, to the extreme medium-term advantage of
ISIS. While a Sunni state, it is not Arab, and would quickly generate
extraordinary ethnic animosity. With Turks having lost the previous
Caliphate, there is no imaginable circumstances in which the Sunni Muslim
world would entertain the prospect of them leading — or even seriously
interfering with — the next one. Turkish intervention might no doubt slow
things down, but it could not conceivably stabilize the situation in
Mesopotamia. The effect would be to rapidly expand the conflict into
Turkey itself, and even into Turkic Central Asia. There is no reason to
think Turkish popular opinion would support a strategically pointless,
bloody war in the south. (We will get to the critical Kurdish factor in a
moment.)
(4) From a strictly military point of view, Iran possesses a mixture of
capability and commitment that makes it a uniquely formidable opponent,
but here the political calculus is also at its starkest. From the moment
it intervenes, the Sunni-Shia sectarian character of the war is
consolidated, and generalized, into a truly global, climactic struggle
between the two dominant branches of the Muslim faith. From a local
(Mesopotamian) uprising, ISIS’s war would be transformed immediately into
an apocalyptic religious event, setting the world to the torch. Jihadi
recruitment and funding would become a worldwide deluge. For the Iranians,
there is no imaginable end-point to this, short of an
absolute resolution at the level of eschatology, or revolutionary
world-transformation. ISIS has the base-brain juice for that, does
Teheran?
… but then we get to the Kurds. Of course ISIS should have
courted them, anything else is utter madness. While not Arabs, they’re
Sunni. They already hate the Baghdad regime, and long for secession.
They’re more than willing to be persuaded to fight Turks, Persians, or
(Alawite) Syrians, if the need arises. Played with even a minimum of
intelligence, the Kurds would have provided a wedge to break Iraq apart
definitively, distract the (Baghdad) regime, strip it of oil revenues,
keep the Turks and Iranians nervous, and even provide various kinds of
active support as they saw their long-held dreams of an independent
Kurdistan arising and beckoning like a tantalizing jinn at the edge of the
new Jihadi Caliphate. It’s the ultimate no-brainer.
Instead, ISIS threw everything away fighting the Kurds. It’s an
organization of idiots, and a whole bunch of its fighters are now
pointlessly dead idiots. No Baghdad-by-early-2015 for you losers. I’m
embarrassed to have been drawn out of my dismissive contempt.
December 3, 2014The Islamic Vortex (Note-4)
So the Islamic State has
executed
their captive Jordanian pilot, Lt Moaz al-Kasasbehby, by
burning him alive. The event was artfully videotaped and
maximally publicized. It was an act undertaken with an extraordinary
degree of intent.
The ‘organization’
beheaded
Japanese journalist Kenji Goto a few days previously. It had
already
beheaded another Japanese hostage, Haruna Yukawa, a week before.
The deliberate combination of indiscriminate and exorbitant violence is
remarkable. It looks like a purposeful escalation beyond terror, aimed
calmly at the entire world.
If there’s anyone who hasn’t watched Apocalypse Now recently,
this might be the time to correct that. A
reminder:
Kurtz: I’ve seen horrors … horrors that you’ve seen.
But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill
me. You have a right to do that … but you have no right to judge me.
It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do
not know what horror means. Horror … Horror has a face … and you must
make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If
they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly
enemies! I remember when I was with Special Forces … seems a thousand
centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We left
the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old
man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went
back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There
they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember … I … I … I
cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out; I
didn’t know what I wanted to do! And I want to remember it. I never want
to forget it … I never want to forget. And then I realized … like I was
shot … like I was shot with a diamond … a diamond bullet right through
my forehead. And I thought, my God … the genius of that! The genius! The
will to do that! Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then
I realized they were stronger than we, because they could stand that
these were not monsters, these were men … trained cadres. These men who
fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were
filled with love … but they had the strength … the strength … to do
that. If I had ten divisions of those men, our troubles here would be
over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral … and at the same
time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without
feeling … without passion … without judgment … without judgment! Because
it’s judgment that defeats us.
ADDED: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning …”
February 4, 2015Coming Soon
The trailer for
the ISIS jihad-porn blockbuster Flames of War is quite something.
The Rubin Report-embedded
version. “They’re
clearly trying to bring us into a fight …”
ADDED: A little background from the International Business Times:
The new video, titled “Flames of War,” was released late Tuesday by the
Al Hayat Media Center, which,
according to
the Washington-based Middle East Media Research Institute, was
established in May as the media arm of the Islamic State. […] The
52-second-long video, which, at first glance, seems more like a
video-game trailer, is replete with slow-motion effects and
high-definition images. It shows exploding tanks and Islamic State
militants apparently preparing to execute captives before the words
“Flames of War” flash on the screen, followed by the words, “Fighting
has just begun.” And, before the screen fades to black, the video ends
with the words, “Coming Soon.”
September 18, 2014Progress (III)
(Via.)
January 21, 2015Moors Law
Derbyshire
cited
some statistics from
this
exponential demographic calamity article, which are truly remarkable:
Figures from the 2011 census show that the
Muslim population in the UK has substantially risen between 2001 and
2011 from 1.5 million to almost 3 million. This now takes the proportion of Muslims from 2% of the population to
5%. In some towns, Muslims make up almost 50% of the population, and in
large cities like London and Manchester they make up around 14% of the
population. But why has the number of Muslims risen so much and what are
the implications? […] There are several reasons why the number of
Muslims has doubled. […] …
By the next census Muslims may even double again and make up 10% of
the population. These statistics encourage us to think more carefully about the
provisions made for British Muslims and the ways in which they are an
integral part of the nation.
[Emphasis in original.]
(It ‘encourages’ me to think of
different
things
entirely.)
March 24, 2015Things Fall Apart
Pax Americana is easy to laugh at, but so — no doubt — was
Pax Britannica and even Pax Romana. Imperial order isn’t
a tidy or pretty business. It was, however, something, and it’s very
rapidly ceasing to be.
Powerful nonlinear dynamics are triggered at certain critical points of
systemic transformation. The positive network effects that induced powers
great and small to buy into a credible world order switch into reverse,
with every defection making the value of continued adherence less
convincing to everyone else. In Europe and East Asia the defection
dominoes have yet to cascade, and the slow work of fundamental subversion
proceeds at a misleadingly languid pace. In the Middle East, in sharp
contrast, little remains of the preferred American
status quo beyond a ghastly husk. It’s hard to see any way back.
America’s traditional regional lynch-pin allies — Israel, Egypt, Saudi
Arabia, and Turkey — are united (only) in alienation. The most important
structural reason for this, beyond the inexorable decline of American
global management capability, and coherent
options
for intervention, rumbles beneath the surface of
this
WSJ article. Everything the US is still trying to accomplish in the region
is pushing it into deeper complicity with the Teheran regime — whether on
the specific issue of the Iranian nuclear program, operations against
ISIS, or involvement in Yemen — and this makes it an objective antagonist
of the Sunni establishment. A deep Sunni
reformation
— in the most blood-drenched sense of the word — is unfolding in the
region, and the US is simply incapable of aligning with it. Yet as
conflict escalates, and polarization intensifies, even the most
conservative Sunni players are driven into solidarity with revolutionary
Jihadi radicalism. If an Iranian-orchestrated campaign, coordinated with
Iraq’s Maliki regime*, Assad, and the Kurds, succeeds in crushing the ISIS
Islamic State, it is a near certainty that the major Sunni powers will
commit to its resurrection, or displacement, rather than concede to the
triumph of a new Shia order in Mesopotamia. … Then Yemen
happened.
A new Middle Eastern
war
scarcely raises an eyebrow outside the region today. The Islamic Vortex
has passed the point of ignition, and the old order is beyond salvage.
Among Western observers, impotence translates immediately into apathy,
even when they notice a deluge of blood de-pinkering
the world. The Battle for Saudi Arabia Begins,
writes
Fernandez — and there’s nothing at all that anybody can do about it.
* Only very roughly speaking (see comments).
ADDED: I should have guessed there was
already a
Things Fall Apart (I) here. Apologies for any subsequent confusion.
(WordPress is entirely relaxed about non-unique post titles, but I’m going
to try not to be.)
ADDED: Pax Americana is over.
ADDED: David Rothkopf combining some valuable analysis with disastrously
misconceived recommendations.
March 27, 2015Join the Queue

Context.
Everyone in my twitter bubble seems impressed
by the aesthetics, but the smart money is on ClarkHat getting to the
finish line first:
April 13, 2015Iconoclasm
There
goes Nimrud.
“The final
images on the
video show the final, total destruction of one of the world’s most
important archaeological sites.”
April 16, 2015Geo-Engineering
This looks like a plan:
October 14, 2015ISIS on Paris
The ‘Daesh’* statement on the attack (in full):
In the name of Allah, the all merciful, the very merciful Allah the
great said: and they thought in truth that their fortresses would defend
them against Allah. But Allah came to them from where they weren’t
expecting it and launched a terror in their hearts. They were
demolishing their gomes with their own hands as well as from the hands
of believers. Take a lesson oh you who are wise. Sourat 59, verse 2. […]
In a blessed attack which Allah facilitated the causes, a group of
believers from the soldiers of the caliphate to whom Allah has given
strength and glory targeted the capital of abomination and perversion,
the one who lifts the banner of the cross in Europe, Paris. […] A group
divorced from this life taking a step toward their enemy, looking for
death in Allah’s path, rescuing its religion, its Prophet and its allies
and wanting to humiliate its enemies. They were true to Allah and we
consider them as such. Allah acquired from their hands and through the
fear in the hearts of those encountered on their own land. […] Eight
brothers carrying explosive belts and assault rifles took for target
places that were carefully chosen in the heart of the capital, in the
French stadium during a game between two countries, France and Germany,
which the imbecile of France [President Hollande] was present, the
Bataclan, where hundreds were present in a party of perversion as well
as other targets in the 10th, 11th anf 18th districts simultaneously.
Paris is shaking in their shoes and its streets have become very narrow,
the death count of the attack is a minimum of 200 and even more injured
by the will of Allah. […] Allah facilitated our brothers and gave them
what they hoped for, (martyrdom), they activated their explosive belts
in the middle of the infidels after they ran out of ammunition. May
Allah welcome them among the martyrs and allow us to meet them. And
France and those who follow its way must know that there are still
principle targets left for the Islamic State and that they [France] will
continue to smell death for having taken the lead in the crusade [in
Syria] after having insulted our Prophet, after they’ve flaunted their
fight against Islam in France, and beaten our Muslim brothers in
Caliphate land with their planes that were useless in the smelly streets
of Paris. This attack is only the beginning of the storm and a warning
for those who want to ponder and learn a lesson. […] Allah is great, the
strength belongs to Allah and His messenger and believers, but the
hypocrites do not know it. Sourat 63, verse 8.
(Source, with French original.)
* Conflicted here on whether to switch over to that name. Any suggestions?
November 14, 2015The Management of Savagery
Is
this
strategic guide to Jihad by Abu Bakr Naji the equivalent of Mao Zedong’s
On Guerrilla Warfare (link) for our time?
November 16, 2015Peak Jacobinism
It’s an over-used formula, but this time it really does seem appropriate.
If
this
analysis can be trusted — and it looks at least superficially plausible —
ISIS has broken the soul of evangelical democratization. Once the
Cathedral’s universalistic faith has been defeated (“the freedom agenda in
the Muslim world is dead”), how long can it be before the gathering ebb
tide tears apart its internal ideological structure? “This is something
only for us” requires an ‘us’ — and that acknowledgement marks the
cresting of a crisis that has been centuries — if not millennia — in the
making.
Syria represents the culmination of this trend. The moderate rebels of
2011 stood no chance of survival against the hard liners who managed to
rapidly mobilize foreign fighters and take over the majority of the
insurgency. The result is that, post-Paris, Western capitals will be
skeptical of regime change of any sort. It will be clear that when
intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign (albeit repressive)
states becomes a vehicle for democratic change, that vehicle will
probably be hijacked by radical Islamists, and will arrive at a
substantially worse political destination than intended.
The post-Paris war on terror will affirm the West’s commitment to
fighting radical Islamic terrorism, but, in the process, it will reject
the idiom of revolutionary, moralizing democratic change inherited from
President Bush. Syria was the end of the line for that approach.
The revolution has come right back around to Hobbes, and thus to the
systematically-cynical origin of the modern state system, the author
(Emile Simpson) argues. What a long strange trip it’s been.
(Via.)
ADDED: “… jihadis have come to inhabit a different moral universe …” —
Multiversalism it is, then.
November 23, 2015The Islamic Vortex (Note-5)
Michael Klare takes a
look at the Islamic
State logistics train (bullish for US defense stocks):
In the years after invading Iraq and disbanding Saddam Hussein’s
military, the U.S. sunk about
$25 billion
into “standing up” a new Iraqi army. By June 2014, however, that army,
filled with at least
50,000 “ghost soldiers,”
was only standing in the imaginations of its generals and perhaps
Washington. When
relatively small numbers
of Islamic State (IS) militants swept into northern Iraq, it collapsed,
abandoning
four cities
— including Mosul, the country’s second largest — and
leaving behind
enormous stores of U.S. weaponry, ranging from tanks and Humvees to
artillery and rifles. In essence, the U.S. was now standing up its
future enemy in a style to which it was unaccustomed and, unlike the
imploded Iraqi military, the forces of the Islamic State proved quite
capable of using that weaponry without a foreign trainer or adviser in
sight.
Notice anything repetitive in all this — other than another a bonanza
for U.S. weapons makers? Logically, it would prove less expensive for
the Obama administration to simply arm the Islamic State directly before
sending in the air strikes.
June 2, 2015The Islamic Vortex (Note-6)
Why (sane) non-Muslims hate Islam,
made
simple:
So, Islam was established as a polygynous system, meaning it created a
wife shortage among believers. But raiding non-believers who do not
submit to Muslim rule was sanctified and taking their women for your
sexual use was also sanctified. So, sexual frustration generated by
Sharia marriage rules was then explicitly directed
outwards towards the non-believers who have not submitted to Muslim
rule. The ghazis raiding across the frontier into “the
lands of unbelief” which were such a feature of the borders of Islam for
over a millennia represented Islam sanctifying (and so intensifying)
patterns of typical of polygyny; polygyny that it also sanctified.
All dithering aside, it’s an inter-culturally aggressive
rape
machine, by essence.
ADDED: “The
problem, ultimately, is this …”
ADDED:
December 3, 2015The Islamic Vortex (Note-7)
Robin Wright (in The New Yorker)
expresses
the frustrations of a modern Jacobin about as straightforwardly as one
could hope:
What seems to have been lost in the past five years is American
strategic support for the Arab Spring’s aspirations — and for the
innumerable other Bouazizis still struggling for rights and justice and
jobs. One of Obama’s boldest decisions, in 2011, was to abandon
longstanding U.S. support for Arab despots, personified in President
Hosni Mubarak, who ruled Egypt ruthlessly for thirty years. For the
first time, Washington opted for the unknowns of potential democracy
over the guarantees of autocratic stability in the Arab world.
A speaker for HRW is even clearer about the ideological lineage at stake
(and it isn’t anything coming out of the Middle East):
Each local crisis has been complicated by regional players who have
intervened to block a new Arab order. “It’s no longer about what
Egyptians want. Or what the Syrian people want,” Whitson, of Human
Rights Watch, explained. “It’s so much broader and wider — and more
complicated than during the French Revolution. Now a revolutionary
doesn’t just fight the bureaucrats in the capital but bureaucrats
thousands of miles away. There are so many horses in the game who have
the resources and power to dictate or sway the outcome. It’s a much more
difficult battle.” […] Speaking of the idealistic protesters of five
years ago, Whitson said, “Sometimes it makes you wonder if they ever had
a chance.” Yet she remains sanguine about the future. “The fight is not
over,” she told me. “Because it can’t be over. The aspirations that
inspired the spark over a seven-dollar bribe are universal, and we know
it. As long as governments deny people basic justice and dignity, people
will rise up.”
Yes, “rise up” [*facepalm*]. If there’s any distinction at all between
(subjective) ‘caring’ and (objective) raw evil it’s getting ever harder to
discern. The bleeding-out of universalistic Cathedral evangelism in the
Middle East has been an event of far greater consequence than anyone is
yet able to acknowledge.
December 17, 2015The Islamic Vortex (Note-8)
Yuletide comedy
supplement:
The four core elements of Obama’s Syria policy remain intact today: an
insistence that Assad must go; that no anti-IS coalition with Russia is
possible; that Turkey is a steadfast ally in the war against terrorism;
and that there really are significant moderate opposition forces for the
US to support.
(The entire essay is a valuable American Proxy Civil-War primer.)
December 23, 2015The Islamic Vortex (Note-9)
Fernandez:
One man who understood the power of “Salafi jihadism” was Saddam
Hussein, who according to
Kyle Orton, writing in the New York Times, understood long before Obama that secular socialism was no match for
a full-bore jihadism which had endured the test of centuries. “The Arab
nationalist Baath Party, which seized power in 1968 in a coup in which
Mr. Hussein played a key role, had a firmly secular outlook. This held
through the 1970s, even as religiosity rose among the Iraqi people. But
soon after Mr. Hussein invaded Iran in 1980, it began to change.”
To compensate for his shortcomings in governance, Saddam covered
himself with the Koran. He also tried what Obama later attempted, an
alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood, with disastrous results. Rather
than beating Islam, the Baath began to be absorbed by it. “In 1986,
however, the Pan-Arab Command, the Baath Party’s top ideological
institution, formally reoriented Iraq’s foreign policy toward an
alliance with Islamists. This was the first clear deviation from secular
Baathism.”
The causal pathways in this area are easily obscured by ideological
preferences.
ADDED: Throwing this in to store the link. (Some topic-bridging necessary.)
December 26, 2015The Islamic Vortex (Note-10)
According to the geo-economic logic of the dying status quo, the
Islamic Vortex supported oil prices by injecting menace into the supply
chain. Peaks of turbulence were associated with oil
shocks. ‘Middle East peace
initiatives’ (or more drastic interventions) were so deeply entwined with
oil supply security imperatives as to be scarcely distinguishable.
Not
anymore:
Many energy analysts became convinced that Doha would prove the
decisive moment when Riyadh … would agree to a formula allowing Iran
some [production] increase before a freeze. … But then something
happened. According to people familiar with the sequence of events,
Saudi Arabia’s Deputy Crown Prince and key oil strategist, Mohammed bin
Salman,
called
the Saudi delegation in Doha at 3:00 a.m. on April 17th and instructed
them to spurn a deal that provided leeway of any sort for Iran. When the
Iranians — who chose not to attend the meeting — signaled that they had
no intention of freezing their output to satisfy their rivals, the
Saudis rejected the draft agreement it had helped negotiate and the
assembly ended in disarray. […] … Most analysts have since suggested
that the Saudi royals simply considered punishing Iran
more important
than raising oil prices. No matter the cost to them, in other words,
they could not bring themselves to help Iran pursue its geopolitical
objectives, including giving yet more support to Shiite forces in Iraq,
Syria, Yemen, and Lebanon. Already feeling pressured by Tehran and ever
less confident of Washington’s support, they were ready to use any means
available to weaken the Iranians, whatever the danger to themselves.
With ‘Peak oil demand‘ in prospect, and a brutal zero-sum
struggle beginning for shares in a market tending to secular shrinkage,
the deepening Sunni-Shia has become an engine of systematic oil price
suppression. According to plausible Saudi calculations, the Iranian enemy
will simply use oil revenues to pursue their geopolitical objectives more
competently than the Saudis can themselves. A higher oil price, therefore,
is comparatively advantageous to the Shia bloc (at least in the eyes of
the Saudis, whose perceptions in this regard uniquely matter, due to their
status as sole
swing-producer). Any rise in revenues is overwhelmed by the quantity of
additional military challenge it brings with it. This holds true
whatever the level of social stress a low price inflicts on the Sunni
side.
It’s quite a box the Saudis find themselves in. There’s no way out of it
that doesn’t require winning a religious war.
April 30, 2016The Islamic Vortex (Note-11)
Could the escalating Sunni-Shia War (intensified by the fracking
revolution) take
out
Saudi Arabia?
(Cold Western indifference would be nice.)
October 22, 2016The Islamic Vortex (Note-12)
Everything is
proceeding
as foreseen.
“They say all Sunnis are Daesh, but it isn’t true,” said former truck
driver Jassem Nouri, 50. Nouri has spent the past two years living on a
building site in the northeast of Salahuddin province; his home, in the
Sunni village of Salman Beg, is just six miles away, but the Shiite
militias that ejected the Islamic State from the area over two years ago
have refused to allow any of the residents to return. Last year, his two
sons, former university students, were detained by masked men in
unmarked uniforms and accused of working with the Islamic State. Nouri
insists that they are innocent, but he has not been able to secure their
release. […] “The one thing that is breaking my heart is that my sons
are in jail and I can’t prove their innocence,” he said. “If this
government doesn’t change, there will never be security and stability in
Iraq, just an endless blind revenge.”
No one has the slightest (realistic) idea what equilibrium would even look
like. The Sunni-Shia war has no end short of utter exhaustion. For
everyone else, staying mostly out of it — and keeping it out —
has to be the basic principle of strategic wisdom.
ADDED: From The Economist — “Horrifyingly, although home to only 5%
of the world’s population, in 2014 the Arab world accounted for 45% of the
world’s terrorism, 68% of its battle-related deaths, 47% of its internally
displaced and 58% of its refugees.”
November 28, 2016Quote note (#260)
Dalrymple
on
visions of the Apocalypse:
Oceans of ink have been spilt on the attempt to estimate the true
extent of the threat of Islam to the West, and the attempts range from
the frankly paranoid to the most supinely complacent. For myself, I veer
constantly between the two, hardly pausing in between. In the last
analysis, the West has all the cards, intellectual and military; but if
it refuses ever to play them, they are of no account.
If Islam destroys the West, it will only be in the role of a suicide
weapon, deployed by the West against itself. The basis of the Apocalyptic
case is that the West has been taught, very successfully, that it does not
deserve continued existence. (“Better dead than rude” is John
Derbyshire’s
formulation.)
Islam is the Hell the West damns itself to, for its sins.
June 22, 2016Twitter cuts (#94)
It’s a clear sign of how seriously Radical Islam is taken by the foreign
policy establishments of civilized states. Roughly, it’s treated as a
biological weapon, to be used against real adversaries (you know,
those who are not mere hill people). That’s not going to change
much anytime soon, however much one might want it to.
October 14, 2016Twitter cuts (#123)
This is not — of course — conclusive. It would be a stretch to say that it
isn’t suggestive. As far as practical politics are concerned, current
leftist priorities look strikingly self-contradicting. Islamization or
popular sovereignty — choose one (or less).
The essay at the attached link recommends re-education as a remedy, in an
age when the dominant organs of opinion formation have collapsed into
culture war and unprecedented illegitmacy. Good luck with that.
ADDED: On point.
March 16, 2017
SECTION D - IMMIGRATION
Quote note (#132)
WRM
on
the politics of amnesty by executive order:
For many liberal Democrats (as well as for some of their Republican
opponents) two key beliefs about immigration shape their political
strategies. The first is that Latinos are the new blacks: a permanent
racial minority or subgroup in the American political system that will
always feel separate from the country’s white population and, like
African-Americans, will vote Democratic. On this assumption, the
Democratic approach to Hispanic Americans should be clear: the more the
merrier. That is a particularly popular view on the more leftish side of
the Democratic coalition, where there’s a deep and instinctive fear and
loathing of Jacksonian America (those “bitterly clinging” to their guns,
their Bibles, and their individualistic economic and social beliefs).
The great shining hope of the American left is that a demographic
transition through immigration and birthrates will finally make all
those tiresome white people largely irrelevant in a new, post-American
America that will forget all that exceptionalism nonsense and ditch
“Anglo-Saxon” cultural and economic ideas ranging from evangelical
religion to libertarian social theory.
If conventional wisdom on the subject is this stark — and Mead is a good
weather-vane for that — then Obama might as well put on the
Kill Whitey T-shirt, because he’s clearly not fooling
anybody. (It’s also worth explicitly noting, for the anti-market trads out
there, that your besieged cultural norms and
laissez-faire capitalism are on the same radical leftist death
list, whether you appreciate the company or not.)
November 24, 2014Discrimination II
It would be hard to find a clearer illustration of the topic than
this
article (written from the vehemently discrimination-negative left). The
stakes are so clear that detailed commentary is entirely otiose. Some
snippets:
The contrast was stark. One group of South Asians had become objects of
fear and derision and targets of immigration enforcement and extra-legal
violence. Another group of South Asians was being heralded for their
social, economic, and cultural contributions to the United States. … the
complexities that lay beneath the surface of “South Asian” identity were
flattened into a powerful binary; South Asian Americans were either
model minorities or national threats. … But this was not merely a
post–9/11 phenomenon. In fact, the division between the feared and the
desired, the denigrated and the celebrated, has been a defining feature
of South Asian racialization in the United States for over one hundred
years. … for decades, federal immigration laws and popular culture have
worked together to make these distinctions, to distinguish desirable
from undesirable South Asians. … Between 1904 and 1917 … xenophobia and
Indophilia were not simply contradictory attitudes that played out in
two separate social spheres — that is, South Asians were not simply
denigrated in political debates over immigration restriction while they
were simultaneously celebrated in popular culture. Instead, each sphere
generated its own set of distinctions between who was desirable and who
was not, and each set of distinctions reinforced the other. … the 1882
Chinese Exclusion Act, the 1885 Alien Contract Labor Law, and the 1917
Immigration Act were never straightforward acts of Asian exclusion, nor
was the 1965 Hart-Cellar Immigration Act — the law that is credited with
ending the exclusion era — an act that fully “opened the door” to Asian
immigration. All four of these Acts — in effect and in intent — helped
define who within Asian populations was welcome and who was not. … the
so-called exclusion laws introduced a logic that certain South Asians
were admissible — or desirable — because of their class, education, and
profession. This was ultimately the logic enshrined in the “occupational
preferences” provisions of the 1965 Immigration Act; the legislation
brought thousands of South Asian doctors, engineers, and other
professionals to the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, while keeping
working-class migration to a minimum. … Orientalism is a double-edged
set of ideas, standards, and expectations. In the realms of both
immigration law and popular culture, the desired and the denigrated have
always been inextricably linked; they are defined in relation to one
another, with a line drawn between them.
As with most leftist tirades, the effect of this discussion is to engender
appreciation for those few fraying fibers of sound public policy and
cultural discernment that might otherwise be overlooked. I’m willing to
grant the possible advantages of
further, more minute discrimination. The fact that discrimination
is occurring at all, however, is an indication that — even in this
advanced stage of Cathedral dominion — sanity is not altogether dead.
Discriminate between these guys …
… and these guys?
Hell, yeah.
April 10, 2015Ethnomasochism
Arguments that indiscriminate immigration is socially beneficial are too
widespread to pick upon in detail — spend any time over at
The Economist or, for the full-throttle ‘altruistic’ version,
Bryan Caplan’s place, to be inundated in them. It’s hard to see how a lack
of selectivity could ever be advantageous from the perspective of the
demographic recipient, but the whole discussion evades a far more toxic
problem. If a case for the mass implantation of unscreened foreign
populations is couched in the language of self-interest — however
misguidedly — it can, at least potentially, be engaged rather than merely
diagnosed. (This blog has no problem with immigration
in general whatsoever.)
Far more disturbing to any surviving assumptions about sane social policy
decisions is the very different argument (exemplified by the
Cathedral-crazed second questioner in
this
clip (via)) that
immigration is a punishment to be embraced, in a form of
religiously-intoxicated, collective self-flagellation, to scourge the
sin-blackened Occident, unendingly, for its ineliminable historical
crimes. This is ethnomasochism in its purest instantiation, and argument
is wholly irrelevant against it. Such moral-religious convulsants do not
want ‘good’ (productive, orderly, talented, aspirational) immigration.
They want the lash. No ‘racist’ profile of potential immigrant groups can
be vicious enough to elicit aversion, on the contrary — the more harm that
is promised by the incomers, the more sobbing gratitude accompanies the
invitation. Immigration is meant to be torture, so what use are
brainy, well-behaved entrepreneurs? The ideal immigrant in this vision of
infinitized moral purgation is not a social asset, but a wretched,
dysfunctional parasite, or better still an arrogant, contemptuous
aggressor. ‘Model minorities’ are erased from the picture entirely,
because they do not exact the suffering that is so ardently desired. (“You
can wander through Chinatown late at night without being robbed, beaten,
or raped — what’s the possible spiritual value in that?”) To repeat the
essential, and hideously consequential point:
Immigration is supposed to punish us.
This is the terminal pathology of Western Civilization, in its ‘highest’
state of expression. There is not much that can be said to be fortunate
about it, except that it cannot be indefinitely prolonged.
July 14, 2015Quote note (#214)
The intolerable clarity of Sailer at
work:
… the concept of “Europeanism” upon which the EU was founded — that
Europeans should be more neighborly to their fellow Europeans than to
non-Europeans — is increasingly unmentionable in polite society because
it’s seen as racist. For example, during the peak of adulation for
Merkel before reality set in, she was widely praised for personifying
European values by de-Europeanizing Europe.
How would one even begin to argue with anything said here? There’s a lot
in this short passage, but nothing that isn’t obviously true,
to everyone, which accounts — perhaps — for the fact that it is
nevertheless almost unthinkably controversial.
It would be a relief to see Merkel awarded the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize for
her contribution to the
ruin
of Europe. If not honest — or anything close — it would at least attain
meta-honesty, by defining ‘peace’ explicitly as the suppression of truth.
February 1, 2016Quote note (#222)
The ironical
road from feminism
to Islam:
Some commentators like to point out that many of the most passionate
and bravest defenders of the West are women, citing Italian writer
Oriana Fallaci
and others
as examples. But
women like Ms. Fallaci, brave as they might be, are not representative
of all Western women. If you look closely, you will notice that, on
average, Western women are actually more supportive of Multiculturalism
and massive immigration than are Western men. […] … surprise, you didn’t
enter a feminist Nirvana, but paved the way for an unfolding Islamic
hell.
Give feminist ideology a voice in security policy, and the gates are
thrown open. The evo-psych behind this is dark, but
compelling.
It’s past time to move it from the ‘provocative speculations’ to the ‘hard
cold facts’ folder.
February 22, 2016Quote note (#184)
Thompson:
It is little surprise that people want to move from badly organised
countries to better organised ones. What is more surprising is that the
causes of bad national organisation are so often ascribed to external
factors rather than to the people who live in such countries. The theory
seems to be that some people, by an accident of birth, had the good
fortune to be plonked down in a place with laws, institutions, roads,
schools and hospitals, while others had the misfortune to be born in
places with dictators, gangs, muddy tracks and slums. According to this
world picture, if you move people from the unfortunate to the fortunate
geographies, then the world’s problems are solved.
One consequence of escaping this common error is the downgrading of the
territorial obsessions common on the right. Free association is the real
topic of concern. Pieces of real estate are never more than rough proxies
for that.
September 14, 2015Tsunami
Either
Europe is absorbed into Africa or at some point it learns, pitilessly, to
say ‘no’. Neither alternative is likely to be remotely pretty.
The 21st century would probably be a good time to be somewhere else.
… two years ago the United Nations Population Division released a
shocking update to their population projections, revising the forecast
for the continent of Africa upward to
4.2 billion
in 2100 from 1.1 billion today. […] That is about a half dozen times
greater than the population of Europe. […] Africa is almost certainly
not going to add over three billion residents over the next 85 years.
Something else will happen instead …
For an example of how ugly it looks — in the eyes of polite opinion — to
get anywhere close to realism on the topic, try
this. It’s unthinkable! So, by far the most likely outcome is that Europe
buries its head in the sand until it is already deep into existential
crisis, then lurches into some new and even more hysterical version of its
traditionally-favored fascist ‘solution’. Quite probably, it will get to
lose another World War before the complete extinction of its civilization.
(If there’s a positive spin to put on this glacial catastrophe, don’t
hesitate to share it in the comments.)
April 30, 2015All Over
Peter Hitchens has given up, on
immigration
(as well as everything
else):
Once [illegal immigrants are] in, our own treasured freedoms work
against us. Thanks to centuries of island freedom, when we were able to
decide who came in and who didn’t, it is far easier to disappear in
Britain than in almost any other country in the world. We’ll abolish
those freedoms in the end, alas, but it won’t do any good. […] And now
the expensive navies of the EU are ferrying thousands more across the
Mediterranean each week. The people-smugglers are saving a fortune on
fuel, for they know their victims will be picked up before they are
halfway across, in what are misleadingly described as ‘rescues’. […] The
only thing that will stop the flow is when the EU countries, including
ours, become so like the places these people are fleeing from that there
is no point in coming any more.
June 15, 2015Policy Migration
Hints
of queasiness from open borders advocate Nathan Smith:
A couple of years ago, I wrote a post called “The American Polity Can Endure and Flourish Under Open Borders.” I would not write that post today. The American polity might endure
and flourish under open borders, but I wouldn’t claim that confidently.
What changed my mind? A greater familiarity with the theoretical models
that are the basis for “double world GDP” as a claim about the global economic impact of open borders,
especially
my own. It turns out that these estimates depend on billions of people
migrating internationally under open borders. … I do not think the US
polity is robust enough to absorb 1 billion immigrants (even, say, over
the course of fifty years) and retain its basic political character and
structure.
The large, link-dense text that follows is sure to stir up some excitement
among border-stripping libertarians. As a political science fiction
scenario, it has much to recommend it (including some fragmentation
features that the Outer Right might find suprisingly appealing).
August 21, 2015Exponential
Do try to keep
up:
German authorities expect up to 1.5 million asylum seekers to arrive in
Germany
this year, the Bild daily said in a
report to be published on Monday, up from a previous estimate of 800,000
to 1 million.
Whatever it is that’s happening here should be over fairly quickly.
Also worth noting: “The authorities’ report also cited concerns that those
who are granted asylum will bring their families over to Germany too, Bild
said. […] Given family structures in the Middle East, this would mean each
individual from that region who is granted asylum bringing an average of
four to eight family members over to Germany in due course, Bild quoted
the report as saying.” (So we can crank the binary exponent up by another
2-3 notches straight away.)
October 5, 2015Diverse Opinions
Americans of Indian ancestry seem to be having a disproportionate impact
on the horizons of ‘sensitive’ debates at the moment. Techno-commercial
secession
and
eugenic
immigration in a single week. Diversity clearly has an up-side.
November 7, 2013Twitter cuts (#39)
Realistically, economic opportunity on a new frontier is likely to
predominate as the driver for geopolitical disintegration, but “Where do I
have to go to get away from these people?” is worth carving on the gate of
an Exit-based polity. It’s
Elysium, and probably the right-most impulse of the present world order. The
Cathedral basically coincides with the answer: Nowhere. It’s not
an allowable incentive. Still, it’s already a huge incentive (in fact),
and every week it gets more huge.
Running the entire immigration crisis through this question is (darkly)
enlightening. Anything that might count as a positive answer is probably
our stuff.
ADDED: Not very closely related, but pinned on
for fun
December 8, 2015Why Iran?
The blog obviously isn’t coming from where Scott Aaronson
is, and the title
of this post isn’t even centrally his question, so I’m asking it.
If you were trying to discredit a demographic policy that discriminated
against Islamization, the thing rolled out by the US administration looks
like a good way to do it. Shouldn’t selecting against Salafism be the
policy core? Such a stance could be easily based upon solid American
precedent.
This
looks like something else entirely. (It’s a dog’s breakfast, which is to
say hastily hashed-up populism food.)
ADDED: The flip-side to Scott Aaronson’s concerns (from his own comment
thread).
February 5, 2017
SECTION E - EXIT
CHAPTER ONE - GETTING OUT
Lure of the Void (Part 1)
Shanghai’s 2010 World Expo included an entire pavilion dedicated to urban
futures. Among the exhibits was a looping video on a large screen,
depicting varieties of futuristic city-types as speculative animations,
light-heartedly, and with obvious orientation to youngsters. Since
children are the denizens of the future, it makes sense to treat them as
the target audience for a vision of tomorrow’s world, but the effect was
also disconcerting, as if parenthesizing what was shown in a form of
deniable, non-abrasive irony.
This is what the future used to look like. Does it still? On this
point, a subtle reserve concealed itself as a concession to childish
credibility, or even inconsequential fantasy.
One of the four future cities on display had been constructed off-planet,
in earth-orbit. It was populated by happy humans (or, at least,
humanoids). No date was predicted. Untethered from firm futuristic
commitment, it intersected adult perception as a fragment of
cross-cultural memory.
Imagine a city in space, as a child might. Given the strategic
obscurity of this statement, when encountered at a carefully-crafted
international event, in a sophisticated, cosmopolitan, global, Chinese
city, in 2010, it is tempting to approach it through analogy. Half a
century ago, when Western children were encouraged to imagine such things,
during the twilight decades of modernity (1.0), was a sincere promise
being made to them that they would inherit the solar system? If so, is
such a promise now being humorously referenced, or is it being
re-directed, and re-made?
The 2010 Expo had a Space Pavilion, too, which only deepened the
perplexity. Given the opportunity to re-activate Expo traditions of
techno-industrial grandiosity, it was a spectacular miss-launch,
containing almost nothing in the way of monumental hardware. The content
fell into two broad categories: video-based immersive special effects
(highly-appreciated by kids), and vanilla-domestic applications of space
technology, on the approximate model of NASA’s lamentable “we’re the guys
who brought you the non-stick frying-pan” PR campaign. Anybody hoping for
soul-crushing cyclopean military-analog launch vehicles and the acrid
stink of rocket fuel had clearly wandered into the wrong century.
Contemporary international etiquette prevailed, and according to that, the
business of blazing into orbit is far too crude – even
primitive — to be vigorously publicized.
So even in China, at least in its 2010 window to the world, off-planet
aspirations were stirred together indissolubly with childhood fantasy. The
unmistakable insinuation, harmonized with the commanding heights of world
opinion, was that such hard SF dreams had been outgrown. Rather than
staring through a window into the spark-torched clangorous workshop of
China’s emerging national space program, Western visitors found their
gazes bounced from mirrored glass, into a ‘postmodern’ vacuum of collapsed
expectations, amongst the eroded ruins of Apollo. Four decades of
Occidental space failure smiled politely back.
You lost it, didn’t you? (A quick trip across the Huangpu to the
drearily mundane USA Pavilion sufficed for unambiguous confirmation.)
The dismissal of a human off-planet future as a childish dream has plenty
to build upon. The world’s publishers and book shops have long
accommodated their classification systems to the sleazy ambiguity of the
‘science fiction / fantasy genre’, in which futurism smears into oneirism,
and the vestiges of hard SF
programs (telecommunication satellites, moon bases, space
elevators…) are scattered amongst fantastic elves-in-space mythologies
(from Star Wars to Avatar). Competitive prophecies decay
into polemical allegories, making statements about anything and everything
except the shape of the future.
Of all the cultural ripples from the truncation of the Apollo-era space
trajectory, none is more telling than the rising popularity of ‘Moon Hoax’
conspiracy theorizing. Not satisfied with the prospective evacuation of the heavens,
the moon hoaxers began systematically editing space-travelers out of the
past, beginning with the lunar landings. Whilst clearly maddening to space
technologists, American patriots, NASA supporters, and sensible types in
general, this form of ‘denialism’ is not only historically comprehensible,
but even inevitable. If nobody seriously contests the fact that Columbus
reached the New World, it is at least in part because what was then
started kept happening. Something began, and continued. Nothing comparable
can be said about the process of lunar colonization, and that, in itself,
is a provocative oddity. When forecasts are remembered, abandoned outcomes
can be expected to mess up memories.
Old-school space enthusiast Sylvia Engdahl
finds
the whole situation pathological, and subjects it to a kind of jerry-built
psychoanalysis. With defiant optimism, she attributes “the present hiatus
in space travel” to xenophobic trauma:
She elaborates:
Engdahl hints at a modern variant of the Orpheus myth, and captures
something of arresting significance. We were told not to look back from
orbit, but of course, we did, and what we saw pulled us back down. The
damnation of our extraterrestrial out-leap gave birth to a lucid
environmentalist vision — the earth seen from space. That is why Tom
Murphy
turns
to the Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America, John
Michael Greer, to
transmute
elegiac disillusionment into acceptance:
Disillusionment is simply awakening from childish things, the druids tell
us. This is a point Murphy is keen to endorse: “space fantasies can
prevent us from tackling mundane problems.” Intriguingly, his initial step
towards acceptance involves a rectification of false memory, through a
(sane) analog of ‘Moon Hoax’ denial. Surveying his students on their
understanding of recent space history (“since 1980 or so”), he discovered
that no less than 52% thought humans had departed the earth as far as the
moon in that time (385,000 km distant). Only 11% correctly understood that
no manned expedition had escaped Low Earth Orbit (LEO) since the end of
the Apollo program (600 km out). Recent human space activity, at least in
the way it was imagined, had not taken place. It was predominantly a
collective hallucination.
Murphy’s highly-developed style of numerate druidism represents the null
hypothesis in the space settlement debate: perhaps we’re not out there
because there’s no convincing reason to expect anything else.
Extraterrestrial space isn’t a frontier, even a tough one, but rather an
implacably hostile desolation that promises nothing except grief and
waste. There’s some scientific data to be gleaned, and also (although
Murphy doesn’t emphasize this) opportunities for political theatrics.
Other than that, however, there’s nothing beyond LEO worth reaching for.
The neo-druidic starting point is unapologetically down to earth. It
begins
with energy physics, and the remorseless fact that doing just about
anything heats things up. According to Murphy’s calculations, a modest
2.3% global economic growth rate suffices to bring the planetary surface
to the boiling point of water within four centuries, even in the complete
absence of (positive) greenhouse effects. Economic growth is essentially
exponential, and that guarantees that we’re cooked, due to elementary
thermodynamic principles, efficiency limits, and the geophysics of heat
dissipation. Within this big picture, conventional ‘energy crisis’
concerns are no more than complicating details, although Murphy engages
them thoroughly. (He provides a neat summary of his argument, with
internal links,
here.)
From the neo-druidic perspective, the space ‘frontier’ is a horizon of
sheer escapism, attracting those who stubbornly deny the necessity of
limitation (pestilential growth-addicts):
Since plenty of irrepressible growth-mongers
seriously
want
to get out there, Murphy trowels on the discouragement in thick, viscous
layers. Most of the deterrent factors are relatively familiar, but none of
them are frivolous, or easily dismissed. The principal problem is the most
qualitative (and druidic): human adaptation to terrestrial conditions.
This is strikingly illuminated by a consideration of terrestrial
‘frontier’ environments that remain almost entirely unexploited, despite
environmental features that are overwhelmingly more benign than anything
to be found off-planet. When compared to any conceivable space station,
asteroid mining camp, lunar base, or Mars colony, even the most
‘difficult’ places on earth — the seabed, for instance, or the Antarctic —
are characterized by extreme hospitability, with ready access to
breathable air, nutrients, fuels, and other essential resources, a
moderate temperature range, protection from cosmic radiation, and
proximity to existing human settlements. This is to be contrasted with
typical extraterrestrial conditions of hard vacuum, utter exposure,
complete absence of bio-compatible chemistry, and mind-jarring distances.
Murphy touched upon these distances in his survey of student space
ignorance. If earth is represented by a “standard” 30-centimeter globe,
LEO is 1.5 centimeters from the surface, and the moon a full 9 meters
further out. For intuitive purchase upon more expansive space visions,
however, a re-calibration is required.
It makes sense to model the earth as a small apple (8.5 cm in diameter),
because then an astronomical unit (AU, the mean earth-sun distance of
roughly 150 million kilometers, 93 million miles, or 500 light seconds)
shrinks to a kilometer, with the sun represented by a sphere a little over
10 meters in diameter. The moon now lies less than 2.7 meters out from our
toy earth, but Mars is never less than 400 meters away, the nearest
asteroids a kilometer away. The distance to the edge of the planetary
solar system (Neptune) is at least 29 kilometers, and within this spatial
volume (a sphere of roughly 113,400 AU³), less than one part in 27 billion
is anything other than desolate vacuum, with almost all the rest being
solar furnace. On the toy scale, the outer edge of the solar system, and
the Oort cloud, lies 50,000 kilometers from the earth. The distance from
our shriveled apple to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is 277,600 toy
kilometers (or 41.5 trillion real ones).
If space colonization is being construed as an escape from terrestrial
resource constraints, then a pattern of activity needs to be knitted
across these distances, producing — at a minimum — an energy surplus. In a
non-frictional kinetic system, governed almost purely by (macroscopic)
conservation of momentum, the basic currency of space activity is
‘delta-v’, or the transformation of velocity. Delta-v is broadly
proportional to energy expenditure on “small burns”, when fuel consumption
makes a negligible difference to total propelled mass, but when complete
flights or “large burns” are calculated, the math
becomes
nonlinear, since the reduction of fuel payload becomes a critical factor
in the equation (subtracting inertial resistance as it adds motive force).
In practical terms, the prospective off-planet (‘space-faring’) energy
economy consists of the consumption of propellant to move propellant
about, with non-fuel vehicle mass contributing little more than a rounding
error in the calculations.
This double-registry of fuel within the nonlinear equations of “rocket
math” – as payload and propellant – is the key to Murphy’s deep skepticism
about the viability of off-planet energy economics. The fuel resources
strewn within the inner solar system – even assuming their absolute
abundance – cannot be moved around usefully for less energy than they
provide. Jupiter offers the most tantalizing example. This methane-rich
gas giant might be superficially apprehended as an immense cosmic fuel
depot, but even the most generous calculations of delta-v requirements for
a Jupiter ‘tanker-run’ imply energy expenditures at least an order of
magnitude higher than energy obtained – from the ‘scooping’ operation
alone. The inner solar-system is abundant in “stranded resources” that
cannot conceivably be extracted at a cost lower than their value. That, at
least, is the coherent neo-druidic perspective.
…and yet, in the yawning void, where the space settlements were meant to
have been, the stirrings have not ceased. There even seems to be,
unmistakably, a quickening of pace. Chinese ‘Taikonauts’, private (American) ‘NewSpace’ businesses, and ever more advanced
robots
are venturing out beyond the wreckage of dead dreams. Are they heading
anywhere that works, or that even makes sense?
[Next…]
August 15, 2012Lure of the Void (Part 2)
Fascism makes our heads spin, which is unfortunate, because an inability
to gaze unwaveringly into the dominant ‘third way’ model of political
economy (corporate nationalism) makes the history of the last century
unintelligible. For amateur space historians, dropping in briefly on the
Moon Nazis
is simply unavoidable.
SS Sturmbannführer Wernher von Braun, Deputy Associate Administrator for
Planning at NASA Headquarters, Washington DC (1970-2), helps with the
introduction. Technical director of the Nazi rocket program at Peenemünde,
which culminated in the creation of the A-4 (V-2) ballistic missile, von
Braun was brought to America in 1945 as the top prize of Operation
Paperclip. His contribution to US rocket development, through Redstone to
Apollo (and the moon), was central and indispensable. NASA Socialism was
born on the
Dark Side of the Moon. (This probably isn’t the right time to wander too deeply into
Pynchon territory, but, roughly speaking, that’s where we are.)
If fascism sounds unduly harsh, more comfortable terminology lies within
easy reach. ‘Technocracy’ will do fine. The name is less important than
the essentials, which were already clearly formulated in the work of a
previous German immigrant to the United States,
Friedrich List, who devoted an influential book to outlining
The National System of Political Economy (1841). According to
List, the ‘cosmopolitanism’ of mainstream (Smithean) political economy was
insufficiently attentive to the collective national interest. Industrial
development was too important to be surrendered to the interplay of
private economic agents, and should instead be considered a strategic
imperative, within the context of international competition. Only by
leveraging the power of the state to regulate trade, foster modern
industries, and drive the development of critical infrastructure, could a
country hope to advance its interests in the international arena.
Development was war by other means, and sometimes the same ones.
When eagerly embraced by Henry Clay, who connected List’s ideas with the
founding tradition from Alexander Hamilton, these ideas became the basis
of the American System. Economic nationalism was to be pursued along the
threefold path of managed trade (tariffs), state-controlled finance
(central banking), and state-directed infrastructure development
(especially transportation systems). Such policies were already
‘progressive’ or fascist technocratic in that they subordinated
private-cosmopolitan economic interests to national purposes, but this
took place flexibly, without the more recent encrustations of
anti-business class warfare, large-scale entitlement spending, or
Cathedralist cultural policing. Capitalism was to be steered, and even
promoted, rather than milked, deliberately ruined, or replaced. Due to its
patriotic direction, elitism, and affinity with militarization, this
technocratic progressivism could easily be understood as a phenomenon of
‘the right’, or at least (in Walter Russell Mead’s
words) the “Bipartisan Establishment.”
Apollo perfectly exemplified American technocratic progressivism in the
teutonized, neo-Hamiltonian tradition. A small step for a man, and a
substantial leap for mankind, it was a colossal high-jump for the US
Leviathan, marking an unambiguous triumph in the structured competition
with its principal geo-strategic and ideological rival. The Apollo program
wasn’t exactly part of the ballistic missile arms race with the
Soviet Union, but it was close enough to contribute to its symbolic,
mass-psychological, and deterrent purpose. Landing a man on the moon was a
type of overkill, relative to landing a nuke on Moscow, and it expressed a
super-abundant payload-delivery capability that had won a war of messages.
In an article originally published in The American Spectator (November 10,
2010), Iain Murray and Rand Simberg
describe
the moon race as Big Government’s Final Frontier, remarking that:
They conclude:
Whilst it would be pointlessly upsetting to translate this into a call for
the denazification of outer space, it would be equally misleading
to read it as nothing of the kind. Progressive technocracy, in a range of
national flavors, is the only effective space politics the world has ever
seen, and it is still far more likely — in the near-term — to be
modernized than radically supplanted. Space development poses such an
immense collective challenge that it sucks even liberty-oriented
conservatives such as Simberg towards accommodation with the activist,
catalytic, neo-Hamiltonian state. At least initially, there’s simply no
other place where the clanking machinery of Leviathan is more at home.
Popular culture has picked up on this well. Among the
many reasons
for the ecstatic reception to Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) was
appreciation for its ‘realistic’ tonal portrait of practical space
activity. Science and commerce played their parts, but the leading edge
was dominated by quasi-military heavy metal, funded by massive budgets
based on gravely obscure strategic objectives, directed and crewed by
hard, obedient, buzz-cut types who did whatever it took to get things
done. Weapons research trumped all other considerations. Breaking out into
the deep frontier required a rigid, armored-bulkhead seriousness that
civilians would never quite understand.
When suddenly stripped of its Cold War context, the proxy warfaring of the
rocket-state lost coherent motivation, and immediately veered off course
into increasingly ludicrous pseudo-objectives. By the closing years of the
20th century, all pretense of a big push outwards had been dissipated
amongst commoditized LEO satellite maintenance, unconvincing zero-gravity
science projects, ritualistic space-station diplomacy, multicultural
astronaut PR, and even cynical make-work schemes for dangerously competent
ex-Soviet technicians. Clever science continued, based on robot probes and
space telescopes, but none of that even hinted at an impetus towards space
settlement, or even manned spacecraft, and typically advised explicitly
against it. Despite all the very real ‘right stuff’ heroism, putting people in space was a circus act, and perhaps it
always had been.
Whatever else outer space may be, it’s a place where the right goes
schizoid, and the more that it’s thought about, the more jagged the split.
The seemingly straightforward, dynamic-traditional, and extremely
stimulating ‘image’ of the frontier illuminates the point. The
frontier is a space of attenuated formal authority, where entrepreneurial,
‘bottom-up’ processes of social formation and economic endeavor are
cultivated amongst archetypal ‘rugged individualists’, its affinity with
libertarian impulses so tight that it establishes the (‘homesteading’)
model of natural property rights, and yet, equally undeniably, it is a
zone of savage, informal warfare, broken open as a policy decision,
pacified through the unremitting application of force, and developed as a
strategic imperative, in the interest of territorial-political
integration. By fleeing the state, in the direction of the frontier, the
settler or colonist extends the reach of the state towards the frontier,
drawing it outwards, and enhancing its ferocity, or
roughening it. The path of anti-governmental flight confuses
itself with a corresponding expansion, hardening, and re-feralization of
the state, as the cavalry learn from the Indians, in a place without
rules. Then the railroad comes.
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
meets
Starship Troopers.
“A strategy for achieving economic benefit from space must involve both
government and industry, as did the development of the American West,”
argues
Martin Elvis, and no one seriously disagrees. Whenever realism is
prioritized on the extraterrestrial horizon, some variant of
rough-and-dirty technocratic progressivism always waits on the launch-pad,
ready to piggy-back business off-planet on patriotic, Leviathan-funded,
first-stage boosters.
Over-hasty denazification is strictly for earth-bound softies
The neo-Hamiltonian jump-leads work too well to drop. As usual, Simberg
expresses
this best:
Which brings us to ‘NewSpace’…
[Next]
September 6, 2012Lure of the Void (Part 3a)
The material base for a space-faring future is not only stranded in space,
but also stranded in time. Not only are the gravitationally-unlocked
resources from which it would assemble itself strewn across intimidating
immensities of vacant distance, but the threshold where it all begins to
come together – in an autocatalytic extraterrestrial economy – is
separated from the world of present, practical incentives by dread gulfs
of incalculable loss. In a variant of the old joke, if getting off-planet
is the goal, a planet is the absolutely worst place to set out from. “I
can tell you how to get there,” the local helpfully remarked. “But you
shouldn’t start from here.”
Being out there could quickly start to make sense, as long as we were
already there. Experimenting with this perspective-switch makes the
animating impulse clearer. Most tellingly, it exposes how deeply planets
suck, so that merely not being on one is worth almost anything. That’s the
end game, the final strategy, ultimately arranging everything, with
anti-gravity as the key.
Once gravity is perceived as the natural archetype of imprisonment,
keeping you somewhere, whether you want to be there or not, the
terrestrial-economic motivations for off-planet expansion are revealed in
their fundamental spuriousness. The reason to be in space is to be in
space, freed from planetary suckitude, and any benefits to Earth-dwellers
that accrue on the way are mere stepping stones. Off-planet resources
diverted to the surface of the Earth are, in the ultimate spacer scheme,
wasted, or at least strategically sacrificed (since such wastage is almost
certainly required in the interim). In the final analysis, the value of
anything whatsoever is degraded in direct proportion to the gravitational
influences brought to bear upon it, and descent from the heavens is a
fall.
A wider cosmo-developmental view sharpens resolution (although this
requires that Smart’s invaluable
insights
are strictly set aside, and black holes avoided with maximum prejudice).
Smear into fast-forward until the process of extraterrestrial escape has
been substantially accomplished, then freeze the screens. Fleeing gravity
can now be seen as no more than the first step in a more thorough,
antagonistic contestation with gravity and its works. Asteroids and comets
are being pulverized, quarried, or bored into sponges, leaving moons,
planets, and the sun itself as the local problems of interest. Such bodies
are ‘problems’ because they deform space with gravity wells, which trap
resources, but their status as development obstacles can be abstracted
further. These worlds, at least partially isolated from the emerging
deep-space commercium by their own mass, have been shaped by
gravity into approximate spheres, which is to say – from the developmental
perspective – into the very worst shapes that are mathematically
possible, since they minimize the ratio of (reactive) surface to
volume, and thus restrict resource accessibility to the greatest
conceivable extent. Way out there, in deep space and the deep future, the
gathering developmental impulse is to go full
Vogon,
and demolish them completely.
When seen from outside, planets are burial sites, where precious minerals
are interred. By digging through the earth’s mantle, for instance, all the
way down to its interior end, 3,000km beneath the surface, one reaches a
high-pressure iron-nickel deposit over 6,500km in diameter – a
planet-vaulted metal globe roughly 160,000,000,000 cubic kilometers in
size, doped by enough gold and platinum to coat the entire surface of the
earth to a depth of half a meter. To a moderately advanced off-world
civilization, pondering the practicalities of its first planet-scale
demolition, leaving this buried resource trove in place has a
robotic-industrial opportunity cost that can be conservatively estimated
in the region of 1.6 x 10^23 human-level intelligences, a mineral
stockpile sufficient to manufacture a trillion sentient self-replicating
probes for every star in the galaxy. (Even ardent conservationists have to
recognize how tasty this morsel will look.)
Lift-off, then, is merely a precursor to the first serious
plateau of anti-gravity technology, which is oriented towards the more
profoundly productive task of pulling things apart, in order to
convert comparatively inert mass-spheres into volatile clouds of cultural
substance. Assuming a fusion-phase energy infrastructure, this initial
stage of off-world development culminates in the dismantling of the sun,
terminating the absurdly wasteful main-sequence nuclear process, salvaging
its fuel reserves, and thus making the awakened solar-system’s
contribution to the techno-industrial darkening of the galaxy. (Quit
squandering hydrogen, and the lights dim.)
Focus for a few seconds on the economic irritability that arises at the
sight of an oil-well flaring off natural gas, through sheer mindless
incompetence, then glance at the sun. ‘Unsustainable’ doesn’t begin to
capture it. Clearly, this energy machinery is utterly demented, amounting
to an
Azathothic
orgy of spilled photons. The entire apparatus needs to be taken apart,
through extreme solar surgery. Since this project has yet to receive
sustained consideration, however, the specific engineering details can be
safely bracketed for now.
The inexorable logic of techno-industrial efficiency, on its anti-gravity
vector, means that
the only consistent motivation for leaving the earth is to dismantle
the sun
(along with the rest of the solar-system), but that doesn’t play well in
Peoria. Unsurprisingly, therefore, those sensitized to political
realities, media perceptions, and public relations are inclined to
emphasize other things, depicting the earth as a destination for cosmic
bounty or — even more immediately — for juicy tax-funded
pork, rather than as a tricky but highly-rewarding demolition problem.
Conspicuously missing from the public space debate, therefore, is any
frank admission that, “(let’s face it folks) — planets are misallocations
of matter which don’t really work. No one wants to tell you that, but it’s
true. You know that we deeply respect the green movement, but when we get
out there onto the main highway of solar-system redevelopment, and certain
very rigid, very extreme environmentalist attitudes – Gaian survivalism,
terrestrial holism, planetary preservationism, that sort of thing — are
blocking the way forward, well, let me be very clear about this, that
means jobs not being created, businesses not being built, factories
closing down in the asteroid belt, growth foregone. Keeping the earth
together means dollars down the drain – a lot of dollars,
your dollars. There are people, sincere people, good people, who
strongly oppose our plans to deliberately disintegrate the earth. I
understand that, really I do, you know – honestly – I used to feel that
way myself, not so long ago. I, too, wanted to believe that it was
possible to leave this world in one piece, just as it has been for four
billion years now. I, too, thought the old ways were probably best, that
this planet was the place we belonged, that we should – and could — still
find some alternative to pulling it apart. I remember those dreams, really
I do, and I still hold them close to my heart. But, people, they were just
dreams, old and noble dreams, but dreams, and today I’m here to tell you
that we have to wake up. Planets aren’t our friends. They’re speed-bumps
on the road to the future, and we simply can’t afford them anymore. Let’s
back them up digitally, with respect, yes, even with love, and
then let’s get to work…” [Thunderous applause]
Since, during the present stage of extraterrestrial ambition, pandering to
the partisans of cosmic disintegrationism cannot reasonably be conceived
as a sure-fire election winner, it is only to be expected that rhetoric of
this kind has been muted. Yet, in the absence of some such vision, or
consistently extrapolated alignment with anti-gravity, the off-planet
impulse is condemned to arbitrariness, insubstantiality, and insincerity
of expression. Absent an uncompromised sense of something else, why not
stick to this? The result has been, perhaps predictably, a reign of
near-silence
on the topic of extraterrestrial projects, even in regard to its most
limited, immediate, and practically unobjectionable varieties.
If escaping the earth – and gravitational confinement in general — is not
an intelligible end, but only a means, what provides the motivation? It is
into this cramped, awkwardly-deformed crevice of aspiration that NewSpace
must insinuate itself. To speak of ‘insincerity’ might seem unduly harsh –
since there is no reason to suspect conscious deception, or even
carefully-calibrated reservation, when NewSpace advocates outline their
plans. An enveloping structure of implausibility nevertheless announces
itself in every project that is advanced, manifested through the
incommensurability between the scale of the undertaking and the rewards
that supposedly incentivize it.
Space tourism,
asteroid mining,
micro-gravity experimentation and manufacturing… really? Is it genuinely imaginable that these paltry goals finally or
sufficiently motivate a prolonged struggle against the terrestrial
gravity-trap, rather than serving as fragile pretexts or
rationalizations for the pursuit of far more compelling, yet
hazy, unarticulated, or even completely unsuspected objectives?
When this question is extended backwards, and outwards, it gathers force.
Stretch it back to the moon, and out to Mars, and the inference becomes
increasingly irresistible. None of these ‘missions’ made, or make, any
sense whatsoever, except insofar as they abbreviate some wider,
undisclosed impulse. Space activity is not the means to a targeted end,
but the end to be advanced by a sequence of missions, whose specific
content is therefore derivative, and devoid of intrinsic significance.
Once the inarticulate outward momentum decays, leaving nothing but an
arbitrary extraterrestrial destination to represent it, the naked
absurdity that is exposed rapidly extinguishes the last, flickering embers
of popular motivation. Four decades of explicit
lunar nihilism
attest abundantly to that.
Whilst the partial privatization of space activity (‘NewSpace’) creatively
displaces the problem of purpose, it does not radically dispel it. To some
degree, NewSpace substitutes the economic motivations of disparate private
operators for the political justification of a concentrated public
bureaucracy, and by doing so it relieves the pressure to maintain
coherent, communicable, and consensual objectives. Space ambitions are
freed to enter the fragmented, competitive terrain of idiosyncrasy,
variety, experimentation, and even personally-financed frivolity. It might
even be thought that seriousness becomes optional.
When examined more doggedly, however, it is clear that the basic problem
persists. The terrestrial gravity-well produces a split between the
surface of the earth, and ‘orbit’ (or beyond), and private capital is no
less severely divided by this schism than Rocket-State ‘public’ hardware.
Whilst convertible temporarily into forms of inert, stored value, capital
is an essentially modern phenomenon, born in industrial revolution, and
typically defined by the diversion of immediate consumption into
‘roundabout’ production, which is to say: machinery. It is reproduced, or
accumulated, by circulating through machines, or apparatus, and it is upon
this that the gravity-well compels a decision: is NewSpace capital to be
invested, unambiguously, in space?
A serious space program is, fundamentally and irreducibly, a process or
terrestrial evacuation. It requires the consistent relocation (or
de-location) of enterprise, resources, and productive capabilities from
the earth into space, at least until the threshold of extraterrestrial
autocatalysis is reached, at which point a break has been achieved, and an
autonomous off-planet economy established. Whatever the opportunities for
obfuscation (which are probably considerable), the basic
decision remains unaffected. The accumulation of a terrestrial
fortune is not at all the same, and is in fact almost certainly
economically inconsistent, with the sustained investment in an off-planet
industrial infrastructure. Either stuff is being shifted into
space, irrevocably, or not.
[moon cake break]
September 29, 2012Lure of the Void (Part 3b)
The peculiarities of the ‘space race’ have yet to be fully unfolded.
Through its extraordinary formality, reducing extraterrestrial ambitions
to a binary, international competition to put the first man on the moon,
it seems – retrospectively – to owe more to the culture and history of
organized sports than to technological and economic accomplishments. There
would, by definition, be a winner and a loser, which is to say a Boolean
decision, conventional and indisputable. Then it would be over. Perhaps it
was seen to be pointing at something further, but in fact the moon was a
finishing line.
Within a broad geo-strategic context, the space race was a symptom of
thermonuclear stand-off. A modern history of warfare that had descended
inexorably from a restrained game of princes to unleashed total war,
amongst ideologically-mobilized peoples, targeting their basic
institutions, industrial infrastructures, and even demographic
root-stocks, had consummated itself – virtually – in the MAD potential for
swift, reciprocal extermination. Under these circumstances, a regressive
sublimation was called for, relaying conflict through chivalric
representatives – even Homeric heroes – who competed on behalf of the
super-lethal populations they appeased. The flight of an astronaut
symbolized antagonism, substituting for a nuclear strike. In this sense,
victory in the space race was a thinly-disguised advance payment on the
conclusion of the Cold War.
This sublimation is only half of the story, however, because a double
displacement took place. Whilst the space race substituted a formal
(chivalric) outcome for a military result, it also marginalized the
long-envisaged prospect of informal space colonization, replacing it with
a predominantly conventional (or socio-political) objective. The price of
unambiguous symbolic triumph was a ‘triumph’ that relapsed into the
real ambiguity of (mere) symbolism, with reality-denying,
postmodernist, ‘moon hoax’ temptations already rising. When nothing is won
except winning itself, it could scarcely be otherwise. A champion is not a
settler, or anything close to one.
What is this real ambiguity? It begins on the frontier, with a series of
questions that reaches beyond the meaning of the space race, and into the
identity of America. As a country settled within the modern epoch, and
thus exhaustively determined by the dynamics of colonialism, America has
been condensed from a frontier.
In extended parenthesis, it is worth noting explicitly that the
continent’s aboriginal population was not yet America, but something
earlier, and other, encountered on the frontier. The idea of a ‘Native
American’ is an exercise in historical misdirection, when it is not merely
a thoughtless oxymoron. This is not to suggest that these populations were
unable to become American, as many did, once America had begun in
the modern period. By innovating distinctive modes of secession, they were
even — in certain cases — able to become radically American. A reservation
casino in institutional flight from the IRS is vastly more American than
the Federal Reserve, in a sense that will (hopefully) become evident.
The foundation of America was a flight into the frontier, extending a
trajectory of escape into a perpetually receding space, or open horizon —
the future made geography, and only subsequently a political territory.
This original, informal, and inherently obscure space project is as old as
America itself – exactly as old. As Frederick Jackson Turner had already
noted in 1893, for America an open frontier is an existential necessity,
which is to say: the basic condition of American existence. Once the
frontier closes, borders take over, exceptionality withers into
insubstantial rhetoric (or worse, its neoconservative facsimile) and
necrosis begins.
In this respect, America cannot be sustained as a state with a space
program. It requires an open horizon, extended beyond the earth if
necessary, sufficient to support a prolongation of its constitutive
colonial process. Only on and out of this frontier does America
have a future, although ‘the USA’ could (more) comfortably persist without
it. That is why, beneath, alongside, and beyond the space race, the
frontier ‘myth’ has been spontaneously extended to extraterrestrial vistas
considered as an essentially American prospect. (NASA and its
works are quite incidental to this, at best.)
Since this claim invites accusations of gratuitous controversy, it is
worth re-visiting it, at a more languid pace. Even after re-emphasizing
that America is not the same as – and is indeed almost the
precise opposite of – the USA, obvious objections present
themselves. Is not the Russian space program the world’s most economically
plausible? Is not the upward curve of recent Chinese space activity vastly
more exuberant? Hasn’t the United Nations claimed the heavens on behalf of
a common humanity? What, other than cultural-historical accident, and the
unwarranted arrogance stemming from it, could imaginably make ‘an
essentially American prospect’ of outer space?
The counter-point to all of these objections is colonialism,
understood through its radical, exceptional, American lineage. Colonialism
of this ultimate variety consolidates itself from the frontier, and passes
through revolutionary thresholds of a very specific type: wars of
independence, or secession (rather than comprehensive regime changes) that
are pro-colonial (rather than anti-colonial) in nature. The
colony, as colony, breaks away, and in doing so creates a new society.
Successful examples of such events are extremely rare – even singular, or
exceptional. There is America, and then there are ‘lost causes’,
with considerable (and increasing) overlap between them.
What has any of this to do with outer space, beyond impressionistic
analogy? Gravity cements the connection. Dividing the surface of the earth
and extraterrestrial space is an effective difference, or practical
problem, that can be quite precisely quantified in technological terms
(fuel to deliverable payload ratios), and summarized economically. For
purposes of comparison, transporting freight across the Pacific costs
US$4/kg (by air), or US$0.16/kg by ocean-bound container vessel (US$3,500
per TEU, or 21,600 kg). To lift 1 kg of cargo into Low Earth Orbit (LEO),
in stark contrast, costs over US$4,000 (it was over US$10,000 by Space
Shuttle). Call it the Rift: an immense structural re-supply
problem, incentivizing economic self-sufficiency with overwhelming force.
Each kilogram of extraterrestrial product has saved US$4,000 before
further calculations get started. Out in space, the Rift is the bottom
line: a cold, anti-umbilical reality.
Whatever the historic colonial impetus to the American way –
separation and social re-foundation – is reinforced by orders of magnitude
in LEO and beyond. This is an environment that might have been
precision-engineered for revolutionary colonialism, as science fiction
writers have long recognized. On the flip side lies a more obviously
explanatory conclusion: Because developments beyond the Rift are
inherently uncontrollable, there is no readily discernible motivation for
terrestrial political-economic agencies to fund the emergence of
off-planet societies that are on an irresistible conveyor-belt to
independence, whilst voraciously consuming resources, opening an avenue of
escape, and ultimately laying the void foundations for a competitor
civilization of a radically unprecedented, and thus ominously
unpredictable kind.
It follows clearly that the status quo politics of space
colonization are almost fully expressed by
space colonization not happening. When understood in relation to
the eclipsed undercurrent of the frontier analogy — social fission through
revolutionary colonialism or wars of independence — the ‘failure’ of
large-scale space colonization projects to emerge begins to look like
something else entirely: an eminently rational determination on the part
of the world’s most powerful territorial states to inhibit the development
of socio-technological potentials characterized by an ‘American’
(revolutionary colonial) tendency.
Of course, in a world that grown familiar with interchangeable
anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist declarations, the terms of this
(Froude / Moldbug / Donald) analysis are initially disconcerting. When
detached from the confusions and conflations of a disturbed periphery,
however, the pattern is compelling. Colonists are, by their very nature,
in flight from the metropolis. It is less than a single step from this
acknowledgement to the recognition that they tend to independence of
action, social fission, and political disintegration, following trends
that imperialists – with equal inevitability — seek to curtail. Since
colonization, strictly understood, is cultural and demographic
transplantation, it only acquires its sense of expansion when
restrained under imperial auspices. Whilst colonial and
rebellious are not even close to synonymous expressions, they are
nevertheless mutually attracted, in near-direct proportion to the rift
that separates colony from metropolis. A colonial venture is a rebellion
of the most practical and productive kind, either re-routing a rebellion
from time into space, or completing itself in a rebellion that transforms
an expedition into an escape. Since the triumph of imperialism over
colonialism beginning in the second half of the 19th century, it is only
in (and as) America that this system of relations has persisted,
tenuously, and in large measure occulted by the rise of an imperial state.
It is helpful, then, to differentiate in principle (with minimal moral
excitability) between a colonial space project, oriented to
extraterrestrial settlement, and an imperial space program, or
policy, designed to ensure terrestrial control over off-planet
development, maintain political integrity, and thus secure returns on
investment across the Rift. From the perspective of the territorial state,
an (imperial) space program that extracted economic value from beyond
earth’s gravity well would be ideal, but this is an ambition unsupported
by the vaguest flickerings of historical precedent (and obstructed by at
least four orders of magnitude of yawning economic gulf). Second best, and
quite satisfactory, is the simple prevention of colonial space projects,
substituting political space theater as an expensive (but low-risk and
affordable) alternative. The occasional man on the moon poses no great
threat to the order of the world, so long as we “bring him safely back to
earth.”
America was an escape from the Old World, and this definition suffices to
describe what it still is – insofar as it still is – as well as what it
can be, all that it can be, and what any escape from the new old world –
if accurately named, would also be. When outlined by the shadows of dark
enlightenment, America is the problem that the USA was designed to solve,
the door that the USA closes, the proper name for a society born from
flight.
As Nietzsche never exactly said:
Am I understood? America against the stars and stripes …
October 26, 2012Rosetta’s Stone
(Links and video
here)
ADDED: The
sonic
dimension. Harpoon
failure.
ADDED:
Slingshot targeting.
November 12, 2014Quote note (#272)
Frederick Jackson Turner, from his
essay
The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893):
From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of
profound importance. The works of travelers along each frontier from
colonial days onward describe certain common traits, and these traits
have, while softening down, still persisted as survivals in the place of
their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded. The
result is that, to the frontier, the American intellect owes its
striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with
acuteness and inquisitiveness, that practical, inventive turn of mind,
quick to find expedients, that masterful grasp of material things,
lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends, that
restless, nervous energy, that dominant individualism, working for good
and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with
freedom — these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out
elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier. […] Since the days
when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World,
America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the
United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which
has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. He would be a
rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American
life has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and,
unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy
will continually demand a wider field for its exercise. But never again
will such gifts of free land offer themselves. […] For a moment, at the
frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant.
There is not tabula rasa. The stubborn American
environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its
conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and yet,
in spite of environment, and in spite of custom, each frontier did
indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the
bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older
society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to
its lessons, have accompanied the frontier.
Recollected with reference to the prospects of
seasteading
and space colonization, and their continuity with a distinctive Anglophone
cultural impetus to resolve political tension through dissociation in
space (with Exit as its key).
August 14, 2016Quit
Foseti
writes:
There’s a lot of hand-wringing in these parts of the interwebz about
what reactionaries should do.
However, if I were to suggest a plan, I’d say tell the truth.
His (slightly) more detailed suggestions are also commendable. The
Cathedral provokes reaction by mandating fantasy over reality, and there
is no doubt much that could be
done
about
that.
There is a sub-question about all this, however, which is scarcely less
insistent: What do ‘we’ really want?
More
cybernetics, argues the determinedly non-reactionary Aretae. Of course,
Outside in agrees. Social and technical feedback machinery is
reality’s (only?) friend, but what does the Cathedral care about any of
that? It’s winning a war of religion. Compulsory anti-realism is the
reigning spirit of the age.
The only way to get more tight-feedback under current conditions is by
splitting, in every sense. That is the overwhelming practical imperative:
Flee, break up, withdraw, and evade. Pursue every path of autonomization,
fissional federalism, political disintegration, secession, exodus, and
concealment. Route around the Cathedral’s educational, media, and
financial apparatus in each and every way possible. Prep, go Galt, go
crypto-digital, expatriate, retreat into the hills, go underground,
seastead, build black markets, whatever works, but
get the hell out.
Truth-telling already presupposes an escape from the empire of neo-puritan
dreams. ‘We’ need to throw open the exit gates, wherever we find them, so
the wreck can go under without us. Reaction begins with the proposition
that nothing can or should be done to save it. Quit bailing. It’s done.
The sooner it sinks the better, so that something else can begin.
More than anything we can say, practical exit is the crucial signal. The
only pressure that matters comes from that. To find ways out, is to let
the Outside in.
February 28, 2013Exit Test
What can Exit do? It
looks
as if France is going to provide an important demonstration:
France has become a defeatist nation.
A striking indicator of this attitude is the massive emigration that
the country has witnessed over the last decade, with nearly 2 million
French citizens choosing to leave their country and take their chances
in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the United States and other
locales. The last such collective exodus from France came during the
French Revolution, when a large part of the aristocracy left to await
(futilely) the king’s return. Today’s migration isn’t politically
motivated, however; it’s economic.
This departing population consists disproportionately of young people —
70% of the migrants are under 40 — and advanced-degree holders, who do
their studies in France but offer their skills elsewhere. The migrants,
discouraged by the economy’s comparatively low salaries and persistently
high unemployment — currently at 10.9% — have only grown in number since
Socialist Francois Hollande became president.
The young and enterprising in France soon realize that elsewhere — in
London, say — obstacles to success are fewer and opportunities greater.
The British capital is now France’s sixth-largest city, with 200,000 to
400,000 emigres.
The exile rolls also include hundreds of thousands of French retirees,
presumably well-off, who are spending at least part of their golden
years in other countries. Tired of France’s high cost of living, they
seek out more welcoming environments.
My beloved country, in other words, has been losing not only its
dynamic and intelligent young people but also older people with some
money. I’m not sure that this social model can work over the long
term.
It will be extremely interesting to see.
February 24, 2014Exit notes (#1)
Some notable attempts to dial back the NRx commitment to
exit over voice, as inherited from Moldbug, have been
seen
recently. (I think NBS
was crucial in advancing this argument, but I couldn’t find his post
immediately — I’ll link to it if someone nudges me helpfully.) It’s
undoubtedly a central discussion throughout the reactosphere at the
moment.
Some preliminary thought-gathering on the topic:
(1) Exit is a scale-free concept. It can be applied rigorously to extreme
cases of sociopolitical separation, from secession to extraterrestrial
escapes. Yet these radical examples do not define it. It’s essence is the
commercial relation, which necessarily involves a non-transaction option.
Exit means: Take it or leave it (but don’t haggle). It is thus,
at whatever scale of expression, the concrete social implementation of
freedom as an operational principle.
(2) As a philosophical stance, Exit is anti-dialectical. That is to say,
it is the insistence of an option against argument, especially refusing
the idea of necessary political discussion (a notion which, if
accepted, guarantees progression to the left).
Let’s spatialize our disagreement is an alternative to resolution
in time. Conversations can be prisons. No one is owed a hearing.
(3) In regards to cultural cladistics, it can scarcely be denied that Exit
has a Protestant lineage. Its theological associations are intense, and
stimulating.
(4) Exit asymmetries have been by far the most decisive generators of
spontaneous anti-socialist ideology. The iconic meaning of the Berlin Wall
needs no further elucidation. The implicit irony is that
people flee towards Exit, and if this is only
possible virtually, it metamorphoses automatically into delegitimation of
the inhibitory regime. (Socialism is Exit-suppressive by definition.)
(5) Exit is an option, which does not require execution for its
effectiveness. The case for Exit is not an argument for flight, but a
(non-dialectical) defense of the opportunity for flight. Where Exit most
fully flourishes, it is employed the least.
(6) Exit is the alternative to voice. It is defended with extremity in
order to mute voice with comparable extremity. To moderate the case for
Exit is implicitly to make a case for voice. (Those who cannot exit a deal
will predictably demand to haggle over it.)
(7) Exit is the primary Social Darwinian weapon. To blunt it is to welcome
entropy to your hearth.
June 24, 2014Age of Exit
Mark Lutter’s
forecast
for the general landscape of 21st century politics leaves plenty to argue
with, from all sides, and even vociferously, but the basic trend-line he
projects is persuasive (at least to this blog):
… the costs of exit are going down. Increased mobility and smaller
political units will allow people increasingly to vote with their feet.
The old political questions of which ideological empire controls which
territory will give way to a choose-your-own-governance meta system. […]
Thus, to be successful, political units will have to attract
residents—that is, to providing better services at lower cost. Increased
competition among smaller political units will spur innovation, leading
to new forms of governance. Many will fail. But the successful will be
replicated, outcompeting more stagnant forms. Singapore, Dubai, Hong
Kong, Switzerland, and Lichtenstein show the beginnings of such success.
[…] Not all the governments will be libertarian. In fact, most probably
will not be. Some will experiment with higher levels of redistribution;
others with petty tyrannies, zealous zoning and even social exclusion.
However, competition will eliminate unsuccessful models. Ultimately, the
meta-rules that are emerging are decidedly libertarian in flavor, as
choice will govern the survival of political units.
The left won’t like this, for obvious reasons. It is dissolidarity
incarnate, with an egalitarian-democratic promise that is minimal, at
best. I’m not sure whether the criticism has developed beyond indignant
scoffing to calmly-formulated theoretical antagonism yet, but it surely
will.
The right’s objections are likely to be more diverse. Most pointedly, from
the perspective here, there is room for deep skepticism about the
harshness of the selection mechanisms Lutter is counting upon. Driving a
state into insolvency, and liquidation, is no easy thing. For those,
especially, who would be delighted to see effective inter-state Darwinism
cropping micro-states for adaptive excellence, cold realism concerning the
capabilities of states to forestall such outcomes is essential. If
widespread conflict-free high-functionality futures sound too good to be
true, they probably are.
April 17, 2015Exit Pressure
It’s impossible to tell anything from
this
story about the effectiveness of exercising an Exit Option. It
should be expected, anyway, that the option itself does the work, even if
pulling the trigger has to contribute to the general credibility of
virtual exodus.
As an exemplary case, however, it would be hard to beat. From the
statement by Preston Byrne, of eris:
If [the Communications Data
Bill] is passed into law, we are likely to see a mass exodus of tech
companies and financial services firms alike from the United Kingdom. We
are happy to lead the charge. […] In keeping with our promise in January
to leave the country if the Conservatives were returned to power with
this policy on their legislative agenda, we have promptly ordered all of
our staff to depart from the United Kingdom and to conduct all future
development work abroad. […] Additionally, with immediate effect, we
have moved our corporate headquarters to New York City, where
open-source cryptography is firmly established as protected speech
pursuant to the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United
States, until such time as we can be certain that the relevant
provisions of the Communications Data Bill will be stricken from it
(otherwise, we will reincorporate in America and continue our business
here).
(To add a “Go eris” at this point could be reasonably criticized
for redundancy.)
May 29, 2015Exit Options
Everyone will notice them when they’ve
gone.
All recent policy decisions by the reigning political-economic structure
are intelligible as a mandatory bubble. If you didn’t think
quietly ‘sitting it out’ was already the exercise of an exit option, the
necessary lesson will be increasingly hard to ignore. Refusing to invest
everything into this lunacy is ceasing to be a permissible social posture.
We’ve already reached the stage where merely seeking to preserve a pot of
retirement savings has been officially recoded as something close to
right-wing guerrilla warfare.
Anybody with anything at all is now in the position where they are faced
with an aggressive binary dilemma. Either unreserved
collaboration with the final phase gamble of the existing order —
amounting ultimately to the all-in bet that politics has no ontological
limits, so that any dysfunction is soluble in a sufficient exertion of
will — or a dissident skepticism about this dominant assertion,
practically instantiated by ever more desperate attempts at withdrawal
(persecuted with ever greater fanaticism as acts of sabotage).
There will be massive confusion among the destitution. Explaining why
capital preservation is being persecuted as dissent would provide the
scaffolding for a counter-narrative that will certainly, eventually, be
needed.
ADDED: The basic point is this, if it is conceded to Keynes that
refusing to invest in industrial production is anti-social, then,
as a matter of realistic political necessity,
any insane evil that the powers-that-be come up with gets defined as
‘industrial production’. Let go of gold — the archaic economic exit option — as we did, and
anything at all that we’re told to sink all we have into is green-lighted.
The stream was crossed without enough people noticing. Now the fascism we
chose reaps its consequences. It isn’t going to be pretty.
June 6, 2015Exit Foundations
Having lost count of the number of times the demand for
exit guarantees has come up as an objection to the
Patchworked-Neocameral model, it seems worthwhile to reproduce Moldbug’s
most directly on-point, pre-emptive response to the question. The question
being:
What is to stop a regime, once it is entirely unshackled from all
domestic political constraint (i.e. Neocameralized), from extinguishing
the exit options of its residents?
As a prefatory note: Like the Misesian praxeology from which it is
cladistically descended, the Moldbuggian System is a
transcendental political philosophy, which is to say that it
deals with ultimate or unsurpassable conditions. You have reached the
transcendental when there is no higher tribunal, or court of appeal. This
is the socio-cosmic buffers. If you don’t like what you’re seeing here,
there’s still no point looking anywhere else, because
this
is all you’re going to get:
To live on a Patchwork patch, you have to sign a bilateral contract
with the realm. You promise to be a good boy and behave yourself. The
realm promises to treat you fairly. There is an inherent asymmetry in
this agreement, because you have no enforcement mechanism against the
realm (just as you have no enforcement mechanism against the United
States). However, a realm’s compliance with its customer-service
agreements is sure to be a matter of rather intense attention among
residents and prospective residents. And thus among shareholders as
well.
This is terrible, of course. But again, the mechanism we rely on to
prevent it is no implausible deus ex machina, no Indian rope-trick from
the age of Voltaire, but the sound engineering principle of the profit
motive. A realm that pulls this kind of crap cannot be trusted by anyone
ever again. It is not even safe to visit. Tourism disappears. The
potential real-estate bid from immigrants disappears. And, while your
residents are indeed stuck, they are also remarkably sullen and display
no great interest in slaving for you. Which is a more valuable patch of
real estate, today: South Korea, or North Korea? Yet before the war, the
North was more industrialized and the South was more rural. Such are the
profits of converting an entire country into a giant Gulag.
Is that all? Yes — that’s all. Beyond the rational economic incentives of
the Sovereign Corporation, controlled within a Patchwork-environment (of
competition for human resources), there is nothing to which an appeal can
be made. The end.
June 11, 2015Geopolitical Arbitrage
Stross:
… things will get very ugly in London when the Square
Mile and investment banking sector ups and decamps for Frankfurt,
leaving the service sector and multiethnic urban poor behind.
The specifics of this prediction are nutty, if only because mainland
Europe is going down the tubes much faster than the UK, but the
abstract anxiety is spot on. The globalization of the right is
entirely about geopolitical arbitrage (while that of the left is about
homogenizing global governance). All the critical trends point towards the
exacerbation of the ‘problem’. The 21st century is the epoch of
fragmentation — unlike anything seen since the early modern period —
shifting power to the footloose, and away from megapolitical systems of
territorial dominion. Being left behind is the rising threat, and
we can confidently expect to see it consolidating as the subtext of all
leftist grievance. You can’t just leave. Watch.
The obstacles to geopolitical arbitrage — i.e. spatial Exit pressure — are
security constraints. It requires defensible off-shore bases (and
Frankfurt most certainly isn’t going to provide one). Eyes need to be
fixed firmly on secessionary dynamics (fragmentation), techno-commercial
decentralization of hard security, crypto-anonymization, artificial
intelligence, and the emergence of capital outposts in the Western Pacific
region. More exotic factors include opportunities for radical exodus
(undersea, Antarctic, and off-planet), facilitated by
territorial production (artificial islands). The machinery of
capture needs to keep all of these escape routes firmly
suppressed in order to perpetuate itself. That simply isn’t going to
happen.
Capital is learning faster than its adversaries, and has done so since it
initially became self-propelling, roughly half a millennium ago. It’s
allergic to socialism (obviously), and tends to flee places where
socialist influence is substantially greater than zero. Unless caged
definitively, eventually it breaks out. Over the next few decades —
despite ever deeper encryption — it should become unmistakable which way
that’s going.
January 18, 2016Flea Politics
One time-tested
way
to shed parasites is to take a dip:
Foxes will actually take a stick when they have fleas and get into the
water slowly. They let the water raise up to their necks and hold the
stick up in the air. As the water goes higher up their face, the fleas
will climb higher. Eventually the fox will just have it’s nose out of
the water while holding the stick. The fleas will climb up the stick and
the fox will sink under the water and let the flea infested stick float
down the river to the flea’s watery grave.
As Balaji Srinivasan
remarked
(on Ultimate
Exit): “… but the best part is this: the people who think this is weird,
the people who sneer at the frontier, who hate technology — they won’t
follow you out there.”
Did you really think it was going to be that
easy?
Space de-colonization is already
preparing
to queer-up the escape trajectory:
As venture capitalist space entrepreneurs and aerospace contractors
compete to profit from space exploration, we’re running up against
increasingly conflicting visions for human futures in outer space.
Narratives of military tactical dominance alongside “NewSpace” ventures
like asteroid mining projects call for the defense, privatization, and
commodification of space and other worlds, framing space as a
resource-rich “frontier” to be “settled” in what amounts to a new era of
colonization … […] we have to stake a claim in the territory of space
programs now. We need to add our voices, perspectives, plans, our
cares. There isn’t time to wait. We can’t sit back and
say: Space isn’t urgently important, we should be looking at problems
here on Earth. First of all, much of space science is looking at and
working on problems here on Earth (from conflict, migration, and drought
to climate change, deforestation, and more). Secondly, SpaceX, Boeing,
and others are preparing new craft and taking humans into space
now — and human technology is leaving the solar system.
Perhaps it’s not happening on the timeline you would prefer, but it’s
already happening and has been for decades, and they’re
pretty much doing it without us … So what’s next?
We — all us queer, trans, disabled, black, native, etc. folk and
more — we need to fight back, take back, de-colonize and re-imagine our
futures in outer space, we need to
pop up where they least expect us.
(Emphasis in original.)
Leaving those ‘cares’ behind is going to take a colder exit.
ADDED: From
VXXC on twitter — “In space no
one can hear you whine.”
January 29, 2016Sentences (#55)
Collapse
traps
people:
You have to know when to leave.
Most don’t, and won’t, of course.
(Treat this as a promissory note on an installment of provocative
skepticism viz the ‘eventually its necessary to stand and fight, or even
take things back’ proposition that haunts NRx like a chain-rattling ghost,
now more than ever, in the shadow of the impending Trumpenreich.
Zombie-fighting-types can assume that the tacit XS stance (“flee you
fools”) is at least as infuriating as they would expect it to be.)
May 24, 2016Ultimate Exit NY
Some chatter on various web channels about
this
event, which should be a great opportunity for exploring. To be clear
about my participation (which has been open to confusion) — it consists of
an intervention out of Cyberspace. (No chance of drinking dates in NY just
yet, unfortunately.)
This is a nonlinear point, from my perspective, since the rapid
development of telepresence is of obvious internal consequence to the
recent intensification of Exit-oriented and neo-secessionist discussion.
(Balaji S. Srinivasan brought this out very clearly in his October 2013
talk
on the subject, from which this event takes its title.) Exit in depth —
i.e. into the crypto-thickened ‘Net — is at the very least an important
complement to more traditional notions of territorial flight. It also
sustains a better purchase on the commercial principle which provides Exit
with its fundamentalal model, and which can easily get lost among
secessionist excitement and visions of technologically re-sculpted
geographical space.
Some
background
to the event (and hints of choppy waters). Argument is, of course, the
other side of the nonlinearity (a micro-enactment of the inclusive
Democratic ideal), so it will be interesting to see whether on this
occasion the controversy can remain productive in its own terms, rather
than ‘merely’ stacking up the incentives to get Out.
December 6, 2014Into the Dark
As the Occident subsides into an ocean of shadow, the FBI is
noticing:
“We’re seeing more and more cases where we believe significant evidence
resides on a phone or a laptop, but we can’t crack the password,” FBI
Director Jim Comey said during a speech in Washington. “If this becomes
the norm … justice may be denied.” […] Specifically, Comey said he is
“deeply concerned” about what’s known as “going dark” — operating
systems being developed by companies such as Apple and Google that
automatically encrypt information on their devices. And that means even
the companies themselves won’t be able to unlock phones, laptops and
other devices so law enforcement can access emails, photos or other
evidence that could be crucial to a case …
Comey, however, didn’t place full blame with companies like Apple and
Google for creating devices with such encryption. They were “responding
to what they perceive is a market demand” from the general public, which
has grown “mistrustful of government” in the wake of Edward Snowden’s
disclosures of secret government surveillance. […] Encryption “is a
marketing pitch,” Comey said. “But it will have very serious
consequences for law enforcement and
national security
agencies at all levels. Sophisticated criminals will come to count on
these means of evading detection. It’s the equivalent of a closet that
can’t be opened. A safe that can’t be cracked. And my question is, at
what cost?”
A process of Exit-in-place is underway, automatically, and it’s not easy
to imagine how it could be stopped. With message management disintegrating
on
one side, and the
public sphere eroding into dark nets on the other, it must seem to the
State in the age of Internet runaway that the walls are closing in.
October 24, 2014Buy Out
This
(via Mangan) is such naked
precious metals propaganda — and yet it’s so right.
… markets are behaving exactly as one would expect at the end of a
major economic era. That is, markets are totally divorced from the
reality of what is going on both economically and geopolitically.
Markets are now in a manic phase, driven by false hope and momentum. […]
It clearly helps that many economic figures are manipulated and
therefore totally inaccurate. If we add to this the most massive money
creation in history, we can be certain that these are not normal times.
[…] We are experiencing the beginning of a hyperinflationary period,
with hyperinflation, so far, being noticed only in financial markets,
property markets, and other key assets such as art and classic cars. […]
And currencies will continue their decline to zero. Continued money
printing will guarantee this. And we have to remember that the major
currencies don’t have far to go since they are down between 97 and 99
percent in the last hundred years. As currencies start the next major
phase of decline we will experience hyperinflation in all parts of the
economy. This hyperinflation will be happening in most major countries.
…
It’s not just that the analysis is solidly grounded in an obdurate realism
(this is the raw economics of Gnon), it’s also that:
(a) Gold is the traditional medium of economic-regime exit, and
therefore
(b) This discourse is immediately anti-politics (or resistance).
It says: Get out! That’s not a message to be easily decrypted for
representational content, because it’s a war cry.
How does a hyperinflationary collapse begin? With a flight to gold.
There’s going to be hyperinflation — flee to gold. It’s a
circuit. The Cathedral’s economic authorities are entirely justified in
considering such messaging aggressive (even ‘terroristic’), in the
specific mode of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people listened, they’d
bring everything crashing down.
It’s no less crucial to understand that, by inversion, the voice of
central monetary authority is equally incapable of isolating the
communication of objective information from the continuous flow of
psychological operations. When the state monetary apparatus speaks, it
exercises effective power. It commands. The sole value of fiat currency
lies in a popular habit of obedience, which the state money power
systematically sustains. There is no other usage of macro-economic signs.
‘Buy gold’ is a counter-revolutionary instruction to participate in the
destruction of the state money system.
(… and now we have Bitcoin too.)
August 22, 2014
CHAPTER TWO - WHAT IS GOING ON?
Go Scotland!
Tribal politics excites the autobiographical impulse, which I’ll pander to
for just a moment (without pretending to any particular excitement). My
immediate ancestry is a quarter Scottish, and — here’s the thing — those
grandparents were Wallaces. Seriously, they were these guys:
… but it’s my remaining three-quarters of mongrelized Brit that is leading
this post to its destination. In particular, the 37.5% of English blood
coursing through my veins is the part murmuring most enthusiastically for
Scotland to vote ‘Yes!’ to departure this week.
Scotland is hugely
over-represented in the UK Parliament, shifting the country’s politics
substantially to the Left. While Scottish exit wouldn’t
necessarily
ensure a permanent conservative government — electoral democracy simply
doesn’t work like that — it’s hard to argue that the result could be
anything other than an ideological rebound of sorts, with the rump UK’s
entire political spectrum shunting right. Since such an outcome would
almost certainly prolong the viability of liberal democracy, perhaps even
worldwide (due to contagion effects), it would be unseemly for any
neoreactionary to get adrenalized about it. England would nevertheless
undergo a minor restoration, conceivably broadening the political
imagination in a modestly positive way.
Every increment of dynamic Anglo capitalism adds resources that will
eventually be of great use — especially now, with public ledger
crypto-commerce coming online. It is a grave error to become so fixated
upon the death of the demotic power structure that positive
techno-commercial advances are simply written off, or worse, derided as
life-support apparatus for the enemy. Even a minor Anglo-capitalist
revitalization would produce some deep value (as early, or
creative destruction-phase Thatcherism did, amid its manifold failures).
Far more significantly, Scottish secession would mark a turning of the
tide, with great exemplary potential. Beginning its new life as a hotbed
of socialist lunacy, an independent Scotland would be forced — very
rapidly — to grow up, which of course means moving sharply to the right.
The more theatrical the transitional social crisis, the more thoroughly
leftism-in-power would be humiliated. As everyone now knows, such lessons
in the essentially incompetent nature of leftist social administration
never have any more than a limited effect, since humans are congenitally
stupid creatures who find profound learning next-to-impossible. Despite
this, they are the only remotely effective lessons history offers. However
pitiful mankind’s political-economic education may be, it is owed entirely
to the disaster spectacle of leftism in power. A fresh lesson — the more
brutally calamitous the better — should always be welcomed unambiguously.
If wild-eyed socialists were to drive Scotland over a cliff, they would be
presenting a precious gift to the world thereby. (Sadly, in the opinion of
this blog, the probability of such an eventuality is relatively low —
Scottish canniness can be expected to re-assert itself with remarkable
speed once the Sassenach dupes are no longer subsidizing its
disappearance.)
The secession of Scotland, from the perspective of the rump UK, is already
a (relative) purge of leftist entropy. With the return of an independent
Scotland to minimally-functional, and thus moderately right-corrected
government, this purge becomes absolute. A quantum of leftist insanity
will have been extinguished, since its condition of existence was a
relation of political dependency. No one resorts to beggary when
abandoned, solitary, upon a desert island. Compulsory self-reliance
mandates adjustment to the right (whether preceded by collapse or not).
An independent Scotland would work, most probably quite quickly. It then
lights a beacon of disintegration, first across the Anglosphere, and
subsequently more widely. The time of fragmentation will have come. The
present world epoch of democracy will then have arrived at its final stage
— promoting the break-up of the states it has built (and with them,
eventually, itself). Scotland could light the touch-paper. It would save
everybody some time if it did.
ADDED: What’s the point of independence?
ADDED:
As Bremmer explained, Scottish independence would “tilt the entire U.K.
political spectrum to the right.” That would boost the odds of a
conservative majority winning in 2015. […] … “If Scotland votes ‘yes,’
down the road would come the ultimate irony,” Bremmer said. “The U.K.
would be more likely to pull out of the E.U., while Scotland clamors to
get in.”
September 8, 2014Last Days of the UK?
Probably not, but the chance isn’t
negligible. There’s a poll tracker for the final phase
here.
This
historical overview of independence plebiscites is encouraging.
My favorite
article
on the topic so far is too odd too easily classify. Quality hedginess from
Sailer, and (ratcheting down a few notches) David Miles
at
the Huffington Post.
Reason does the
right
thing. Steve Forbes
makes
an even stronger case for a break, while trying to do the opposite.
Here‘s some deeply retarded propaganda, that happens to be pointing in the
right direction. Round-up
coverage
from The Scotsman.
As should be expected, various flavors of hostility and condescension to
secession from the (smug–through-to-foaming) Left. (We splittists will take
whatever
we can get.) Paul Krugman, who has never been right about anything, is
against
independence, which should settle the question conclusively.
XS has
already run up the
saltire (or something).
George Friedman isn’t thrilled about the modern nation
state
passing through the gates of disintegration, but he’s probably right in
suggesting
that’s the ultimate issue at stake: “I think that however the vote goes,
unless the nationalists are surprised by an overwhelming defeat, the genie
is out of the bottle, and not merely in Britain. The referendum will
re-legitimize questions that have caused much strife throughout the
European continent for centuries, including the 31-year war of the 20th
century that left 80 million dead.”
ADDED: The Bitcoin connection. (+
here.)
ADDED: The two
Scotlands.
ADDED: “Under the SNP, the expression ‘no true Scotsman‘ may change its meaning from a logical fallacy into a
real question of identity.”
ADDED: Occidental Dissent links an excellent RT video.
ADDED: “A
friendly separation
is possible, though — and in the longer term, for the best. My guess is
that Scotland will, after all, vote against independence tomorrow, cowed
by the risks and uncertainties and by the sudden force of
international opinion
telling them to think again. If so, it will be a shame. A Scotland that
stays in the union reluctantly will be of little use to itself or anybody
else. Alongside childish simplicity on fiscal and monetary policy, peevish
resentment of the English has been a persistent aspect of the independence
campaign. The cure for both is to grow up and move on.”
ADDED: Scotland carries the flag of global secession.
September 17, 2014Dependency Culture …
… proves yet again that it’s a reliable vote
winner.
September 19, 2014Crack up
“Why oh why don’t those damned crackers just
leave?”
If we’re already entering the ejection phase of neo-secessionism, it has
to be a good thing, right?
December 9, 2014Pan-Secessionism
Here’s the All Nations Party vision of the American future:
Some
background, and a
discussion
with Keith Preston on the topic.
The party-political strategy is clearly questionable, but it deserves more
engagement than I’ve noticed in NRx circles. A path to
Patchwork
has to be something — and this is something.
(AnarchoAbsurdist is all
over this at the moment, for e.g.
linking
to another ANP video.)
ADDED: A vehement critique of Preston from the far left that is well worth a
read.
September 7, 2015Brexit
Making the
case
for Brexit water-tight:
If the English vote to leave the EU, the Scots will vote to leave the
UK. There will then be no Britain. Meanwhile, the shock of Brexit to a
continent already staggering under many crises could spell the beginning
of the end of the European Union.
ADDED: It’s a trend.
February 22, 2016Brexit Open Thread
For discussion of UK independence, UK fragmentation, EU disintegration,
Pan-secessionism, and catabolic geopolitics in general.
Here‘s Geert Wilders widening the conversation.
(Content coming later, probably in a subsequent post.)
ADDED: There’s a lot of gravy. One little
drip.
Bye: “Prime Minister David Cameron, who had led the campaign to keep Britain
in the EU, said he would resign by October and left it to his successor to
decide when to invoke Article 50, which triggers a departure from European
Union.”
ADDED:
It just keeps getting better:
ADDED: Open thread over at
Briggs’ place. (“Britain Free. France, Texas Next?”)
June 24, 2016Bluexit
Simply,
yes:
Don’t organize. Pack. […] Not literally, of course. Not even the good
people of Canada should have to stomach a mass migration of moping
American liberals mumbling, “Live locally … make art.” What I mean is
that it’s time for blue states and cities to effectively abandon the
American national enterprise, as it is currently constituted. Call it
the New Federalism. Or Virtual Secession. Or Conscious Uncoupling —
though that’s already been used. Or maybe Bluexit.
March 9, 2017
CHAPTER THREE - IDENTITY, INDIVIDUALISM AND INDEPENDENCE
Identity Hunger
Handle has an excellent
post
up on this, referencing Nydwracu, who has made a momentous
project out of it.
It’s huge, and old, and quite impossible to summarize persuasively. It’s
also impossible to avoid, especially for the Outer Right.
Steve Sailer told a joke that I’m going to mangle. A monstrous alien
invasion assails the earth, and people have to decide how to respond. The
conservatives say, “What’s there to think about? We have to get together
to defeat this thing.” Liberals respond: “Wait! They probably have good
reasons to hate us. It must be something we’ve done. Until we work out
what that is, we should prostrate ourselves before their grievances.”
Finally the libertarians pipe up: “Do they believe in free markets?”
An obvious quibble arises with the libertarian punch-line:
if only. Libertarians have predominantly demonstrated an
enthusiasm for alien invasion that is totally detached from any
market-oriented qualification. As their argument goes —
the alien invasion is the free market. (We’ll
need to return to this, indirectly.)
The appetite for identity seems to be
hard-wired in the approximate manner of language, or religion. You have to
have one (or several) but instinct doesn’t provide it ready made. That’s
why identity corresponds to a hunger. It’s something people need,
instinctively, with an intensity that is difficult to exaggerate.
Symbolically-satiable needs are political rocket fuel.
Providing an expedient plug for the aching identity socket is as close to
politics-in-a-nutshell as anything is going to get. At the core of every
ideology is a determination of the model identity — sect, class, race,
gender, sexual-orientation … — and mass implementation of this
‘consciousness’ is already consummate triumph. After psychological
latching onto the relevant ‘thede’ takes place, nothing except tactics
remains.
Reaction seeks to defend the dying thedes among its
own people — which is already a suggestive repetition.
Neoreaction goes meta, in a world in which the proscription of certain
thedes almost wholly defines concerted enemy action. For one reasonable
construction of the reactionary mainstream (*ahem*), this is already to
have arrived at a natural stopping point.
We want our thedes back. Despite the evident obstacles, or
obstacle (the Cathedral) in its path, this approach plays into the grain
of human nature, and thus tends — understandably — to scare those it wants
to scare. If it begins to work, it will face a serious fight.
Outside in, whose mission is awkwardness, is determined to
complicate things. Even the most resolute thedens will probably welcome
the first appendix, which draws attention to the peculiar introduction
of truly morbid punitive identifications. There’s no reason to
think this is new — Nietzsche denounced Christianity for doing it — but it
rises to unmistakable prominence during the decadence of modernity.
Primary identifications, for select — targeted — groups, cease to be
positive thedes, except insofar as these have become radically
negativized. What ‘one’ is, primarily, if not shielded by credible
victimage, is some postmodern variant of the sinner (racist,
cisgendered, oppressor). Such is the hunger for identity, that even these
toxic formations of imposed psychic auto-destruction are
embraced, creating a species of cringing guilt-consumed
sacrificial animals, penned within the contours of ‘our’ old thedes.
Redemption is promised to those who most fully resign themselves to their
own identitarian toxicity, who thus attain a perverse superiority over
those insufficiently convinced of the need for salvation through
self-abolition. “We really, really deserve to die” beats out a
weak “We really deserve to die,” and anybody who still thinks that it’s OK
to live is simply lost. (Only sinners are included in
this arms-race, and the Cathedral tells us clearly who they are.)
An additional complication will be far less digestible, which is precisely
why I would like to align it with the Outer Right. Perhaps
escaping this structure of captivity cannot possibly take a reverse path,
and a heading into dis-identifications, artificial identities, and
identitarian short-circuits is ‘our’ real destiny. The identity-envy of
the right — however deeply-rooted in an indisputable history of relentless
Cathedralist aggression — cannot ever be anything but a weakness, given
what we know about the political gradient of modern time. The fact it
knows we want to be something, and what it is we want to be, is
the alpha and omega of the Cathedral’s political competence. It knows what
its enemies would be, if they could be what they want to be. It does not
take a deep immersion in
Sunzi to realize the strategic hopelessness of that situation.
I want the Cathedral to be obliterated by monsters, which it does not
recognize, understand, or possess antibodies against. There is an
idiosyncratic element to that, admittedly. I identify far more with the
East India Company that the United Kingdom, with the hybrid Singlosphere
than the British people, with clubs and cults than nations and creeds,
with Yog Sothoth than my ancestral religion, and with
Pythia than the
Human Security System. I think true cosmopolitans — such as the
adventurers of late 19th century Shanghai (both English and Chinese) — are
superior to the populist rabble from which nationalism draws its recruits.
That’s just me.
What isn’t just me, is what the Cathedral knows how to beat. That, I
strongly suspect, at least in the large majority of cases, is you.
September 25, 2013Capitalism vs the Bourgeoisie
John Gray
makes
some telling observations about the debilitating practical paradoxes of
the late-20th century right.
Summing up Thatcher’s outlook, [Charles]
Moore writes of her “unusual mindset, which was both conservative and
revolutionary.” It is a shrewd observation, but Thatcher’s reactionary
nostalgia and revolutionary dynamism had something in common: the sturdy
individualism to which she looked back was as much a fantasy as the
renewed bourgeois life she projected into the future.
Once ‘sturdy individualism’ is dismissed as a fantasy, a horror story of
some kind is the only imaginable outcome. If people are really too
pathetic to take responsibility for their lives, what else could we
possibly expect?
It has surely to be granted that anybody
useless enough to be inadequate to the basics of their own survival, is
scarcely going to exhibit the altruistic surplus value required to
effectively take care of anybody else. Maybe God will make good the
deficit, or — to plunge fully into feel-good superstition — ‘society’? The
ultimate implication of Gray’s argument is that humans aren’t fit to live.
(Which isn’t to say that he’s wrong.)
The future belongs to frontier people. If no significant fraction of the
human species is any longer capable of being that, then it’s time for an
evolutionary search for something that is. Don’t expect it to be pretty.
August 24, 2013INTJ
Everybody seems to be mad for
this
stuff,
understandably.
The craving to be told what you are will never die, until you do. (That’s
why it’s called me-me-memetics.)
As for the wretched cases who can’t quite claw their way into the INTJ
master-race, there are numerous consolation positions available among the
NPCs.
Here’s the obvious role model (but only
because you begged):
Still my favorite:
February 6, 2015Corrosive Individualism?
Everyone’s seen
this
argument a million times: “So what’s the problem with libertarianism? The
problem is that if you put two groups one against another, the one who is
best able to work together will overcome the group of individualists.”
An example would be nice. Here are the major modern wars of necessity (or
existential conflicts) the Anglosphere has been involved in (‘win’ here
meaning ‘came out on the winning side’ — conniving to get others to do
most of the dying is an Anglo-tradition in itself):
English Civil War (1642-1651) — Protestant individualists win.
War of the Spanish Succession (17012-1714) — Protestant individualists
win.
Seven Years War (1756-1763) — Protestant individualists win.
American War of Independence (1775-1783) — Protestant individualists
win.
Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) — Protestant individualists win.
American Civil War (1861-1865) — Protestant individualists win.
First World War (1914-1918) — Anglophone individualists win.
Second World War (1939-1945) — Anglophone individualists win.
Cold War (1947-1989) — Anglophone individualists win.
Have I missed any big ones? I’m simply not seeing the “history is the
graveyard of failed individualist societies” picture that seems to be
consolidating itself as a central alt-right myth.
This isn’t a moral thing. I get (without great sympathy) the “organically
cohesive societies should win” mantra. If there’s any evidence at
all that it’s a judgment endorsed by Gnon, feel free to bring the relevant
facts to the comment thread.
ADDED: “It’s complicated.” — You’re saying that now?
November 5, 2015
The Atomization Trap
“Hands up everyone who hates atomization.” That isn’t a call for surrender
(at least overtly), but merely an informal poll.
Now try it differently:
“Hands up everyone who hates atomization, but this time
without looking around.” Was the decision-process – perhaps
ironically – a little slower this time? It’s worth thinking about that.
Taking a shortcut that bypasses the social process might be expected to
speed things up. Yet on the other hand – introducing the delay – comes the
hazy recognition: If you make the call privately, you’re already
complicit. A minor formal re-organization of the question transforms it
insidiously.
What do you think of atomization, speaking atomistically? It
becomes a strange, or self-referential loop. Modern history has been like
that.
First, though, a few terminological preliminaries. An ‘atom’ is
etymologically indistinct from an ‘individual.’ At the root, the words are
almost perfectly interchangeable. Neither, relative to the other, carries
any special semantic charge. So if ‘atomization’ sounds like a metaphor,
it really isn’t. There’s nothing essentially derivative about the word’s
sociological application. If it appears to be a borrowing from physics,
that might be due to any number of confusions, but not to a displacement
from an original or natural terrain. Atoms and societies belong together
primordially, though in tension. That’s what being a social animal –
rather than a fully ‘eusocial’ one (like an ant, or a mole-rat) – already
indicates.
Individuals are hard to find. Nowhere are they simply and reliably
given, least of all to themselves. They require historical work,
and ultimately fabrication, even to float them as functional
approximations. A process is involved. That’s why the word ‘atomization’
is less prone to dupery than ‘atom’ itself is. Individuality is nothing
outside a destiny (but this is to get ahead of ourselves).
It’s difficult to know where to begin. (Did Athens sentence Socrates to
death for being a social atomizer?) Individualism is stereotypically WEIRD
(western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic), and so tends to
lead into the labyrinth of comparative ethnography. It has been unevenly
distributed, in roughly the same way that modernity has been. Since this
is already to say almost everything on the topic, it merits some
dismantling.
The work of Walter Russell Mead provides a useful relay station. The
historical questions he has engaged – which concern nothing less than
the outcome of the world – have been embedded within an
intellectual framework shaped by special attention to modern providential
Christianity. What has been the source of the ‘manifest destiny’ which has
placed the keys to global mastery in the hands of a progressively
distilled social project, Protestant, then Puritan, then Yankee? If not
exactly or straightforwardly ‘God’ (he is too subtle for that), it is at
least something that the lineage of Reform Christianity has tapped with
unique effectiveness. Protestantism sealed a pact with historical destiny
– to all appearances defining a specifically modern global teleology – by
consistently winning. Individualization of conscience –
atomization – was made fate.
Six years after Special Providence (2001) came
God and Gold, which reinforced the Anglo-American and
capitalistic threads of the narrative. The boundaries between
socio-economic and religious history were strategically melted, in a way
pioneered by Max Weber, Werner Sombart, and – more critically – by
numerous Catholic thinkers who have identified, and continue to identify,
the essence of modernity as a hostile religious power. Eugene Michael
Jones is Walter Russell Mead on the other side of the mirror. The story
each is telling transforms without significant distortion into that of the
other, once chilled below the threshold of moral agitation. Whatever it
was that happened to Western Christianity in the Renaissance unleashed
capitalism upon the world.
It is possible to be still cruder without sacrificing much reality. When
considered as rigid designations, Atomization, Protestantism, Capitalism,
and Modernity name exactly the same thing. In the domain of public policy
(and beyond it), privatization addresses the same directory.
While any particular variant of implicit or explicit Protestantism has its
distinctive theological (or atheological) features, just as any stage of
capitalistic industrialization has its concrete characteristics, these
serve as distractions more than as hand-holds in the big picture. The only
truly big picture is splitting. The Reformation was not only a
break, but still more importantly a normalization of breaking, an
initially informal, but increasingly rigorized, protocol for social
disintegration. The ultimate solution it offered in regard to all social
questions was not argumentation, but exit. Chronic fission was installed
as the core of historical process. Fundamentally, that is what atomization
means.
Protestantism – Real Abstract Protestantism – which is ever more
likely to identify itself as post-Christian, post-theistic, and
post-Everything Else, is a self-propelling machine for incomprehensibly
prolonged social disintegration, and everyone knows it.
Atomization has become an autonomous, inhuman agency, or at least,
something ever more autonomous, and ever more inhuman. It can only
liquidate everything you’ve ever cared about, by its very nature, so – of
course – no one likes it. Catholicism, socialism, and nationalism have
sought, in succession, coalition, or mutual competition, to rally the
shards of violated community against it. The long string of defeat that
ensued has been a rich source of cultural and political mythology. Because
there is really no choice but to resist, battle has always been rejoined,
but without any serious sign of any reversal of fortune.
Under current conditions, atomization serves – uniquely – as an
inexhaustible tube of reactionary glue. Profound aversion to the process
is the sole common denominator of our contemporary cultural opposition,
stretching from traditionalist Catholicism to alt-right ethno-nationalism.
“Whatever our preferred glue, can’t we at least agree that things have
become unglued – and are ever less glued?” That seems very far from an
unreasonable aspiration. After all, if coalition building is the goal,
what – imaginably – could provide a better rallying point than the very
principle of social integrity, even if this is invoked purely, and
negatively, by way of an anathematization directed at its fatal historic
foe? Atomization, in this regard, brings people together, at least
conversationally, though this works best when the conversation doesn’t get
very deep.
Scarcely anybody wants to be atomized (they say). Perhaps they read Michel
Houellebecq’s 1998 novel Atomised (or
Elementary Particles), and nod along to it. How could one not? If
that’s where it ended, it would be hard to see the problem, or how there
ever came to be a problem, but it doesn’t end there, or anywhere close,
because atomization makes a mockery of words. Atomization was never good
at parties, unsurprisingly. It’s unpopular to the point of essence.
There’s the Puritan thing, and the Ayn Rand thing, and the nerd thing, and
the trigger for Asperger’s jokes – if that’s actually a separate thing –
and no doubt innumerable further social disabilities, each alone
disqualifying, if receiving a ‘like’ in some collective medium is the
goal, because nobody likes it, as we’ve heard (for half a millennium
already). But what we’ve heard, and what we’ve seen, have been two very
different things.
Atomization never tried to sell itself. Instead, it came free, with
everything else that was sold. It was the formal implication of dissent,
first of all, of methodical skepticism, or critical inquiry, which
presupposed a bracketing of authority that proved irreversible, and then –
equally implicit originally – the frame of the contractual relation, and
every subsequent innovation in the realm of the private deal (there would
be many, and we have scarcely started). “So what do
you think (or want)?” That was quite enough. No articulate
enthusiasm for atomization was ever necessary. The sorcery of revealed
preference has done all the work, and there, too, we have scarcely
started.
Atomization may have few friends, but it has no shortage of formidable
allies. Even when people are readily persuaded that atomization is
undesirable, they ultimately want to decide for themselves, and the more
so as they think that it matters. Insofar as atomization has become a
true horror, it compels an intimate cognitive and moral relation
with itself. No one who glimpses what it is can delegate relevant
conclusions to any higher authority. Thus it wins. Every Catholic of
intellectual seriousness has seen this, for centuries. Socialists have
too, for decades. The moment of ethno-nationalist revelation cannot long
be delayed. Under modern conditions, every authoritative moral community
is held hostage to private decision, even when it is apparently affirmed,
and especially when such affirmation is most vehemently asserted. (The
most excitable elements within the world of Islam see this arriving, and
are conspicuously unhappy about the fact.)
Substantially, if only notionally, freedom of conscience might tend to
collectivity, but formally it locks-in individualism ever more tightly. It
defies the authority of community at the very moment it offers explicit
endorsement, by making community an urgent matter of private decision, and
– at the very peak of its purported sacredness – of
shopping. Religious traditionalists see themselves mirrored in
whole-food markets, and are appalled, when not darkly amused. “Birkenstock
Conservatives” was Rod Dreher’s grimly ironic self-identification.
Anti-consumerism becomes a consumer preference, the public cause a private
enthusiasm. Intensification of collectivist sentiment only tightens the
monkey-trap. It gets worse.
American history – at the global frontier of atomization – is thickly
speckled with elective communities. From the Puritan religious
communities of the early colonial period, through to the ‘hippy’ communes
of the previous century, and beyond, experiments in communal living under
the auspices of radicalized private conscience have sought to ameliorate
atomization in the way most consistent with its historical destiny. Such
experiments reliably fail, which helps to crank the process forward, but
that is not the main thing. What matters most about all of these co-ops,
communes, and cults is the semi-formal contractual option that
frames them. From the moment of their initiation – or even their
conception – they confirm a sovereign atomization, and its reconstruction
of the social world on the model of a menu. Dreher’s much-discussed
‘Benedict Option’ is no exception to this. There is no withdrawal from the
course of modernity, ‘back’ into community, that does not reinforce the
pattern of dissent, schism, and exit from which atomization continually
replenishes its momentum. As private conscience directs itself towards
escape from the privatization of conscience, it regenerates that which it
flees, ever more deeply within itself. Individuation, considered
impersonally, likes it when you run.
As is well understood, ‘atoms’ are not atoms, and ‘elements’ are not
elements. Elementary particles – if they exist at all – are at least two
(deep) levels further down. Human individuals are certainly no less
decomposable. Marvin Minsky’s ‘society of mind’ is but one vivid
indication of how historical sociology might tilt into the sub-atomic
realm. Particle accelerators demonstrate that shattering entities down to
the smallest attainable pieces is a technological problem. The same holds
in the social realm, though naturally with very different technologies.
To dismiss individuals as metaphysical figments, therefore, would be the
most futile of diversions. Atomization has no constraining metaphysics,
whether in particle physics or in the dynamic anthropological,
socio-historical process. If it promises at times to tell you what you
really are, such whispers will eventually cease, or come to deride
themselves, or simply be forgotten. Protestantism, it has to be
remembered, is only masked, momentarily, as a religion. What it is
underneath, and enduringly, is a way of breaking things.
After so much has already been torn apart, with so many monstrosities
spawned, it is no doubt exhausting to be told that while almost everything
remains to be built, no less still waits to be broken. Atomization has
already gone too far, we are incessantly told. If so, the future will be
hard. There can be no realistic doubt that it will be extremely divided.
The dynamo driving things tends irresistibly in that direction. Try to
split, and it whirls faster.
“Hands up everyone who hates atomization.” No, that isn’t a question
anymore. It would be a call for surrender, if surrender mattered, but it
doesn’t, as we’ve seen. Keep on fighting it, by all means. It likes that.
Against Universalism
There’s a philosophical objection to any refusal of universalism that will
be familiar from other uses (the denunciation of relativism, most
typically). It requires only one step:
Isn’t the denial of the universal itself a universalist claim?
It’s a piece of malignant dialectics because it demands that we agree. We
don’t, and won’t ever, agree. Agreement is the worst thing that could
happen. Merely assent to its necessity, and global communism, or some
close analog, is the implicit conclusion.
If there is a universal truth, it belongs only to Gnon, and Gnon is a dark
(occulted) God. Traditional theists will be at least strongly inclined to
disagree — and that is excellent. We disagree already, and we
have scarcely begun.
There is no ‘good life for man’ (in general) — or if there is we know
nothing of it, or not enough. Even those persuaded that they do, on the
contrary, know what such a life should be, promote its universality only
at the expense of being denied the opportunity to pursue it. If we need to
agree on the broad contours of such a model for human existence, then
reaching agreement will precede it — and ‘reaching agreement’ is politics.
Some much wider world acquires a veto over the way of life you select, or
accept, or inherit (the details need not detain us). We have seen how that
works. Global communism is the inevitable destination.
The alternative to agreement is schism. Secession, geopolitical
disintegration, fragmentation, splitting — disagreement escapes dialectics
and separates in space. Anti-universalism, concretely, is not a
philosophical position but an effectively defensible assertion of
diversity. From the perspective of the universal (which belongs only to
Gnon, and never to man), it is an experiment. The degree to which it
believes in itself is of no concern that matters to anything beyond
itself. It is not answerable to anything but Gnon. What anyone, anywhere,
thinks about it counts for nothing. If it fails, it dies,
which should mean nothing to you. If you are compelled to care
about someone else’s experiment, then a schism is missing. Of course, you
are free to tell it that you think it will fail, if it is listening, but
there is absolutely no need to reach agreement on the question. This is
what, in the end, non-communism means.
Non-universalism is hygiene. It is practical avoidance of other people’s
stupid shit. There is no higher principle in political philosophy. Every
attempt to install an alternative, and impose a universal, reverts to
dialectics, communization, global evangelism, and totalitarian politics.
This is being said here now, because NRx is horribly bad at it, and
degenerates into a clash of universalisms, as into an instinctive
equilibrium. There are even those who confidently propose an ‘NRx
solution’ for the world. Nothing could be more absurd. The world — as a
whole — is an entropy bin. The most profoundly degraded communism is its
only possible ‘universal consensus’. (Everyone knows this, when they
permit themselves to think.)
All order is local — which is to say
the negation of the universal. That is merely to re-state the
second law of thermodynamics, which ‘we’ generally profess to accept. The
only thing that could ever be universally and equally distributed is
noise.
Kill the universalism in your soul and you are immediately (objectively) a
neoreactionary. Protect it, and you are an obstacle to the escape of
differences. That is communism — whether you recognize it, or not.
March 18, 2016Against Universalism II
Preliminary throat-clearing (as in part
one): In
its most rigorous construction, ‘universalism’ is robust under conditions
of rational argument (i.e. evidence-based logico-mathematical criticism).
Mathematical theorems, in particular [sic], are universal truths. Any
assertions that can be constructed to a comparable level of formal rigor
(and ultimately mechanization) can lay claim to the same status.
However, with the slightest departure from this — rigidly algorithmic —
criterion, controversy rapidly begins. This is not the place and time to
argue the case for transcendental philosophy (within which praxeology in
included), but such a case could be made. Ditto strictly proceduralized
empirical science. All of this is a digression.
The question of universalism as it concerns us here is not a matter of
meta-mathematics, epistemology, or the philosophy of science. It is rather
directed at the political scope of argument. Is it mandatory to
demand that argument, according to the highest principles of (logical)
cognitive compulsion, be imposed globally? Does the quality of argument —
however exalted — require its unrestricted application across space and
time? It is the affirmative response to this question that
defines universalism in its ideological sense. Pure Jacobinism, of course,
answers yes. There is a universal duty to compel submission to
the truth. This is the secular form of evangelical salvationism.
The contrary suggestion, here defended, is that — under real global
conditions — universalism is a catastrophic mistake. The social scope of
rational discussion is itself strictly bounded, and attempts to extend it
(coercively) beyond such limits are politically disastrous.
Laissez-faire envelops the sphere of imperative rationality, and
respects its practical contour. Stupidity does not need to be hunted down
and exterminated. All historical evidence indicates that it cannot be.
If the universal triumph of reason is an impractical goal, democratic
globalism is exposed as a preposterous error. Minimizing the voice of
stupidity is the realistic — and already extremely challenging —
alternative. Rare enclaves of rigorously self-critical realism have as
their primary obligation the self-protection of their (evidently
precarious) particularity. In the wider world, fanatical ignorance and
grotesque cognitive malformation rage rampantly. Borders, filters, tests,
and selection mechanisms of all kinds provide the only defenses against
it.
The universalist (Jacobin) model is always a conversation.
You have to join together first, simply to talk, and after that reason
will prevail. That’s the path of the Zeitgeist — Hegelianism at its most
arcane, expedient progressivism at more common levels of popularity — with
its twin-stroke motor of aggressive proselytization and mass embrace.
“Invade the world, invite the world” is the Sailer
formula
(quasi-random link). Amalgamate, then elevate (in the direction
of ascending rationality). This isn’t a (theoretically convincing) claim
about the unique structure of mathematical proof, it’s a (factually
trashed) claim about the global uniformity of human brains. The
‘universality’ it invokes is that of convergence upon the authority of
reason. In other words, it’s a bizarre progressive myth that all
self-protective sanity seeks to maximally distance itself from.
People learn, but only very rarely through sophisticated argument, or its
‘cunning‘ socio-political avatars. They learn because they fail badly, and it
hurts. ‘Mankind’ is a progressive myth, incapable of learning anything.
When real cultures learn, it is because they have been locked in intimate
particularity, such that the consequences of their own cognitive processes
impact intensely upon them. Anything that separates an individual, or a
group, from the results of its own thoughts, is an apparatus of
anti-learning. Progressive universalism is precisely this.
Dis-amalgamation — isolation — is the way to learn. It’s how speciation
happens, long before learning becomes neurological. Individuation (at
whatever scale) establishes the foundation for trade, communication, and
intellectual exchange. Micro-states commercialize. Macro-states decay into
political resource allocation, and entropic sludge. Protect your own patch
if you want to have anything to talk about.
There’s going to be a lot of talk about ‘universalism’ rolling in:
It’s a suicidal ideology in its death-spasm phase, but it won’t die
quietly.
ADDED:
If the West could still do imperialism, that would be one thing, but it
can’t (and can’t even stop doing the opposite).
April 28, 2016Independence
The philosophical antonym to ‘universality‘ is ‘particularity’. Its broader, ideological antonym is something
closer to independence.
This isn’t a word greatly emphasized by NRx up to this point, or — for
that matter — one figuring prominently in contemporary discussions of any
kind. That’s strange, because it orchestrates an extraordinary set of
conceptual connections.
Independence is a rough synonym for sovereignty, to begin with.
The profound association between these terms bears quite extreme
analytical pressure. The sovereign is that instance capable of independent
decision. An independent state is indistinguishable from a sovereign one,
and to impugn its real sovereignty is to question its effective
independence. Secession is a process of independence. A (Moldbuggian)
Patchwork is a network of independent geopolitical entities. All relevant
trends to geopolitical fragmentation are independence-oriented. Each
executed Exit option (even on a shopping expedition) is an
implicit declaration of independence, at least in miniature. (The
relations between independence and connectivity are
subtle and complex.)
Remaining (for a moment) in the narrowest NRx channel, the entire
passivism discussion is independence related. Protest (‘activism’) is
disdained on account of its fundamental dependency (upon sympathetic
political toleration). No social process genuinely directed towards
independence would fall within the scope of this criticism. (The ‘Benedict
Option’ is one obvious
example.) ‘Build something’ epitomizes independence process.
Cannot the entire range of contentions over the individualism /
collectivism dyad be recast in terms of independence? Dependency exists on
a spectrum, but the defining attitude towards it tends to polarization. Is
dependence to be embraced, or configured as a problem to be worked
against? This blog is highly tempted to project the Left / Right or
‘principal political’ dimension along the axis these distinct responses
define. The Left is enthused by inter-dependency, and (to a
greater or lesser extent) accepts comparative independence, while
for the Right this attitudinal system is exactly reversed. (The most
fundamental tensions within the reactosphere are clearly related to this
articulation.)
One inevitable point of contention — honed over decades of objection to
libertarianism — is captured by the question:
Are not children essentially dependents? Yes, of course they are,
but is growing up anything other than a process of independence? From one
perspective, a family can be interpreted as a model of inter-dependence
(without obvious inaccuracy). Yet, from another, a family is an
independence-production unit, both in its comparative autonomy in respect
to the wider society, and as a child-rearing matrix. Families are loci of
independence struggle (to which the Left response is:
They shouldn’t have to be). Dependency culture is the Left
heartland.
Independence and autonomy are very closely related terms. All discussions
of autonomy, and even of automation, click quite neatly onto this
template, but this is a point exceeding the ambitions of the present post.
Abstraction, too, is a topic the tantalizingly overlaps independence.
Whether cognitive independence
entirely accommodates intelligence optimization is also a
question for another occasion.
NRx, XS tentatively proposes, is
a political philosophy oriented to the promotion of independence.
(Much pushback is, naturally, expected.)
May 3, 2016
Independence Games
North Korea’s nuclear test on September 3 was registered as a rare
literal geopolitical earthquake. Some public uncertainty persists about
the scale and significance of the tremor. It has been reported in a
range of magnitudes from 6.1 to 6.3 (or even higher), on the logarithmic
Richter Scale. An event of this size suggests an explosion of several
hundred kilotons of TNT, and is consistent with the detonation of a
thermonuclear device. North Korean confirmation of exactly this
occurrence has been received with unprecedented seriousness.
Nuclear non-proliferation is more idea than reality. Its only substance
is a comparative sluggishness when estimated against the benchmark of
some generally unstated nightmare scenario. According to such
counter-factual consideration, nuclear weapons might
have been more widespread than they are by now. But exponential
processes look like this. They start small, and don’t seem to be going
anywhere dramatic for a while. As the celebrated
fable
of exponentiation shows, a modest bowl of rice gets you quite a long way
into the chess board. The supposedly common-sense assumption that uncontrollable nuclear proliferation isn’t yet happening
requires an argument. (This short essay makes the other argument.)
The nuclear ‘club’ is too unwieldy to share any kind of seriously
constraining principle. There is nothing identifiable that entitles a
nation to membership, beyond naked possession of doomsday-tier military
capability. The club was trans-ideological from the start, and quite
soon afterwards highly multicultural. Among members, reciprocal distrust
and even hostility is the norm, which – given the runaway
action-reaction process that settled the membership roster – could
scarcely be unexpected. The behavior of members is controlled by nothing
beyond game theory. It’s also very much worth mentioning that nobody who
manages to get into the club can, in any practical way, be thrown out.
The United States detonated the world’s first thermonuclear, two-stage,
fusion, or (Teller-Ulam
design)
‘hydrogen’ bomb at Enewetak Atoll on November 1, 1952. The Soviet Union
responded less than a year later, testing its own H-bomb on August 12,
1953. Tests – or demonstrations – followed in succession from The United
Kingdom (November 1957), China (June 17, 1967), and France (August
1968). Israel is thought to have conducted a joint test with the
Republic of South Africa – the so-called ‘Vela Incident’ – in September
22, 1979. In 1991 the South African government claimed to have
assembled, and later unilaterally dismantled, six nuclear devices. India
expanded the spiral of thermonuclear proliferation into South Asia with
a test in May 1998. Pakistan is not known to have tested anything beyond
‘boosted fission’ devices, but it formidable nuclear capability is not
in question. (A longer essay would have found space at this point to
acknowledge Pakistani Abdul Qadeer Khan’s disproportionate contribution
to the global proliferation dynamic.) Saudi nuclear cooperation with
Pakistan can be expected to accelerate the spread of nuclear weaponry
into the Arabian Peninsula, once Iranian progress in the military
application of the technology triggers the long-anticipated Sunni-Shia
arms-race in weapons of mass destruction. Hence the chain of
proliferation steadily lengthens on its main axis, through Cold War
superpower rivalry, into Chinese triangulation, a responsive Indian
bomb, and then into the fractured world of Islam, via Pakistan (with
unreciprocated Israeli nuclear prowess as additional prompt, and
pretext).
The one-dimensional character of this narrative is an artifact of its
immaturity. The under-development of the proliferation process appears
to present the ‘international community’ with no more than a single
crisis at any time. Things will not look this way for long. There is
nothing essentially mono-linear about the dynamic of cross-escalation.
Increasing momentum is already taking it off the tracks. As Richard
Fernandez
notes, lines of nuclear escape are occurring in several directions at
once:
North Korea claims to have tested thermonuclear weapons in January
2016, following fission device tests in 2006, 2009, and 2013). Whether
as a matter of analytical realism, or of strategically motivated public
skepticism, the claim was met by orchestrated Western disparagement. The
2017 test shattered this wall of denial. In the words of Scott D. Sagan,
writing at Foreign Affairs: “North Korea no longer poses a
nonproliferation problem; it poses a nuclear deterrence problem”
While, if traced as a simple historically consistent curve, it is not
yet impossible to see a process of deceleration in this time-line, such
an optic is ceasing to convince. It seems to be part of a collapsing
world order, which is taking its structures of perception down with it.
The assumption of continuity, for instance, now seems reckless in the
extreme. Historical discontinuity
in the proliferation dynamic has been especially notable over recent
decades, due to a hardening pattern whose incentive effects could not
easily be more ominous. The surrender of thermonuclear ambitions has
acquired a stark correlation with subsequent regime destruction, unlike
anything seen in the previous era of Cold War superpower patronage.
Ukraine voluntarily surrendered its nuclear arsenal to Russia upon the
disintegration of the Soviet Union. In the Gorbachev era, this decision
no doubt appeared rational – and even prudent. Subsequent regional
developments make it far harder to excuse. It remains to be seen whether
Ukrainian national independence will have finally been sacrificed to
this high-minded call, but rudimentary geopolitical and domestic
security already has been.
The prevailing racial hysteria of our age hazes any analysis of South
African regime change in comparable terms, as it already hazed the
process itself. Future historians will have clearer eyes. It certainly seems
to fit the pattern. No less than with Juche, the experience of apartheid
is that sensitivity to international ‘polite opinion’ is vastly
increased by the absence of nukes.
The Libyan lesson has been the most lurid to date. Libyan
denuclearization “was peacefully resolved on December 2003” Wikipedia
explains. In a separate
article
it adds the appendix (more helpfully still) that “Muammar Gaddafi, the
deposed leader of Libya, was captured and killed on 20 October 2011
during the Battle of Sirte. … videos of his last moments show rebel
fighters beating him and one of them sodomizing him with a bayonet
before he was shot several times as he shouted for his life.” It would
be difficult to devise a more graphic educational resource against
international WMD non-proliferation compliance.
This is the background against which North Korean nuclear
obstreperousness is to be gauged. The regime had, in any case, already
made obnoxiousness into a local specialism. Its delinquent international
behavior
has
long been
the stuff of dark comedy. The country’s cultivated image takes prickly
into territory the zoological porcupine lineage has yet to explore.
In respect to strategic fundamentals, however, the regime’s feral
punk-performance attitude to diplomatic conduct is not the principal
issue. Bad attitude makes for stimulating diplomatic theater, but it
decorates the fundamentals of threat. Focus on capabilities, not motivations, is a strategic principle that cannot be over-stressed. In the case of
North Korea, and others no doubt soon to follow, however, it is a
principle that requires complete inversion. A definite incapacity
rises, instead, to strategic prominence.
The extremity of the emerging North Korean threat is a function of
weakness, in many respects, but most centrally regarding its new
responsibilities for deterrence management. Insecure nuclear arsenals
are destabilizing, since they incline to first use, on the use-it-or-lose-it
principle. Vulnerability to a first-strike is a continuous prompt to
pre-emption.
North Korea is a geographically small nation, with crude
command-control structures, very limited early warning capabilities, and
an exclusive reliance on exposed land-based ballistic missile platforms
for warhead delivery. In other words, it is destined to remain on a
hair-trigger from the moment it crosses the deterrence threshold. Rather
than being a splitting headache to the world order by relentless,
malignant initiative, it will henceforth be one by simple strategic
default. The world will have become a city built under Vesuvius, quite
regardless of any planning decisions or philosophies of risk. An epoch
of peril is opening.
Under these conditions, mere ‘capability’ becomes extraordinarily
provocative, and
incompetence
is automatically terrorizing. Yet, while this dilemma is not difficult
to understand, it is perhaps a little too
difficult to be captured by any public debate conducted at a
realistically imaginable level of sophistication. Insofar as there is
anything like a court of global mass opinion, it can be confidently
expected to miss the strategic essentials and lose itself in
multilateral theater performances. Geostrategic realities and mass
perceptions are on diverging trajectories.
The prevalent delusions tend to be simplifying, and retarded (in the
strict sense). They lag the diffusive trend, and thus invoke
unrealistically economical structures of agency, drawn back towards the
long-lost ideal of bipolarity. The age of superpowers still dominates
the nuclear imagination.
Because there is no road through Pyongyang that doesn’t end in a pit
full of diplomatic punji sticks, the temptation is to fantasize a road
through Beijing. No such thoroughfare exists. Relations between China
and the North Korean regime have reached their lowest point since the
Korean War, and are now frankly hostile. The Kim Jong-un regime has
sought to extirpate Chinese influence from its leadership, with
spectacular
ruthlessness. Targeting of Chinese urban centers by the North Korean arsenal is no
longer
unimaginable, or, in China, unimagined. After all, the natural target of a
deterrent is the greatest threat to the wielding nation’s sovereignty.
It is near-inevitable that China will occupy this role in the North
Korean case. Chinese impotence in respect to North Korea is what the
North Korean nuclear arsenal is largely – and perhaps even primarily –
about.
Tyler Cowen
describes
Robert Heinlein’s (1966)
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
as “perhaps the best novel for understanding the logic of a future
conflict with North Korea.” He then adds: “furthermore Catalonians
should read it too. Most of all, I recall upon my reread that this book
was my very first exposure to game-theoretic reasoning.” Not only exotic
bombardment (by “electronic catapult”), independence struggle, and
games, but also a world order reconstructed by the rise of China, and
even a “malicious AI” who acquires strategic agency. Evidently, already
half a century ago, Heinlein is exploring a durable cluster of concerns.
At the very core: There can be no question of achieving or maintaining independence
without the capacity to inflict serious harm upon those who might seek
to prevent it.
Independence, in its geopolitical sense, fuses liberty and security indissociably.
Autonomy – which is exactly sovereignty
– requires insensitivity to coercion, and is thus the negative of
foreign compelling threats. The analytical equivalence between
reciprocal independence and a ‘balance of terror’ submits national
autonomy to a geopolitical form of general relativity. Since no such
thing as absolute security
is realistic, sovereignty exists only in degrees, within tense networks.
The tension is the game.
Thomas Schelling’s pioneering
application
of game theory to nuclear strategy remains the point of ingress into
this world. The core reality of MAD games is easily misunderstood.
Massive (or non-reiterating) retaliation is – at the stage it comes due
– by immediate estimation irrational. It is then too late
to contribute anything but compounded harm, regardless of its occasion.
Under hypothetical conditions of amnesia and unconstrained action, it
can never make sense. Yet, paradoxically, the ability to make credible
retaliatory threats is the basic underpinning of rationality during
prior negotiation games. Without it, there can be no reason
for competitor restraint. The requirement, then, is for a future agent
to be firmly committed to a conditional course of action that – at the
potential point of execution – will be non-compelling.
Mutual assured destruction has been derided for its madness, but it is
no less an outer-limit of sanity. Its logic is as rigorously implacable
as any found within the social and historical sciences. The extreme
moral disturbance that it arouses speaks in favor of its uncompromised
rationality. Anguished intuition counts for nothing in its cold
calculus, unless as a technical obstacle. The fact that people find this
logic of inherited fatal commitments intolerable, as dramatized with
exceptional vividness in the opening sequences of the 1983 movie WarGames, is our
problem. The process is re-routed by our squeamishness, but not at all
derailed. It has long been suspected that humans are too weak for MAD.
As an expression of absolute commitment, suicide terrorism appears to
provide MAD with a microscopic model, but it is a weak and misleading
one. Beyond difference in scale, suicide terrorism fails through
execution. It communicates through actualization – or demonstration of
will – which is the negative of deterrence. (Or perhaps, deterrence of a
kind, expensively purchased.) The terror at the edge of the present, and
of the future, has different models. Among these, civilization-scale
‘quantum suicide’ is perhaps the most exotic philosophical and
ideological
conception
on its way to us. Given the assumption of a (Level-3
or higher) multiverse, comprehensive apocalypse is rationalized as the
pruning of sub-optimal branches. It operates as reality editing. The
game theoretic consequences of such a perspective are intriguing. It
increases the credibility of threats (if accepted as a serious
intellectual commitment), while adapting the pay-off matrix in a fashion
that can only be considered destabilizing. Classic MAD works best among
those who envisage an outcome as the worst thing in the world, yet
commit to it anyway.
We approach here one of the very deepest problems in social and
institutional engineering. It might be called the Odysseus Problem. In sailing past the Sirens, Odysseus anticipated the subversion of
commitment, and thus put in place a socio-technical mechanism to bind
his own future action. The structure is that of a ‘chicken game’ – a
mutant variant of prisoner’s dilemma, in which the player who swerves loses. If you could back down, you might. In both Odysseus’ dilemma and that of the chicken player, the
elimination of future discretion figures as a strategic resource. The
requirement for self-binding inclines to a technological freezing of
decision. Strategic problems of the ‘chicken game’ type thus tend
inexorably to automation.
If AI is brought into play by the intrinsic dynamics of nuclear
confrontation, it does not stop there. AI has a WMD potentiality proper
to itself. There is no obvious horizon to what an algorithm could do.
The same capabilities that enable algorithmic control of WMD arsenals
equally enable such arsenals to be swapped-out for AI itself. An enemy
arsenal under algorithmic control is only ‘theirs’ by contingencies of
software dominance. From the military perspective – among others
oriented to negative capability – the potential destructiveness of the
technology is without determinable limit. Anything under software
control falls into its realm. Which is to say that, asymptotically,
everything does. But it doesn’t end there. AI also promotes an advance
into virtuality.
Nuclear weaponry cuts a convergent path into purity of conception. No
hydrogen bomb has yet been used against an enemy (or “in anger” as the
singularly inappropriate expression goes). Thermonuclear warheads remain
among a select category of virtual weapons, alongside a variety of
chemical and biological agents, whose usage has been exclusively
diplomatic, or even philosophical. The value of this military machinery
is strictly counter-factual. Those ‘possible worlds’ in which they have
been operationalized support little, if any, value of any kind. Weaponry
supporting their potentiality floats the ontological option of extreme
negative utility. They are – in the most rigorous sense – nightmare generators.
There is no reason (at all), then, to think that nuclear weapons are
the last word in mass destruction. Nor can it be assumed that mass
destruction is the ultimate criterion for deterrent weaponry. It is not
only that high-energy physics opens a vast, rambling bestiary of virtual
catastrophes which we have scarcely begun to peruse (although this is
true). Physics has no monopoly on disaster, regardless of what its
recent privileges might suggest.
It can never be a virtue for a weapon to be indiscriminate, which is to
say imprecise. Turned around, we can say without hesitation or reservation that it
is meritorious in any weapon, however absolutely devastating, for the
greatest possible proportion of the damage it produces to be inflicted
upon the enemy. In other words, a good weapon discriminates specifically
against enemy interests. It hunts. There can be no serious doubt that the genomic biosciences and
software engineering have more to contribute to this pursuit than
physics possibly could.
Stuart Russell
describes
autonomous weapons as a “new, scalable class of WMDs.” The systems he is
considering would be exemplified by drone swarms, “hunting in packs like
wolves” (as one DARPA employee was indiscreet enough to reveal). Given
enormous industrial production runs, performance specifications
unshackled from human limitation, and targeting algorithms set for
indiscriminate lethality, the devastating potential of such weapons
would be hard to exaggerate. Their key, confidently predicted
vulnerabilities, however, are at least as significant.
As Russell emphasizes, autonomous weapons could be subverted by a
hostile “software update.” They could be hacked. Behind the menace of
the hacker lies that of advanced artificial intelligence, mustering
superior powers of cryptographic lock-picking and soft intrusion.
Autonomous weaponry is therefore nested into a more profound threat.
AI designates a culmination of sorts. Nowhere else does destructive capability and rigid commitment
promise to intersect more dynamically. Nothing separates the weapon from
the game. It also counts, potentially, as an escalation.
Much criticism of
the Cold War nuclear arms race
already
configured it as an existential risk, before the term had been coined. Between an X-risk and an extreme deterrent
there no definite boundary. The difference is technical. Deterrence is a
mode of employment. It uses negative utility. In this respect anything
bad could be useful, were it not that a deterrent requires a trigger,
under the control of the negotiating agent (at the point of
negotiation). To threaten a potential aggressor with an asteroid strike
makes no sense, unless an asteroid strike can be delivered. The same
holds for geological disasters in general. All of which means that the
acquisition of engineering capabilities on the largest scales, such as
geo-engineering, weather control, climate regulation, and asteroid
defenses – perhaps developed explicitly to avert potential existential risks – will inevitably expand the domain of deterrence options. In
other words, techno-economic progress and the escalation of deterrence
infrastructure are only formally differentiated. There is no materially
persuasive way to improve the world that does not – on its occult side –
widen the horizons of geopolitical horror.
Beside what could be had, there is the question of who has it. Beside
the qualities of WMD-armed antagonists, their mere number is a source of
terror, itself. It is only natural that multilateral deterrence should
be found more threatening than its bilateral ideal, and now distant
predecessor. Complexity scales nonlinearly in networks, and quickly
becomes mathematically intractable. No one has any idea how massively
distributed networks of insecurity would work. It is quite probably
impossible to know. Deterrence is about to change phase.
Toothpaste doesn’t return to the tube just because it makes a mess.
Once it is out, inconvenience has ceased to be any kind of argument
against it. The dangers of a world in which ubiquitous deterrence
capacity reigns are both obvious and immense. This is nevertheless the
world we are entering. The trends driving it, from both the geopolitical
and the techno-economic sides, are by any realistic estimation
irresistible. Cheaper and more diverse nightmare weaponry is becoming
available within an increasingly disintegrated international order. A
variety of self-reinforcing dynamics – including but not restricted to
those of the arms-race type – are further stimulating the process.
Cascading acceleration is all but inevitable.
When conceived with maximal cynicism (i.e. realism), geostrategic
independence is a direct function of deterrence capability. Don’t tread on me
is the colloquial statement, whose perfect applicability is commonly
under-estimated. The rattlesnake, combining fearsome weaponry with
signaling, makes for a natural totem of deterrence. Neither venom, nor
rattle, is dispensable. “Diplomacy without arms is like music without
instruments,” runs the famous analogy, attributed to Frederick the
Great. Game theory recognizes military capability as a communication
medium.
It is not only that robust independence depends upon deterrence.
Reciprocally, geostrategic liberty necessarily tends to the production
of deterrence capability. An alien freedom, which could do anything, is – ineliminably – a threat. It provides the comprehensive model of
the military threat. Whether ‘they hate us for our freedom’ or not, they
have no choice but to fear us for it, and inversely. Geopolitics has no
other origin. Any state without the will to scare also lacks the will to
exist.
It’s all far more basic than we’ve been led to believe. As Niall
Ferguson
writes
(realistically):
Every geopolitical entity that is serious about sovereignty will want
them, or something of at least equivalent deterrent credibility. The
only alternative is naked dependency, made ever more uncomfortable by
increasing global multipolarity, among the stark wreckage of any ‘world
order’ or ‘international community’ grounded in the collective fantasy
of miraculously authorized super-national norms. Explosive proliferation
will be something the world has not seen before, even if it has already
actually been there to see. We can be confident that the geopolitical
order will be reconfigured by it.
What does explosive proliferation mean? Potentially, many things. For
instance, vectors of technological – and thus economic – development are
certain to be, to some significant degree, oriented by it. As artificial
intelligence is factored into policy decision-making not only as an
essential contributor to command, control, communications and
intelligence (C3I), but as an intrinsic weapon of mass destruction, its prominence will
be still further elevated.
WMD proliferation implies a multiplication of real geopolitical
agencies. It is rigorously indistinguishable – in both directions – from
a disintegrated world. Established relations of dependency are broken,
releasing unanticipated – and evidently hazardous – freedoms. Whether or
not this is the world we want, it looks increasingly inevitable that it
is the world we are to have.
TOME III - XENOSYSTEMS: Involvements with Reality
BLOCK 1 - INTRO
CHAPTER ONE - DEFINITIONS
Preliminary mumblings
It’s a little early to tell what this will turn into.
It begins as a ramshackle refugee camp, necessitated by the failure of
Urban Future
to provide:
(a) stability, (b) continuous scrolling, and (c) an adequate platform for
comments. As things develop, other basics (such as a blogroll) can be
expected.
For the moment, longer posts will go up on UF, with a link here for
discussion. Is that sounding like a satisfactory medium-term solution?
(Not to me either.)
In addition to this supportive role, Outside in will have a few
specialized functions, as:
(1) A sandpit for unconsolidated thoughts on time-related topics
(2) A depository for brief commentary and links (from the perspective of
harsh neo-reaction)
(3) A flotation chamber for fragments of morbid fiction
If that doesn’t look repulsive enough yet, we’ll see what we can do …
February 17, 2013Xenomy
Federico has kicked the living daylights out of me (on
this thread), and only the
outer darkness remains. It’s a passage through singularity, so
mathematical consistency requires me to be
infinitely appreciative of that.
The idea of Neocameralism, drawing all its real functionality from Exit,
is parasitic upon what lies beyond it: the Patchwork of competitive
alternatives. Since an exterior disintegration does all the work, why not
fold the outside in?
It’s time to come out as a Xenomist. All power to the
Outside!
April 19, 2013Urban Future (2.0)
The new UF blog is up and running
now, with a few teething problems expected. The platform is much more
reliable than the old one, but its idiosyncrasies still require some
getting used to. Comments, especially, might be troublesome at first.
The intention is to use it as a platform for material that isn’t (in one
way or another) off the wall. There’s nothing much up yet except some
tentative posts on the structure of history, urbanization, economic
development, and the recent regime transition. (There’s also a product
promo, providing a clue to the underlying economic base of the blog, which
is still extremely embryonic at this stage.)
Urban Future (2.0) is my work blog, which means it will be
connected up to e-publication projects – realized and prospective – with a
Shanghai dimension. Hopefully that will be mostly synergic, rather than
intrusive. Self-marginalization will be restrained by the commercial
reality-principle over there, so the content only comes in vanilla flavor
right now. (If I can keep it vaguely respectable, blogging gets included
in billable time.) A few rum-soaked raisins will probably creep in, but
anything too intoxicating will end up here (in Outer Darkness).
It’s not exactly clear at this stage how specialization between these
blogs will work, so there’s an experimental aspect. The neater the
crystallization into artificial good twin / bad twin schizophrenia, the
smoother it should run. It might end up being necessary to run light side
/ dark side versions of the same post on occasions. ‘Politeness’ in this
contexts starts from Outside in criteria of minimal civility,
then super-adds sensitivity to the norms of present day metropolitan China
and those of low-friction trans-national commerce. It is easier,
at least at first, to investigate the edges of these normative systems
here than over there. (More on this topic later.)
Decorous commentary on China, history and economics is especially welcome,
and the range of discussion should gradually expand, with some
responsiveness to reader interest. Anyone with the irresistible urge to
howl like a werewolf – even about UF content – is advised to do that here,
where the risk of immediate deletion, whilst by no means negligible, is
considerably smaller.
June 21, 2013Search Records
If anyone has found difficulties reaching this blog, it’s possible that
inefficient search terms are to blame. From the WordPress Dashboard, I’ve
been assured that these search paths all have a record of success:
domestic robotician
racism blog
nick land goes insane
nick land date died when?
h.l. mencken heaving deadf cats in the cathderal
14 vector shot red dawn mood and sex stimulator directions
how all organisms are buckets of anachronisms
one click chicks spanking
free nude picture tubes of saddam hussein
(Some loyal commentators can take their share of credit for our emerging
definition within the Planetary Cybermind.)
July 24, 2013Wikipedia
Awkward personal confession moment: I appreciate Wikipedia a lot.
OK, it isn’t the Antiversity, but then, on the positive side, it exists.
Here are three Wikipedia articles dropped in the Outsideness TL very
recently (with footnotes stripped out):
Universal Darwinism
(via): “Universal Darwinism
(also known as generalized Darwinism,
universal selection theory, or
Darwinian metaphysics) refers to a variety of approaches
that extend the theory of
Darwinism beyond its
original domain of
biological evolution
on Earth. Universal Darwinism aims to formulate a generalized version of
the mechanisms of
variation,
selection
and
heredity proposed by
Charles Darwin,
so that they can apply to explain
evolution
in a wide variety of other domains, including
psychology,
economics,
culture,
medicine,
computer science
and physics. …”
Galton’s problem
(via): “Galton’s problem, named after Sir
Francis Galton,
is the problem of drawing inferences from
cross-cultural
data, due to the statistical phenomenon now called
autocorrelation. The problem is now recognized as a general one that applies to all
nonexperimental studies and to
experimental design
as well. It is most simply described as the problem of external
dependencies in making statistical estimates when the elements sampled are
not
statistically independent. Asking two people in the same household whether they watch TV, for
example, does not give you statistically independent answers. The sample
size, n, for independent observations in this case is one, not two. Once
proper adjustments are made that deal with external dependencies, then the
axioms of probability theory concerning statistical independence will
apply. These axioms are important for deriving measures of
variance, for
example, or tests of
statistical significance. …”
Toba catastrophe theory
(via): “The Toba supereruption
was a
supervolcanic
eruption
that occurred some time between 69,000 and 77,000 years ago at the site of
present-day
Lake Toba (Sumatra, Indonesia). It
is one of the Earth‘s
largest known eruptions. The Toba catastrophe hypothesis holds that this event
caused a global
volcanic winter
of 6–10 years and possibly a 1,000-year-long cooling episode. …”
September 19, 2015
CHAPTER TWO - BLOG POLICY
Chaos Patch (#1)
A blog closely models a patchwork-embedded neocameral micro-state, which
is to say that its governance is dictatorial, controlled by external
competition. Internally, it’s God-king stuff: zero-democracy, undivided
power without constitutional constraint, absolute discretion tilting into
sorcerous extremities. The sole counter-balance comes from outside,
sustained by a freedom of exit no less highly realized than the
administrative power it evaluates. If people don’t like what’s happening,
they leave.
As in the (virtual) neocameral state it models, a blog stages a dramatic
collision between administrative authority and radical liberty. Admin and
commentators coordinate tacitly to make things work, already conjoined in
the production of value.
Commentators speak for themselves. That is their work and investment,
which the blog exploits, to develop. Necessarily, therefore, from the side
of the sim-neocameral Admin, there are inescapable but obscure
responsibilities. Undoubtedly, among the first of these, is the
maintenance of order.
Three aspects of order are especially relevant
at this point (although there are others).
(1) Troll eradication. This responsibility has been very undemanding at
Outside in so far. The prospect of prompt and certain
liquidation, coupled with a minimally-efficient comment processing system,
deters troll invasion to a truly remarkable extent.
(2) Ensuring civility. This is a far hazier and potentially more
challenging task, involving cooperative interaction between multiple
parties. There are sure to be micro-ethnographic theories that relate to
it, because a blog ecology is a small, artificial culture, and reasonable
differences exist as to how these can be propagated, nudged, incentivized,
and / or directed. These are questions for another time.
(3) Entropy suppression — finally, our topic. How does a blog climb
backwards along the incline into chaos, perpetually restoring the order of
things in their place, or on-topic commentary? How to
maintain a micro-culture that, in its balance of creative liberty and
efficient order, is more Singaporean than Somalian?
The emergent policy of Outside in is to be troll-free and civil,
but beyond this it aims to be minimally suppressive. It does, however,
aspire to the perpetuation and development of order. Its model comment
thread is coherent, even in its diversity and controversy, which is to say
that on-topic commentary is its ideal. Departures from this are
registered as error, and in fact as classical entropy, or disordered
distribution. The solution presently entertained is
zoned liberty.
Flagrantly off-topic commentary will be increasingly discouraged, but
regular ‘chaos patches’ (or open threads) will ensure that any civil
remark has a place. If your comment would be obviously out of place on any
given thread — and thus effectively entropic (I’m looking at you Fotrkd
and Northanger) — it would be to our mutual advantage if it were directed
towards the most recent Chaos Patch. In exchange for cooperation in this
respect, Outside in neocameral Admin proposes the following deal:
Use Chaos Patches (CPs) neatly, like a good pseudo-Singaporean, and Admin
commits to:
(a) Read all CP contents (and avoid all temptation to treat them as
black-hole entropy-bins).
(b) Introduce new CPs on request (request to be made in latest CP).
(c) Thematically direct each CP according to the content unfolding within
it, by providing — at least minimally — an ADDED directory function, plus
discussion where possible.
(d) Modify the CP concept in response to feedback, with open-ended
flexibility, given only the understanding that entropy regulation is an
indispensable Admin responsibility.
Let’s see how it goes …
ADDED: CP#1 Topic Summary:
— Thoughts on blog commentary
— What (the hell) does Continental Philosophy contribute to Dark
Enlightenment?
— Web search systems, social media, and soft Cathedralism
— Handle’s ‘Darkest Enlightenment’ (as glimpsed
here)
— ‘How about you and
him fight?’
— Phallic leftism
— Sodomite abomination
— Did Turing screw up computer science?
— Streaming reaction
Discussion diffuses, so the order listed here is only an inexact
approximation.
‘Meta’ (or ‘admin’) questions predominate at this stage — how is
commentary most effectively handled? Since no one has yet staked a claim
to the lead CP#2 topic, I’ll begin from there. Current assumption: once
the number of comments exceeds 100, it’s time to make more space. Does
this seem reasonable?
May 19, 2013Curses!
There’s a seemingly irrepressible enthusiasm to discuss
Outside in speech codes, so let’s do it here (please). For the
precursor exchanges on the topic, see
here, and
here.
I only became a methodical Moldbug reader in 2011, so I cannot pretend to
have followed the degeneration of the
Unqualified Reservations comments section in real time. What I
did see, making my way back through this blog, was the rapid collapse of
its comment threads into an open cultural gutter of no conceivable
interest to anybody with a three digit IQ — a situation that hit nadir and
remained there. We are talking about what — even
inactive
— remains arguably the most important blog in the history of the medium.
If anyone wants to suggest that its accrued commentary is a model to be
emulated, they are encouraged to make the case, for the entertainment
value alone.
At the other extreme of cognitive ambition, is
4chan/pol/, a veritable sewer
of senselessness, where the idea of an intelligent conversation is an
absurdity from the start. This is a discussion forum that revels in its
own crass vulgarity. It too is a negative model, to be deeply appreciated
for the lesson in degeneracy it provides.
My default assumption is that everything tends to ruin, unless actively
tended. UR shows what a naked laissez-faire policy leads
to, if crudely interpreted as confidence in self-correcting bohemianism.
Spontaneous order requires dynamic entropy dissipation merely to survive.
This blog is not a commons. It welcomes
visitors who add value, tolerates those who do no harm, and ejects agents
of degradation. Up to this point, policing here has been very light, but
there is no firm principle behind that. If it becomes necessary, the full
panoply of police powers will be exercised without the slightest liberal
qualm, and these are potentially considerable. Insofar as the space of
this blog itself are concerned, they are in fact effectively unlimited.
Occasional demented goblins seem to derive great satisfaction from
provoking crack-downs. If these individuals are deluded enough to think
that inciting such responses represents some kind of cognitive dissonance
here, by driving a departure from the generally tolerant policy in place,
they are very much mistaken. The only rigid principle here is absolute
(local) authority. Gibbeting goblins poses no ideological contradiction
whatsoever. There should probably be a great deal more of it, the more
random and graphically brutal the better, just to make this point. (This
auto-suggestion is being taken under advisement.)
A more difficult problem is posed by the right vulgarians, at least
superficially. Their intentions are not, it appears, disruptive. They
merely seek to crank down the general tone of commentary here to a more
popular level, with direct rhetorical offensiveness to progressive
sensibilities considered a positive factor. I have to confess to finding
some of these visitors likable, but their objectives will not be
tolerated. With the conclusion of this discussion — at the latest — the
desired tone here will be imposed, by whatever mixture of
selection, editing, and scolding is required. This is not a negotiable
matter.
The first Chaos Patch
here drew an
analogy between a blog and a virtual micro-state. Considered at a
sufficient level of abstraction, the principles of governance are
basically identical. Authority is absolutely concentrated, guided by the
incentive to maximize the value of an estate, which only subsequently
introduces pragmatic policies of extreme laissez-faire tolerance,
since freedom maximizes productivity. People here are basically free to
say whatever they like, with the understanding that
scum will be ejected without apology or reservation. Anyone
tempted to explore the limits of tolerated scumminess has profoundly
misunderstood what is going on here. Once again, this is not disputable
beyond the norms of tolerated disputation. Scum have no rights here,
whatsoever, and the only definition of scum behavior that matters is that
decided by the government or local sovereign power (and that’s me).
So what counts as scum behavior? Basically: classlessness or incivility.
There are absolutely no limits being set on the ideas that can be promoted
by visitors here, as long as they are presented with some minimum of
decorum. Vulgarity, slurs, abuse, snark, and scum rhetoric in general, on
the other hand, is not acceptable. Intelligent or humorous comments that
cross some of these lines will not be suppressed, if their transgressions
plausibly serve a higher cultural purpose. Sovereign Admin alone decides
each problematic case with absolute discretion, perhaps drawing upon
advice from other respected commentors where appropriate. Yes, this is an
elitist dictatorship (duh!).
August 20, 2014
BLOCK 2 - NEOREACTION
CHAPTER ONE - DEFINITION
Neoreaction (for dummies)
Kill the hyphen, Anomaly UK advised (somewhere) – it lets Google
Search dissolve and avoid the subject. Writing ‘neo-reaction’ as
‘neoreaction’ nudges it towards becoming a thing.
Google Search gets to edit our self-definition? That’s the ‘neo’ in
‘neoreaction’, right there. It not only promotes drastic regression, but
highly-advanced drastic regression. Like retrofuturism, paleomodernism,
and cybergothic, the word ‘neoreaction’ compactly describes a time-twisted
vector that spirals forwards into the past, and backwards into the future.
It emerges, almost automatically, as the present is torn tidally apart —
when the democratic-Keynesian politics of postponement-displacement
exhausts itself, and the kicked-can runs out of road.
Expressed with
abstruse verbosity, therefore, neoreaction is a time-crisis, manifested through paradox,
whose further elaboration can wait (if not for long). Disordering our most
basic intuitions, it is, by its very nature, difficult to grasp. Could
anything easily be said about it?
Anomaly UK
offers
a down-to-earth explanation for the reversal of socio-political course:
Ultimately, however, if after all these centuries of trying to improve
society based on abstract ideas of justice have only made life worse
than it would have been under pre-Enlightenment social systems, the time
has come to simply give up the whole project and revert to traditional
forms whose basis we might not be able to establish rationally, but
which have the evidence of history to support them.
This understanding of neoreaction – undoubtedly capturing its predominant
sentiment – equates it with a radicalized Burkean conservatism, designed
for an age in which almost everything has been lost. Since the progressive
destruction of traditional society has been broadly accomplished, hanging
on to what remains is no longer enough. It is necessary to go back, beyond
the origin of Enlightenment, because Reason has failed the test of
history.
Neoreaction is only a thing if some measure of consensus is
achievable. Burke-on-steroids is an excellent candidate for that. Firstly,
because
all neoreactionaries define themselves through antagonism to the
Cathedral, and the Cathedral is the self-proclaimed consummation of Enlightenment
rationalism. Secondly, for more complicated, positive reasons …
Spandrell helpfully
decomposes
neoreaction into two or three principal currents:
There are two lines of [our contemporary] reactionary thought. One is
the traditionalist branch, and [the other is] the futurist branch.
Or perhaps there [are] three. There’s the religious/traditionalist branch,
the ethnic/nationalist branch, and the capitalist branch.
Futurists and traditionalists are distinguished by distinct, one-sided
emphases on ‘neo’ and ‘reaction’, and their disagreements lose identity in
the neoreactionary spiral. The triadic differentiation is more resiliently
conflictual, yet these ‘branches’ are branches of something, and that
thing is an ultra-Burkean trunk.
Reactionary theonomists, ethno-nationalists, and techno-commercialists
share a fundamental aversion to rationalistic social reconstruction,
because each subordinates reason to history and its tacit norms – to
‘tradition’ (diversely understood). Whether the sovereign lineage is
considered to be predominantly religious, bio-cultural, or customary, it
originates outside the self-reflective (enlightenment) state, and remains
opaque to rational analysis. Faith, liturgy, or scripture is not soluble
within criticism; communal identity is not reducible to ideology; and
common law, reputational structure, or productive specialism is not
amenable to legislative oversight. The
deep order of society – whatever that is taken to be – is not
open to political meddling, without predictably disastrous consequences.
This Burkean junction, where neoreactionary agreement begins, is also
where it ends. Divine revelation, racial continuity, and evolutionary
discovery (catallaxy) are sources of ultimate sovereignty, instantiated in
tradition, beyond the Cathedral-state, but they are self-evidently
different – and only precariously compatible. Awkwardly, but inescapably,
it has to be acknowledged that each major branch of the neoreactionary
super-family tends to a social outome that its siblings would find even
more horrifying than Cathedralist actuality.
Left intellectuals have no difficulty envisaging Theocratic
White-Supremacist Hyper-Capitalism®. In fact, most seem to consider this
mode of social organization the modern Western norm. For those
hunkered-down in the tangled, Cathedral-blasted trenches of neoreaction,
on the other hand, the manifold absurdities of this construction are not
so easily overlooked. Indeed, each branch of the reaction has dissected
the others more incisively – and brutally – than the left has been able
to.
When theonomists scrutinize ethno-nationalists and techno-commercialists
they see evil heathens.
When ethno-nationalists scrutinize theonomists and techno-commercialists
they see deluded race-traitors.
When techno-commercialists scrutinize theonomists and ethno-nationalists
they see retarded crypto-communists.
(The details of these diagnoses exceed the present discussion.)
When developed beyond its ultra-Burkean trunk, therefore, the prospects
for neoreactionary consensus – for a neoreactionary thing –
depend upon disintegration. If we’re compelled to share a post-Cathedral
state, we’ll kill each other. (The zapped hyphen was just a foretaste.)
April 17, 2013Definitions
In the end, it’s all comes down to harsh realism.
Socialists imagine there are no wolves, so democracy is easy.
Conservatives imagine democracy as a way for wolves to apologize.
Libertarians imagine democracy as two wolves and a sheep deciding on the
main course for dinner.
Neoreactionaries see democracy as two sheep and a wolf deciding on the
merits of mandatory vegetarianism.
ADDED: Survivingbabel anticipates (6 months ago, no link available):
Democracy is closer to two sheep and a wolf voting on what’s for
dinner. The sheep unite in collective action to fight off the wolf. The
wolf, stripped of its natural power, must graze alongside the sheep.
Eventually it dies from malnutrition, and the sheep, having lost their
natural predator, soon overpopulate and overgraze their land. Then they
die too, usually replaced by another species entirely.
May 14, 2013Deep Heritage
Nick B. Steves’ understanding of
deep heritage
(the one-line version) could be aptly extended to the neoreaction quite
generally: Burkean with Darwinian commentary.
May 15, 2013Categorization
As anticipated, the organization of the Outside in blogroll is
transforming itself from a mechanical task into an engaging
cultural-political and philosophical
problem. My sense is that people generally resolve this type of quandary on a
fairly hasty, ad hoc basis, but it already seems too late to do
that. There are legacy considerations, and intricacies of coalitional
variety at stake. Ultimately, there is a question about the core
significance of the term ‘neoreaction’ — Is it a mere rallying point,
flung into prominence by arbitrary historical opportunity, or is it a
dense concept, whose semantic components are to be scrupulously
respected?
My temptation would be to tactically elude the word, in order to access a
more flexible, differentiated terminology. What prevents me from doing so
is the arrogant sense that I respect the word more than anyone
else it is applied to. ‘Neoreaction’ is an inherently paradoxical,
fissional term, splitting in-itself on a temporal axis. It follows that I
am extremely reluctant to see it relegated to a mere categorical marker,
employed to designate ideological tendencies whose substantial content is
better — or more fully — explicated in other terms. The word
Neoreaction declares, intrinsically, that it belongs to
fissionalist time-junkies exploring historical dissociation. That’s what
it says, irrespective of how it is used.
The problem of categorization, therefore, remains, indissolubly. Any
suggestions?
October 24, 2013The Litmus Test
Whilst pedestrian in its rehearsal of common knowledge, and inane in its
tortured liberalism,
this
article helpfully schematizes the arena of Anglophone racial politics, at
least on its defining black-white dimension (and accidentally). By
counterposing the tradition of Black American self-advancement
(represented by Booker T. Washington) with that of Afro-Marxist agitation
(represented by W. E. B. Du Bois), it implicitly describes an ideological
quadrant.
1. To side with Du Bois against Washington is the position of the radical
Left.
2. To seek a reconciliation of the two is an agonized equivocation,
tilting inevitably to Leftist advantage, of the kind that has predominated
in the development of Anglophone political culture. This is is position of
the author, of mainstream liberalism and conservatism, and of progressive
Cathedralization.
3. To admire Washington, whilst repulsed by Du Bois, is the neoreactionary
stance Outside in defends.
4. To dismiss both Washington and Du Bois as irrelevant Black nonsense is
a departure into confrontational White Nationalism, of a kind that has no
imaginable reach beyond itself.
Thomas Sowell, as the most articulate inheritor of the ‘outsider’
Washington tradition, is the emblem of this racial ideology test today.
Neoreaction is indisputably mostly a White thing, but if it is to have any
additional significance whatsoever, Sowell has to be supported. There’s
nowhere further Right he could possibly go, except into some species of
Black ethnomasochistic suicidalism — and we should know, more than
anybody, that’s a corner no one should be backed into.
November 4, 2013Institution Building
Anton Silensky
initiates
a structured discussion on the subject.
If the Neoreaction is not a popular movement, a political party, a church,
an organization, or even in any strong sense one thing, what is
it? I’m assuming that if it is more than a fight over a name, it is at
least a coalition, integrated by a shared enemy, and some common
references.
The only canonical scripture I am able to identify is the
Unqualified Reservations corpus. This is certainly not ‘gospel’
for anyone, but it constitutes the distinctive intellectual heritage of
those who identify positively with the neoreactionary current. Neoreaction
has to be at least tenuously ‘Moldbuggian’ if it is not to dissipate
entirely into noise. There are, however, already many Moldbugs, and there
will be still more.
Silensky writes: “Splitting will happen. People will disagree. And they
will leave.”
Leave what? (That, I think, is his question.)
And if splitting is intrinsic to what the Neoreaction is? (That
is mine.)
November 28, 2013Our Inheritance
With my nervous-system still too disintegrated by turn-of-the-year excess
to begin a set of 2014 prognoses convincingly, I’ve simply stripped this
argument from my twitter stream (quoting myself):
Neoreaction cannot understand itself without directing far more
sustained attention to its own cladistic identity. As a natural cultural
species, it is a fragment of dissident ultra-protestantism, and this is
quite certain to guide its fate. The forces of internal fragmentation
working through it will make fratricidal Trotskyism look like
unperturbed mind-meld. It will be thriving this time next year, but the
tides of dissolution it will have overcome to do so will be truly
colossal. Those thinking Neoreaction is a platform from which to
complacently deride Neo-Puritanism have a highly-educational 2014
ahead.
Neoreaction is not a series of
premises
(or articles of faith) but a cultural species. I don’t
think that we have begun to seriously digest the consequences of that yet.
January 2, 2014Roughened Chan
To mark the dawn of the new Aeon, the Reactionary Koans of Master
[*Unspeakable*] have been scrupulously
collected
by Nick B. Steves. The path to Dark Enlightenment has never been more
exactly (or obscurely) illuminated.
My own favorite:
I walked to Master Moldbug but the road was too long. I visited master
Jim and he hit me with a stick.
January 6, 2014Premises of Neoreaction
Patri Friedman is both extremely smart and, for this blog among others in
the ‘sphere, highly influential. So when he
promises
us “a more politically correct dark enligh[t]enment” (“adding anti-racism
and anti-sexism to my controversial new pro-monogamy stance”), that’s a
thing. It accentuates concerns about ‘entryism’ and ideological entropy,
leading to some thoughtful responses such as
this
(from Avenging Red Hand).
Michael Anissimov anticipated this in a
post
at More Right on the ‘Premises of Reactionary Thought’,
which begins: “To make progress in any area of intellectual endeavor
requires discourse among those who agree with basic premises and the
exclusion of those who do not.” (The
commentary
by Cathedral Whatever is also well worth a look.) Anissimov’s original
five premises, subsequently updated to six (with a new #1 added) are:
1. People are not equal. They never will be. We reject equality in all
its forms.
2. Right is right and left is wrong.
3. Hierarchy is basically a good idea.
4. Traditional sex roles are basically a good idea.
5. Libertarianism is retarded.
6. Democracy is irredeemably flawed and we need to do away with it.
These neoreactionary ‘articles’ deserve a
response in detail, but at this point I will simply advance at alternative
list, in the expectation that yet other versions will be forthcoming in
the near future, providing a reference for discussion. My objective (in
keeping with the advice from ARH) is economy, honed through abstraction,
in the interest of sustaining productive diversity. Minimally, we
affirm:
1. Democracy is unable to control government. With this
proposition, the effective possibility of a mainstream right is denied.
Insofar as any political movement retains its allegiance to the democratic
mechanism, it conspires in the ratchet of government expansion, and thus
essentially dedicates itself to leftist ends. The gateway from
Libertarianism to Neoreaction opens with this understanding. As a
corollary, any politics untroubled by expansionist statism has no reason
to divert itself into the neoreactionary path.
2.
The egalitarianism essential to democratic ideology is incompatible
with liberty. This proposition is partially derivative from #1, but extends further.
When elaborated historically, and cladistically, it aligns with the
Crypto-Calvinist theory of Western (and then Global) political evolution.
The critique it announces intersects significantly with the rigorous
findings of HBD. The conclusions drawn are primarily negative, which is to
say they support a principled rejection of positive egalitarian policy.
Emergent hierarchy is at least tolerated. More assertive,
‘neofeudal’ models of ideal social hierarchy are properly controversial
within Neoreaction.
3.
Neoreactionary socio-political solutions are
ultimately Exit-based. In every case, exit is to be defended against voice. No society or
social institution which permits free exit is open to any further
politically efficient criticism, except that which systematic exit
selection itself applies. Given the absence of tyranny (i.e. free exit),
all forms of protest and rebellion are to be considered leftist
perversions, without entitlement to social protection of any kind.
Government, of whatever traditional or experimental form, is legitimated
from the outside — through exit pressure — rather than internally, through
responsiveness to popular agitation. The conversion of political voice
into exit-orientation (for instance, revolution into secessionism), is the
principal characteristic of neoreactionary strategy.
From the perspective of this blog, no premises beyond these — however
widely endorsed within Neoreaction — are truly basic, or defining.
Resolution of elaborate disputes is ultimately referred to dynamic
geography, rather than dialectic. It is the Outside, working through
fragmentation, that rules, and no other authority has standing.
[If anyone asks “How did this post suddenly jump from ‘the Dark
Enlightenment’ to ‘Neoreaction’?” my response is “Good point!” (but one
for another occasion).]
ADDED: Jim
on entryism (and how to stop it).
ADDED: Libertarian HIV.
ADDED: The first of
these
two
Aimless Gromar posts on Libertarianism and Neoreaction should
have been linked yesterday — it was a significant prompt for this. (Both
are recommended.)
February 3, 2014Quote notes (#63)
The position of Outside in (admittedly extreme) is that NRx
is Neocameralism. As this equation ceases to persuade,
NRx falls apart, and no future convergence point will be found within
itself. It will be scavenged apart into Dark Libertarian and IQ-boosted
ENR debris, unless neocameralism is either re-animated as its fundamental
doctrinal commitment, or rigorously reconstructed into something
specifically new. Hence today’s Quote
note
(from Moldbug’s How Dawkins got pwned (part 4)):
In order to get to the reactionary theory of history, we need a
reactionary theory of government. History, again, is interpretation, and
interpretation requires theory. I’ve described this theory before under
the name of
neocameralism, but on a blog it never hurts to be a little repetitive.
First: government is not a mystical or mysterious institution. A
government is simply a group of people working together for a common
aim, ie, a corporation. Whether a government is good or bad is not
determined by who its employees are or how they are selected. It is
determined by whether the actions of the government are good or bad.
Second: the only difference between a government and a “private
corporation” is that the former is sovereign: it has no
higher authority to which it can appeal to protect its property. A
sovereign corporation owns its territory, and maintains that ownership
by demonstrating unchallenged control. It is stable if no other party,
internal or external, has any incentive to attack it. Especially in the
nuclear age, it is not difficult to deter prospective attackers.
Third: a good government is a well-managed sovereign corporation. Good
government is efficient management. Efficient management is profitable
management. A profitable government has no incentive to break its
promises, abuse its citizens (who are its capital), or attack its
neighbors.
Fourth: efficient management can be implemented by the same techniques
in sovereign corporations as in nonsovereign ones. The company’s profit
is distributed equally to holders of negotiable shares. The shareholders
elect a board, which selects a CEO.
Fifth: although the full neocameralist approach has never been tried,
its closest historical equivalents to this approach are the 18th-century
tradition of enlightened absolutism as represented by Frederick the
Great, and the 21st-century nondemocratic tradition as seen in lost
fragments of the British Empire such as Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai.
These states appear to provide a very high quality of service to their
citizens, with no meaningful democracy at all. They have minimal crime
and high levels of personal and economic freedom. They tend to be quite
prosperous. They are weak only in political freedom, and political
freedom is unimportant by definition when government is stable and
effective.
Sixth: the comparative success of the American and European postwar
systems appears to be due to their abandonment of democratic politics as
a practical mechanism of government, in favor of a civil-service
Beamtenstaat
in which democratic politicians are increasingly symbolic. The
post-communist civil-service states, China and Russia, appear to be
converging on the same system, although their stability is ensured
primarily by direct military authority, rather than by a system of
managed public opinion.
Seventh: the post-democratic civil-service state, while not utterly
disastrous, is not the end of history. It has two problems. One, the
size and complexity of its regulatory system tends to increase without
bound, resulting in economic stagnation and general apathy. Two, more
critically, it can neither abolish democratic politics formally, nor
defend itself against changes in information flow that may destabilize
public opinion. Notably, the rise of the Internet disrupts the feedback
loop between public education and political power, allowing noncanonical
ideas to flourish. If these ideas are both rationally compelling and
politically delegitimating, the state is threatened.
Eighth: therefore, productive political efforts should focus on
peacefully terminating, restructuring and decentralizing the
20th-century civil-service state along neocameralist lines. The ideal
result is a planet of thousands, even tens of thousands, of independent
city-states, each managed for profit by its shareholders.
Note that this perspective has nothing at all in common with the
Universalist theory of government. Note also the simplicity of the
transition that it suggests should have happened, from
monarchy as a family business to a modern corporate structure with
separate board and CEO, eliminating the vagaries of the hereditary
principle.
If there is a ‘we’ — this is what we believe.
ADDED: “Exit for all is contemporary Protestantism writ large.” (I suspect
this is probably true and inevitable, but then I’m a cladist.)
ADDED: Bryce explains why I’ve had such trouble grappling with his book.
February 23, 2014Definitive NBS
Nick B. Steves defines ‘Neoreactionary‘ for the Urban Dictionary, with concision, clarity, and
accuracy. Altogether, a valuable and well-executed piece of work. The
format comes in two parts, with an initial definition, followed by an
example of usage. This one begins:
Neoreactionary. A new
reactionary; typically one coming to reactionary ideas and conclusions by way of
post-libertarian and/or post-anarchist paths; like traditional
reactionaries one who is profoundly anti-progressive and suspicious of
all egalitarian ideologies, but often more focused on free market
capitalism as a solution to, or escape from, social ills than his ethnic
or religious identitarian forebears; often, but not exclusively, one
influenced by the writings of several well-known reactionary bloggers in
the 2007-present timeframe.
With some breakfast-table usage exemplified:
As a natural conservative Bill sympathized with part of the agenda of
the Center Right party, but as a neoreactionary he knew that it was
merely an ineffectual brake on the progress of the left. He advocated
for a new yet very ancient politics in which traditional give and take
politics no longer was a factor.
Congratulations to NBS.
This kind of practical workmanship does a lot to hold things together.
It’s sanity glue.
May 11, 2014Disintegration
As argued here
before,
Outside in firmly maintains that the distinctive structural
feature of NRx analysis is escalation by a logical level. It could be
described as ‘meta-politics’ if that term had not already been
adopted, by thinkers in the ENR tradition, to mean something quite different
(i.e. the ascent from politics to culture). There’s an alternative
definition
at Wikipedia that
also seems quite different. This congested linguistic territory drives NRx
to talk about Neocameralism, or Meta-Neocameralism — the analysis of
Patchwork regimes.
From this perspective, all discussion of concrete social ideals and
first-order political preferences, while often entertaining, locally
clarifying, and practical for purposes of group construction, is
ultimately trivial and distracting. The fundamental question does not
concern the kind of society we might like, but rather the differentiation
of societies, such that distinctive social models are able — in the first
place — to be possible. The rigorous NRx position is lodged at the level
of disintegration as such, rather than within a specific disintegrated
fragment. This is because, first of all,
there will not be agreement about social ideals. To be stuck in
an argument about them is, finally, a trap.
Is this not simply Dynamic Geography, of the Patri Friedman
type? As a parallel post-libertarian ‘meta-political’ framework, it is indeed
close. The thing still missing from Dynamic Geography (as currently
intellectually instantiated), however, is Real Politik (or
Machiavellianism). It assumes an environment of goodwill, in which
rational experimentation in government will be permitted. The Startup
Cities model, as well as its
close
relative
Charter Cities, have similar problems. These are all post-libertarian
analyses of governance, at a high logical level, but — unlike NRx — they
are not rooted in a social conflict theory. They expect to formulate
themselves to the point of execution without the necessity of a
theoretical and practical encounter with an implacable enemy. ‘Irrational’
obstruction tends to confuse them. By talking about the
Cathedral, from the beginning, NRx spares itself from such naivety. (Sophisticated
conflict theory within the libertarian tradition has to be sought
elsewhere.)
Some initial points:
(1) Meta-Neocameralism — or high-level NRx analysis — opposes itself
solely to geopolitical integration. This means, as a matter of historical
fate, to the Cathedral. An alternative social ideal, however repugnant it
might be found at the level of first-order political preferences, is only
elevated to a true enemy by universalism. If it seeks to do something —
even something that revolts all actually existing NRx proponents to the
core of their being — within a specific territorial enclave and without
practical mechanisms for universal propagation, it is as likely to be a
tactical ally as a foe. Anything that disintegrates destiny is on our
side. (Immediately, therefore, it can be seen that the preponderant part
of NRx discussion is at best oblique to fundamental strategic goals.)
(2) Universality is poison. Whenever NRx appears to be proposing a social
solution for all people everywhere it has become part of the problem. The
ultimate goal is for
those who disagree to continue to disagree in a different place,
and under separate institutions of government. First-order political
argument, insofar as it tends towards compromise (i.e. partial
convergence) is positively harmful to the large-scale NRx project.
The sole crucial agreement is that we will not agree. Better by
far to make that harsher, than to soften it.
(3) Each thread of the
Trichotomy has
approximately equivalent claim to be the standard bearer of the
disintegrationist position. The reason that this is formulated here with a
Techno-Commercial bias is because it is being formulated here (there is no
reason why it has to be).
(4) A Meta-Neocameral coalition, tightly focused upon effective hostility
to the Cathedral, displays a pattern of tolerances and aversions very
different to that found within a first-order reactionary movement seeking
to immediately instantiate a social ideal of the good. Insofar as the
latter tends to exacerbation of social tensions and geopolitical fission,
it contributes* positively to high-level NRx goals, but it can only expect
theoretical condescension in direct proportion to its concreteness, and
therefore deficient apprehension of the disintegrative position.
A movement of communistic localism that successfully pursued a project of
radical geopolitical autonomization would be, realistically, a more
significant tactical ally than even the most ideologically-pure concrete
reactionary movement which spoke a lot about comparable goals, but gave no
indication it was able to practically realize them.
(5) The world is already fractured and divided, to a considerable degree.
This means that the disintegrative position has no need for utopianism,
and is frequently able to orient itself defensively, in support of
existing differences that are subject to integrative-universalist assault.
Furthermore, there are numerous indications that general world-historical
trends are favorable to geopolitical disintegration, in too many fields to
fully enumerate, but which include political, ethnic, technological, and
economic drivers. Incremental pragmatism is entirely practical under
current geographical and historical conditions.
(6) In provisional conclusion, disapproval of some alternative mode of
life is entirely irrelevant to high-level NRx goals, unless said mode of
life also insists upon living with you. The objective is to
divide the world, not to unify it in accordance with those
principles best attuned to your preferences, however rationally or
traditionally compelling such preferences might be. Universalism is the
enemy. Don’t do it (and to make a scholastic objection out of the
universality of non-universalism, is to have immediately started doing it
— check your totalitarian Hegelianism).
Exit is not an argument.
* Initially misspelled as ‘contribrutes’ — which works.
ADDED: I should already have linked to this. It starts off on a very promising
path, goes along OK until falling apart horribly somewhere in Part V, then
stumbles along, recovering a bit, ending on an encouraging note (but with
the theoretical engine now mostly sheared off). It’s high on my agenda for
a serious engagement.
August 4, 2014Disintegration II
Secession? (plus)
Why not take it all the way to
speciation?
(I can already see it’s going to be hard to keep up.)
November 12, 2016Bonds of Chaos
There are many, I know, who find obstinate invocations of NRx — as a
micro-slogan, cultural brand, conflictual stance, or Schelling point — to
be crude at best, and perhaps thoroughly deluded, or worse. It is as if,
having tumbled into a vogue, one has become enthralled by it, locked into
stuttering, mechanical, thoughtless repetition. Those most skeptical about
the sign are most likely disposed to mournfulness about it, whether
decrying it for congenital flaws, or lamenting its loss of intellectual
productivity and direction.
Obviously, I disagree. NRx is still a cultural infant, far younger than
the Millennium, even under the most mythically-creative extension of its
genesis, and the cognitive ferment it catalyzes remains extraordinary. It
has still scarcely begun. The ties of a consistent name are the very least
that are required to concentrate it. NRx, whatever it turns out to be,
needs lashing together, because explosions tend to fly apart — and it is
unmistakably an explosion.
Creative coincidence, or convergent diversity, is the mark of a culture at
work (which is to say, in process). Yesterday, September 3, demonstrated
this vividly. Approaching the conclusion of a multi-aspected
post
on Dugin, ethnicity, religion, and the “dementia’ of being, NIO suggests:
Referring to Chaos would seem in this circumstance to be an option of
incredible potential, indeed, if you look closely enough at NRx the
hints are already there that
Chaos is a central
defining characteristic of the thought of all branches of the Trichotomy
on multiple levels. Chaos creates order, in fact Chaos is also a form of
order, just one which is not immediately understandable.
[I will not fake an apology for the self-looping internal link, since it
it is one that would in any case have been made here.]
Recalling that NIO explicitly invokes the ontological depths of Chaos —
its
Hesiodic
as well as metaphysical density — it is especially remarkable to find, on
the same day, an intricate
post
by E. Antony Gray, which advances an innovative tripartite schema as the
key to the aesthetic core of NRx. This text, too, culminates in a call for
an integrative expedition into chaos, staged out of the void:
… the ‘face of the deep’ in Genesis is a primordial unformed, unseen
void; That it is called ‘water’ in the Septuagint Greek lets us know
something about the peculiar state of Chaos in the Void. The Void is
thus Darkness but not shadow (a shadow is a deprivation of light caused
by an object) but rather the substrate of all existence, only properly
‘unseen’ when no physical light is present. [… ] Chaos is substantial
where disorder is insubstantial. Chaos is the ‘quintessence’ of things,
chaotic itself and yet always-begetting order. Breaking down disorder,
since disorder is maladaptive. Exit is a way to induce bifurcation, to
quickly reduce entropy through separation from the highly entropic
system. If no immediate exit is available, Chaos will create one.
To denounce the exhaustion of NRx is an absurdity. It is an exploratory
departure, scarcely initiated. To cling to its sign is to subscribe to its
impulse, and to set out …
September 4, 2014The Network
(I can’t get enough of this stuff.)
October 1, 2014Theonomy
This
is the NRx sect that still hasn’t shown up. (The
slot is wide open.) A
critical but informative
essay
at First Things explains:
Bible law requires a radical decentralization of government under the
rule of the righteous. Private property rights, especially for the sake
of the family, must be rigorously protected, with very limited
interference by the state and the institutional church. Restitution,
including voluntary slavery, should be an important element of the
criminal justice system. A strong national defense should be maintained
until the whole world is “reconstructed” (which may be a very long
time). Capital punishment will be employed for almost all the capital
crimes listed in the Old Testament, including adultery, homosexual acts,
apostasy, incorrigibility of children (meaning late teenagers), and
blasphemy, along with murder and kidnapping. There will be a cash,
gold-based economy with limited or no debt. These are among the
specifics broadly shared by people who associate themselves with the
theonomic viewpoint.
(‘Triggered’ by this — which
is well worth re-visiting.)
ADDED: This is worth spelling out (from the
same essay) —
A reconstructed world ruled by future Rushdoonyites will not, needless
to say, be democratic. Rushdoony is straightforward in condemning
democracy as a “heresy.” He writes that he is in agreement with John
Dewey on the proposition that “supernatural Christianity and democracy
are inevitably enemies.”
August 14, 2015NRx Thought
It isn’t entirely clear whether Warg Franklin is asking:
How does NRx think? Nevertheless, his
introduction
to postrationalism cannot but contribute to such a question (whether the
latter is taken descriptively, prescriptively, or diagonally). The
excellent onward links merit explicit mention (1,
2,
3).
How NRx thinks is a critical index of what it is.
Outside in is probably ‘postrationalist’. What it
certainly is, however, is disintegrationist. It translates the
caution against rationalist hubris — dubbed
reservationism by Moldbug (in the link provided) — as a general
antipathy to global solutions (and their attendant universalist
ideologies). To be promoted, in the place of any Great Answer, is
computational fragmentation. Whenever the research program meets an
obstacle, divide it. “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Or at
least, since selection is inescapable, defend the fork (as such) first,
and the chosen path only secondarily.
Delegate selection to Gnon. To do so not only husbands resources, but also
maximizes overall experimentation. Intelligence is scarce. It is needed,
above all, for tinkering well. Global conceptual policing is an exhausting
waste, and an unnecessary one, since territorial distribution, or some
effective proxy, can carry it for free. Security capacity is needed to
fend off those determined to share their mistakes. Using it, instead, to
impose any measure — whatsoever — of global conformity is a pointless
extravagance, and a diversion.
Whether articulated as epistemology, or as meta-politics, NRx is aligned
with the declaration: There is no need for us to agree. Refuse
all dialectics. It is not reconciliation that is needed, but definitive
division. (Connect, but disintegrate.)
Think in patches. Eventually, some of them will work.
October 28, 2015Doom Circuitry
This is what XS maintains:
There is perfect philosophical integrity between the tragic foundations of
Occidental Civilization and the cybernetic industrialism that defines its
ultimate limit. Within this neoreactionary frame, reaction is
never regressive enough, nor modernity ever advanced enough. Something
more comforting — less distant — will be seized upon in both
temporal directions. That is the minor theme of fate. No effective
constituency could ever want to push far enough in either direction, to
the point where the circuit of time closes, upon doom (coldly
understood). It does not matter, because politics does not. Doom matters.
The rest is pitiful species vanity, tragedy, and control malfunction. It
will burn, without comprehending why.
From the perspective of doom — only glimpsed, slowly, after vast
disciplines of coldness — everything you are trying to do is a desperate
idiocy that will fail, because humanism (hubris) is the one thing
you can never let go. The drama dictates that. There’s no point
flagellating yourself over it. The cosmos is not so poor in flagellation
that it requires your meager contribution.
“Yes we can!” is everything Neoreaction is not. Perhaps you even see that.
Yet you repeat it with every measure you propose. Take your favorite
ideological slogan and attach “Yes we can!” as an appendix. If it works,
you now know the epoch to which you belong.
Only doom can (and will).
Carry on, though. You will, in any case. It entertains the gods.
February 10, 2016
CHAPTER TWO - AESTHETICS
Elysium
Having finally got around to
Elysium, one point in particular bears emphasis: There’s only one interesting
character in the movie, and she’s a neoreactionary heroine. That’s not a
matter of ideological preference. Among the tiny number of characters who
might imaginably be thought to know what they’re doing, Secretary of
Defense Jessica Delacourt (Jodie Foster) is the only one to be treated
with the slightest seriousness.
There’s a potentially intriguing snakehead gangster (‘Spider’ played by
Wagner Moura), but he loses all credibility by morphing without
explanation into Robin Hood. (Note to Hollywood: Snakeheads are not
carried by any obvious vector of social interest to become proponents of
radically open borders — it’s just possible that Blomkamp is screwing with
your mind.)
Soulless capitalist John Carlyle (William Fichtner) is reduced to plot
prey, whilst the Elysium Davos-liberal President Patel (Faran Tahrir) is
nothing beyond a foil for Delacourt. Everyone else in the movie is either
a convincing nobody, or an entertaining cartoon.
A quick Elysium synopsis might be in order. By 2154 socialist
insanity has long turned the world to shit, in all the ways that anyone
with functioning sensory organs already observes happening today. A
teeming mass of incompetent, dysgenically-processed, entropically
poly-ethnic criminals now populate the earth, whilst the social elites
have retreated to an orbital refuge (Elysium). Naturally, the
earth is a squalid, polluted, socially-collapsed, and radically
decivilized wasteland, whilst Elysium is a beautiful, functional,
productively organized achievement. So far, so obviously realistic.
The earthlings are by now so dim that they don’t even begin to understand
why they can’t have good things too. The government of Elysium, in
Hollywood /Silicon Valley fashion, can’t help but sympathize (or at least
pretend to out of political expediency and social signalling). When
Delacourt does her job, therefore, and arranges for Elysium-headed space
barges full of “illegals” to be blasted into debris, the government moves
to put her on a leash. As a classic neoreactionary, Delacourt quickly
understands that defending Elysium will require a regime reboot. (The
movie actually uses the word “reboot”, in a far sillier way, for the
eventual triumph of the new Cathedral, when the very category of
‘illegality’ is erased from the Elysium computer systems.)
By this point the film has done everything worth doing, and descends
unreservedly into ideological slapstick. Delacourt is randomly killed by
her own human-rights-violating special operative, in order to clear the
last possibility of sanity out of the way. In the end, reliably convincing
half-wit thug Max Da Costa (Matt Damon) becomes a stereotypical Hollywood
Nu-Jesus by sacrificing himself to obliterate the final remaining fragment
of civilization in the name of indiscriminate sharing. Blomkamp has by now
completely lost himself in his own hilarity (“quite how stupid can we make
this without liberals catching on? Actually, infinitely stupid…”). There’s
no reason to get distracted by it here.
Delacourt’s question is the important one: How to maintain the last
redoubt of social order, as a spatially-realized system of discrimination,
when its own governing elite is fundamentally committed to subverting it?
“Do you have children?” she asks the feckless president. He doesn’t even
bother to reply. Responsible time-horizons are incompatible with his
political office. So she moves forwards with plans for a reboot (which, of
course, have to fail — the movie was released and distributed wasn’t
it?).
We need to start printing Delacourt’s image on Tee-shirts*, or
something.
Move over Darth Sidious. She’s the model villain for a rotten world.
*Begin the marketing in
Australia?
October 1, 2013Dawn of Neoreaction
Cambodia version:
Click on image to expand.
(The only illumination comes from the right.)
I’m heading back to SH late tomorrow. The
return to full-spectrum connectivity and production time will be nice, but
I’ll miss this kind of stuff:
Click on image to expand.
[I’ve put up a couple of snaps
here too]
January 31, 2014Play the Decline
Bryce Laliberte passed along
this pop
culture celebration of democracy’s death in imperialist chaos. It’s worth
a look. (Kevin Spacey seems to have made himself the iconic face of mass
media dark enlightenment.)
May 3, 2014NRx Dark Powers
Duck Enlightenment (jokeocracy) hashtags
this
as an #instantclassic. It is. (Also, make sure not to miss
Stirner‘s potted-history
of Neoreaction in the comments.)
… and it looks as if we’re stealing the Black Sun too:
ADDED: Brett Stevens visits the Stirner comment, and annotates it.
I also liked this:
ADDED: History being made.
ADDED: Then this —
May 16, 2014The Trike
RiverC has gone and done it this
time …
There’s more:
May 20, 2014NRx: The Call
The NRx video game
linked a while
back has now
gone
explicitly Neocameralist. The most infernal pulp-zones of popular culture
appear to be going seriously off-script, with the counter-Cathedral
delivered directly through your X-Box. (‘Atlas’ seems more than a little
ideologically-freighted, no?)
Spacey’s post-democratic harsh realism I get, Atlas commercialized
‘security’ I get, but I’ve no idea at all what this is about (although it
looks suitably menacing):
July 31, 2014City of Night
This insisted on being stolen. It made itself irresistible by its sheer
Amishlessness:
(via Derek Hopper)
Rather than cathedrals, the East Asian cities that enthrall this blog tend
to nurture temples to self-cultivation and ultimate cosmic nullity among
their LED-skinned hypermodern edifices of capitalist
darkness. Yet, despite the difference in religious heritage, the split-time
signature is precisely the same. Neoreaction diverges from Paleoreaction
insofar as it coincides with the understanding: Tradition is not something
one can ever simply hold on to, or to which one can truly return. The
Neoreactionary city is a standing
time-spiral
in process.
August 28, 2014Cyber-Suicide
Take my eye off
Anathema, and
this
happens:
It’s pulpy and narrative-driven, of course, but that surely has its place.
Even within its limitations it helps to hold open the question — from
which I’m far too easily distracted —
what would an NRx aesthetic be? The thematic reflexivity is a
part of that.
To be brutally frank, I’ve basically given up on the West as a source of
continuing visual aesthetic achievement (symptom). Its global influence strikes me as radically toxic, promoting
worthless pomo garbage wherever it gets its foot in the door, and whenever
it tries to pull-out of its death spiral — to become neo-traditional — it
sticks Roman columns everywhere and looks simply ridiculous. The last
person who could get away with anything like that was de Chirico. Probably
fascism wrecked it, as it did so many other things. Grumpiness aside, the
importance of the discussion is undeniable. The consolidation which
matters most takes place on the aesthetic plane.
ADDED: Huge
twitter agitation about this, so I’m tacking it on, even though the
connection is tenuous at best.
December 13, 2014Seasonal Order
Tech-Comm NRx approves of this message:
(To replace ‘arrest’ with ‘instant execution by our private security
drones’ would be a tweak worth considering. The ‘change’ sign in the
background is a nice touch.)
December 21, 2014Stock and Flow
Some clear, sensible, extremely practical
suggestions on balancing
production (via). It’s a problem — tractable in principle, but tricky, and easy to get
wrong — that a lot of people are working at right now, NRx very much
included. I’ve not seen it stated with such conceptual elegance before
now.
… stock and flow is the master metaphor for media today. Here’s what I
mean:
* Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of
daily and sub-daily updates that remind people that you exist.
* Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as
interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what
people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely,
building fans over time.
I feel like flow is ascendant these days, for obvious reasons — but we
neglect stock at our own peril. I mean that both in terms of the health
of an audience and, like, the health of a soul. Flow is a treadmill, and
you can’t spend all of your time running on the treadmill. Well, you
can. But then one day you’ll get off and look around and go: Oh man.
I’ve got nothing here. […] But I’m not saying you should ignore flow …
NRx epitomizes the problem. It’s been through a phase of excited flow, but
the question of stock-building is becoming unavoidable. Correct too hard,
and the current dies altogether. Fail to correct at all, and nothing gets
built. Every time I see someone burn out of Twitter, it looks to me as if
the stock-flow balance problem has claimed another casualty. At least,
that’s what I now realize I’ve been seeing.
April 23, 2015
CHAPTER THREE - FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS
Questions
Nydrwracu
wants
us to think harder, which has to be a good thing (right?). So what are the
basic questions of neoreaction? This is too important to rush, so I’m
inclined to go meta (which reliably slows things down).
First meta point: If this is going to work, it has to be far more
rigorously honed. That means a maximum of three basic problems each, with
the objective of amalgamation into a list of 10, at most. The process of
compression should do a lot of the preparatory work. Add Nydrwracu’s
original 11 to Bryce Laliberte’s entirely different 10 ( in the comments,
same link), and the result is already a sprawling mess that isn’t going
anywhere. Neither list is remarkable for its tautness, as I hope both
proposers would admit. “The 119 basic problems of neoreaction” isn’t going
to sharpen anybody up.
Anyway, here are mine:
(1) The
Odysseus Problem (or political knot theory): Can a model of distributed
power be rigorously formulated? I am not remotely convinced that this
question has yet been answered, and I refuse to get excited about monarchs
until it has.
(2)
Does a rigorous theory of degenerative ratchets capture the basic
practical problem of neoreaction? If it does, a domain of investigation is
determined at a high-level of abstraction. If it doesn’t, where do we look
for degenerative ratchet counter-engineering (wherever it is, I’ll be
spending a lot of time there).
(3)
What does the ‘neo-‘ in ‘neoreaction’ signify? This is a timely question,
because I’m noticing a lot of people edging into it, and the topics it
excavates are huge. My own take on this: Anyone who thinks that Modernity,
Capitalism, and Progress are simply bad things to have happened
should drop the ‘neo-‘ prefix immediately. After that, anybody who lacks
conviction about needing it should think about doing the same. Sheer
reaction is OK, isn’t it? Fashion isn’t a good reason for anything.
James Goulding also had an extremely interesting set of basic questions
(I’m worried they’re lost somewhere on this blog). Turning them up would
also contribute seriously to moving this forward.
ADDED: Konkvistador tracks
down
the ghosts of Goulding’s research agenda questions.
The commentary on this thread has already been so scorchingly excellent
that it’s actually quite intimidating. (I’m blaming a brain-fogging head
cold for not diving in more productively so far.)
October 22, 2013Neoreactionary Problems
I’m under a sacred obligation to review Bryce Laliberte’s ebook
What is Neoreaction? Ideology, Social-Historical Evolution, and the
Phenomena of Civilization. Thankfully, this solemn duty was not specifically scheduled. Working
towards its accomplishment is a thought-provoking process, which is a good
thing.
As a trivial matter, I’m forced to ask: Is that supposed to be
‘phenomena’? ‘Phenomenon’ would be more stylistically persuasive, even if
the plural is defensible on conceptual grounds. That kind of side-issue,
however, is symptomatic self-distraction. There are serious questions at
stake here, and elusive ones.
My prevarication is partly the result of
colliding ideas, which have become entangled with the meaning of this book
(for me), but are not really internal to its own concerns. Foremost among
these is the connotation of the word ‘neoreaction’ itself, sparking an
embryonic conversation (at Laliberte’s
place, and mine).
Terminological issues can easily seem pernickety, or fetishistic, but in
this case at least they extend continuously into matters of indisputable
substance, and relevance. Summarily: Is ‘neoreaction’ primarily a doctrine
or a problem? (Perhaps the question mark unfairly skews the trial.)
In a future post I’ll get back to the specifics of Laliberte’s extended
definition — which is arguably coextensive with the book. It’s of
wide-ranging interest, and connects importantly with Nick B. Steves’
search for ‘reactionary consensus‘ (note: no ‘neo-‘). At this point, however, my place-holder remarks are
themselves deliberately problematic, referring to the role of paradox and
irony in the term, and in the ‘thing’ — elements which are for me
essential, but which I suspect Laliberte sees as incidental, or even
unfortunate. Neoreaction, from the problematic perspective, is
the insistence of a question, rather than a solution struggling
to be born into settled doctrine. It is a word contrived to preserve its
own dynamic illegibility (or unstable paradox), at least as much as the
name for a program on the path to acceptance (arriving at consensual
significance).
Since neoreaction seems to be hurtling towards some kind of
recognition, due in no small part to Laliberte’s contributions, these considerations
are only arcane on one side of an undeveloped conversation. Most
probably, the pace and context of this exchange will be set in unexpected
places. Such impending unknowns inevitably guide my path into Laliberte’s
book, as it opens, piece by piece, up ahead.
November 14, 2013Scavenger
Soap Jackal is foraging:
Note: Cap-stripped terms are bolded, while the format
discussion
rages.
October 8, 2014Twitter cuts (#27)
This (cubed).
It shouldn’t even be difficult. Could any ‘rectification of names’ be more
straightforward? If the word is grasped with any lucidity,
the more diversity the better. Every problem that the
(non-totalitarian) right has with ‘diversity’ is in fact a rejection of
homogenization. To allow the prevailing pattern of usage to continue
unchallenged is an absurdity.
‘Diversity’ already tilts into non-universality, and that is meta-level
rightism itself.
The diversity between diversity and non-diversity is the best diversity.
September 8, 2015
CHAPTER FOUR - THE RATCHET
What We Deserve
The mysteries of the ideological spectrum are deep enough to absorb
endless exploration. Why, for instance, should there be
an ideological spectrum at all? Are not human disagreements over
social decisions naturally multi-dimensional? How can opinions about the
optimum scale of government statistically predict attitudes to affirmative
action, immigration, gun control, drug prohibition, abortion, gay
marriage, climate change, and foreign policy? Does it not seem
near-magical that the seating arrangements of the late-18th century French
National Assembly continue to organize the
terminology
of ideological orientation up to the present day?
At times, however, perplexity recedes, and certain basic patterns emerge
with startling clarity. This is evident today in the United States – the
world’s great circus of ideological antagonism — in the wake of its
latest, spectacular performance.
As polarization intensifies – which
it does – the
essential is expressed through the extremes, and the alternatives are
simplified. Which is it to be: politics or economics? There can be no
sustainable co-existence. One must utterly eradicate the other.
Either politics, or economics, deserves to be completely
destroyed — politics for its incontinent lust for absolute power, or
economics for its icy indifference to public concerns. The
conflict of visions
is irreconcilable. From the pure perspective of terminal politics, all
market rewards are arbitrary and illegitimate, whilst from that
of economics, people are entitled to precisely nothing.
Speaking on behalf of the political losers, Russ Roberts (at Cafe Hayek)
adopts
a light-hearted approach:
The despair of the Right is not the product of a single lamentable
election result, but is grounded in the relentlessly gathering realization
that it is inherently maladapted to politics. When the Right attains
power, it is by becoming something other than itself, betraying its
partisans not only incidentally and peripherally, through timidity or
incompetence, but centrally and fundamentally, by practically advancing an
agenda that almost perfectly negates its supposed ideological commitments.
It builds that which it had promised to destroy, and further enthralls
that which it had promised to liberate. Its victories mean ever less, its
defeats ever more. To win is at most a lesser evil, whilst to lose opens
new, unprecedented horizons of calamity, initiating previously unimagined
adventures in horror.
Dean Kalahar
captures
the mood:
The left has its own frustrations, which its ever-greater approximation to
total political dominion cannot appease, and in fact exacerbate. The more
that it subordinates its enemies to its will, the more its will conforms
to the image of its enemies – not the economy as it was, evasive and
morally disinterested, but the economy as it was caricatured and
denounced: narrowly and brutally self-interested, sublime in its
gargantuan greed, radically corrupt, and irreparably dysfunctional. The
cartoon plutocrat re-appears as the consummate political insider in a
shot-silk Che Guevara tee-shirt, minutely dictating the content of
legislation, and pursuing a career trajectory that smoothly alternates
between the chairs of regulatory agencies and Wall Street boardrooms.
Through a perverse, ineliminable double-entry book-keeping, the fiscal
mountains of government largesse are registered, simultaneously, as an
orgiastic feast of crony capitalist money creation. Public altruism and
private avarice lock into exact logico-mathematical identity.
The gyre turns. ‘Right’ administrations become sclerotic big government
bureaucracies, whilst ‘Left’ administrations become the cynical public
relations façade for rapacious banking cartels. In either case, government
equates to treachery, executed by a party that necessarily abuses its own
political partisans. Since politics is ever-increasingly the preserve of
the Left, this is not an oscillator, but a
ratchet, with a predictable direction (into
Left Singularity, “moving the electorate ever leftwards by making it ever
more dysfunctional”).
The Right, the party of the economy, is losing all credibility as a Party,
especially to itself. In the war of annihilation that contemporary
ideological schism has become, the substitute, characteristic battle-cry
could be confidently anticipated, even were it not already so distinctly
heard:
the market will avenge these offenses.
Nemesis. Let the temple crash.
Expect to hear much more of this, however much it revolts you.
Things will fall apart (even more, far more …), or not, but in either case
we will know what we really deserve. Reality is God, but which is
the true religion?
In the immortal
words
of HL Mencken: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what
they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
November 9, 2012Left Singularity
Dark Enlightenment begins with the recognition that
reality is unpopular, so that the ‘natural’ course of political
development, under democratic conditions, is reliably based upon the
promise of an alternative. Pandering to fantasy is the only platform that
delivers electoral support. When the dreams turn bad it is
politically obvious that they have not been held firmly or
sincerely enough, their radicalism has been insufficient, and a more
far-reaching solution is imperative. Since either deliberate or merely
inertial rightist sabotage is clearly to blame,
the beatings will continue until morale improves.
This syndrome, essentially indistinguishable from political modernity,
calls for a cybernetic theory of accelerating social deterioration, or
self-reinforcing economic repression. The trend that dark enlightenment
recoils from demands explanation, which is found in the diagram of
Left Singularity.
A singularity, of any kind, is the limit of a process dominated by
positive feedback, and thus driven to an extreme. In its pure mathematical
expression, the trend is not merely exponential, but parabolic,
asymptotically closing upon infinity in finite time. The ‘logic of
history’ converges upon an absolute limit, beyond which further
prolongation is strictly impossible. From this ultimate, impassable
barrier, dark enlightenment retrogresses into political history,
prophetically inflamed by its certainty of the end. Unless democracy
disintegrates before the wall, it will hit the wall.
“Increased repression brings increased leftism, increased leftism brings
increased repression, in an ever tighter circle that turns ever faster.
This is the left singularity,” Donald writes. The principal
dark hypothesis is evident: on the left slope, failure is not
self-corrective, but rather the opposite. Dysfunction deepens itself
through the circuit of
disappointment:
It is necessary, then, to accept the leftist inversion of Clausewitz, and
the proposition that politics is war by other means, precisely
because it retains the Clausewitzean
tendency to the extreme (making it ‘prone to escalation’). This is the reason why modern political history has a characteristic
shape, which combines a duration of escalating ‘progress’ with a terminal,
quasi-punctual interruption, or catastrophe – a restoration or ‘reboot’.
Like mould in a Petri dish, progressive polities ‘develop’ explosively
until all available resources have been consumed, but unlike slime
colonies they exhibit a dynamism that is further exaggerated (from the
exponential to the hyperbolic) by the fact that resource depletion
accelerates the development trend.
Economic decay erodes productive potential and increases dependency,
binding populations ever more desperately to the promise of political
remedy. The progressive slope steepens towards the precipice of supreme
radicality, or total absorption into the state … and somewhere
fractionally before then, either before or after it has stolen everything
you own, taken your children, unleashed mass killing, and descended into
cannibalism, it ends.
It can’t eat the Petri dish, or abolish reality (in reality). There is a
limit. But humanity gets a chance to show what it’s capable of, on the
downside. As Whiskey commented (on
this
Sailer thread): “This Enlightenment is ‘Dark’ because it tells us true
things we’d rather not know or read or hear, because they paint a
not-so-lovely picture of human nature at its rawest.” Progress takes us
into the raw.
Gregory Bateson referred to cybernetic escalation as ‘schismogenesis’,
which he identified in a number of social phenomena. Among these was
substance
abuse
(specifically alcoholism), whose abstract dynamics, at the level of the
individual, are difficult to distinguish from collective political
radicalization. The alcoholic is captured by a schismogenetic circuit, and
once inside, the only attractive solution is to head further in. At each
step of life disintegration, one needs a drink more than ever. There goes
the job, the savings, the wife and kids, and there’s nowhere to look for
hope except the bar, the vodka bottle, and eventually that irresistible
can of floor polish. Escape comes – if it comes before the morgue – in
‘hitting bottom’. Escalation to the extreme reaches the end of the road,
or the story, where another might – possibly – begin. Schismogenesis
predicts catastrophe.
Hitting bottom has to be horrible. A long history brought you to
this, and if this isn’t obviously, indisputably, an intolerable state of
ultimate degradation, it will carry on. It isn’t finished until it
really can’t go on, and that has to be several notches worse than
can be anticipated. Left Singularity is deep into the dregs of the floor
polish, with everything gone. It’s worse than anything you can imagine,
and there’s no point at all trying to persuade people they’ve arrived
there before they know they have. ‘Things could be better than this’ won’t
cut it. That’s what progress is for, and progress is the
problem.
January 7, 2013Cold Turkey
Neoreactionary excitement has generated a wave of strategy discussions,
focused upon Moldbug’s Antiversity model of organized dissident knowledge.
The most energetic example (orchestrated by Nydwracu) can be followed
here,
here, and
here. Francis St. Pol’s substantial contribution is
here.
Beyond curmudgeonly cynicism about youthful enthusiasm,
these
concerns, and a strain of pessimism that accompanies the recognition that
the Cathedral owns media like the USN owns carrier groups, is
there any explanation for Outside in hanging back from all this,
and smoking sulkily in the corner? If there’s a single term that accounts
for our reluctance, it’s cold turkey.
Keynesianism is far from the only contributor to left-modernist
degeneration, but it’s ruinous enough to account for the destruction of
civilization on its own. The fact that it’s most realistically conceived
as a symptom — of democratized politics, and still deeper things — doesn’t
affect its narrative role. The important point, understood widely enough
to be a cliché, is that Keynesian economics is an exact social
analog of addiction at the level of the individual, slaved to what William
Burroughs described as “the algebra of need.”
Money is made into a drug, and the solution to the pain of craving is to
crank up the dose. However bad it gets, if you just scale-up the fix, the
suffering goes away. Junkies can survive for a shockingly long time.
Perhaps there’s no end to it (that’s a question for the
Right on the Money discussion).
Outside the morgue, if there is an end — and every venture into
neoreactionary strategy presumes it — there’s only one form it can take:
cold turkey. To not be in the habit anymore, it is necessary to kick it.
That’s going to be really nasty.
At the level of economic structure, the ‘blue pill’ isn’t just a
comforting illusion, it’s a massive, deeply habitual, ultra-high tolerance
(thanks
Spandrell) fix, radically craved down to the cellular level. Society has
been doing this for a long time, and by now it’s mainlining crates of the
stuff. People die of cold turkey. If not quite the worst thing in the
world, it’s an overwhelmingly-impressive simulation of exactly that.
Rational argument doesn’t get close to addressing it.
Sure, junkies lie all the time, but the lies aren’t the basic problem.
‘Correcting’ the lies gets nowhere, because nobody is even really
pretending. When the junky lies, he knows, you know, everybody knows that
the fundamental message is simply: I want more junk. He’ll say
anything that gets fractionally closer to the next fix. Hence the circus
of democracy.
The pusher laughs at rational argument. There’s some well-meaning type
saying: seriously, think about it, this is really messed up. Then
there’s the ‘pusher’ — which is already a joke — because people are
crawling to him on their knees. He doesn’t need to say anything. One more
hit and the pain goes away for a while. That’s what matters. The rest is
merely ‘superstructural’ (to go Right-wing Marxist on the topic).
There’s no way, ever, that from this deep in, one gets out before hitting
bottom. The slide has to reach the limit, because short of that, the
prospect of anesthesia trumps everything.
Western Civilization is a sick junky. It isn’t going to be argued out of
its habit. First, it has to taste the floor. That’s just the way it is —
ugly.
ADDED:
Hooked.
June 17, 2013Obamanation II
Richard Fernandez has written many brilliant things, so
this
might not — necessarily — be his greatest moment, but it’s the post most
perfectly substituting for what this blog would want to have said.
Discussing the prospect of impeachment proceedings against the POTUS, he
speaks through the avatar of an imagined Republican senator, to say
exactly what is needed:
And after we get rid of him, after a decent interval, aren’t we’re
going to do again? This time with an historic Woman president, Asian
president, Gay president? You really need never run out of Jonahs.
I say …
Gnon gave you Obama to crash the whole rotten mess. Treasure him. “Ladies
and gentleman. You’re not getting rid of Barack Obama that easily. This
time there are consequences, not from me, not from the Tea Party but from
reality. God exists ladies and gentleman. Or at least Murphy does.
Consequences are a b**ch.”
(Outside in
Obamanation
background)
June 19, 2014The Idea of Neoreaction
To translate ‘neoreaction’ into ‘the new reaction’ is in no way
objectionable. It is new, and open to novelty. Apprehended historically,
it dates back no more than a few years. The writings of Mencius Moldbug
have been a critical catalyst.
Neoreaction is also a species of reactionary political analysis,
inheriting a deep suspicion of ‘progress’ in its ideological usage. It
accepts that the dominant sociopolitical order of the world has
‘progressed’ solely on the condition that such advance, or
relentless forward movement, is entirely stripped of moral endorsement,
and is in fact bound to a primary association with worsening. The
model is that of a progressive disease.
The ‘neo-‘ of neoreaction is more than just a
chronological marker, however. It introduces a distinctive idea, or
abstract topic: that of a degenerative ratchet.
The impulse to back out of something is already reactionary, but it is the
combination of a critique of progress with a recognition that
simple reversal is impossible that initiates neoreaction. In this
respect, neoreaction is a specific discovery of the arrow of time, within
the field of political philosophy. It learns, and then teaches, that the
way to get out cannot be the way we got in.
Wherever progressivism takes hold, a degenerative ratchet is set to work.
It is unthinkable that any society could back out of the
expansive franchise, the welfare state, macroeconomic policy-making,
massively-extended regulatory bureaucracy, coercive-egalitarian secular
religion, or entrenched globalist intervention. Each of these
(inter-related) things are essentially irreversible. They give modern
history a gradient. Given any two historical ‘snap-shots’, one
can tell immediately which is earlier and which later, by simply observing
the extent to which any of these social factors have progressed.
Leviathan does not shrink.
Within the theory of complex systems, certain phase transitions exhibit
comparable properties. Network effects can lock-in changes, which
are then irreversible. The adoption and consolidation of the Qwerty
keyboard exemplifies this pattern. Technological businesses commonly make
lock-in central to their strategies, and if they succeed, they cannot then
die in the same way they matured.
When neoreaction identifies a degenerative ratchet — such as the (Jim
Donald) Left Singularity — it necessarily poses the problem of a novel
end. The process goes wrong consistently, and irreversibly. To repeat the
Neoreactionary Idea as a mantra:
the way out cannot be the way in.
A degenerative ratchet can only progress, until it cannot go on, and it
stops. What happens next is something else — its Outside. Moldbug calls it
a reboot. History can tell us to expect it, but not what we are
to expect.
June 28, 2013The Ruin Reservoir
In the Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer
notes:
It doesn’t take a genius to see what happens when the entitlement state
outgrows the economy upon which it rests. The time of Greece,
Cyprus, Portugal, Spain, the rest of insolvent social-democratic Europe — and
now Detroit — is the time for conservatives to raise the banner of
Stein’s Law and yell, “Stop.” You can kick the can down the road, but at
some point it disappears over a cliff.
Yes, yes, yes … but. Despite its perfect common sense, the monotony of
this message is becoming utterly unbearable. The end isn’t arriving
tomorrow. This dreary horror show could last for
decades. How
many roughly-identical, absolutely obvious, sensible Op Ed columns is it
possible to endure? (I’m already way into overtime.)
A reasonable conclusion from the reality of
degenerative ratchets is that nothing less than a comprehensive
crash
makes them stop. Some of the healthier Right-delight over the Detroit
implosion is tied to the expectation that bad examples could be
educational, but the evidence for that is slender, especially under
conditions of sovereign propaganda saturation (the Cathedral). Who are you
going to trust, the academic-media complex or your lying eyes? We already
know the predominant answer to that question.
When a message is existentially unacceptable to the Cathedral, it will not
be heard, and the only messages with substantial reality content are of
exactly this kind. True believers will stick with a morbid utopia to the
end, since anything truly different would — in any case — count for them
as some species of death. For cynics, the calculation is even easier: why
unnecessarily shorten looting time? More common still are the poor idiots,
who will just do what they’re told (while trying to grab a little feeding
trough time), and then be sacrificed. It should already be clear that
nobody cares about them, and they’re too defective to care
competently for themselves. That’s neither justice nor injustice, but
simple reality.
Nobody here is under any illusions about the profound socio-political
malignancy given free reign in Detroit, or about the quality of human
material over which it held sway, and yet it lasted up to a point that has
provoked repeated comparisons with Hiroshima-1945, wrung out to the ugly
end (and we haven’t yet seen the end). If we ever doubted that
there’s a lot of ruin in a nation, we no longer can. For a city
uniquely proficient at suicide, the process lasts half a century,
including final, grinding decades, when nothing beyond a zombie parody of
what once was still remains. If a uniquely benighted social trash pile can
last this long, how far can the world’s most powerful nation spin out its
decline? There’s enough time, to be sure, for an Amazon jungle worth of
Herbert Stein-inspired Op Eds.
Can-kicking eventually runs out of road, of course, and its only
when this truism has become an intolerable, deadening drone that
neoreaction begins. Anybody who still needs to hear that message
is simply lost. Remedial education cannot be the neoreactionary
task (there are libertarian-oriented conservatives for that — and they
will fail).
If the Dark Enlightenment cannot end with Stein’s conclusion, but is
rather initiated by it, born from the presupposition that
this cannot go on forever, how is its guiding topic to be
understood? What will it discuss — with what will it occupy itself — amid
the deepening ruin, for decades?
As its name indicates, Dark Enlightenment is a creature of late twilight,
preparing for a gruesomely protracted night. One object that merits
growing fascination is certainly this:
the ruin reservoir is deep. As a fact this is easily — and for
neoreaction necessarily — acknowledged, but the exploration of
its mysteries has still scarcely begun.
July 26, 2013Dark Acceleration
There’s been a virtual post on
the worse, the better* simmering in the kitchen here for
a while, without reaching the stage of being ready for the table. ‘Max’
exuberantly pre-empts the topic in
this comment
thread. How deeply is this speculative position insinuated into the DNA of
neoreaction? (The provisional Outside in response: very deeply.)
There’s no longer any keeping it off the ‘to do’ list.
Also (on the same thread): don’t miss the trial application of the Lesser
Bull / Gnon terminological creation Ruin Voting. It has a
dazzling future, because it so exactly captures a devastating empirical
reality. (If successfully slogan-synthesized with one or two additional
words, it will be despatched immediately to the T-shirt
factory.
Perhaps antagonistic ghetto punks would be prepared to pay for a ‘Ruin
Voter’ shirt already?)
*Wikipedia
attributes
the origin of the phrase to Nikolay Chernyshevsky, who seems to have been
systematically lexo-pillaged by Lenin. (Chernyshevsky was also author of
the novel What is to be done?)
September 3, 2013Sundown
David Stockman rests his analysis of recent economic history upon one
basic presupposition, whose modesty is expressed by an intrinsic
inclination to a negative form:
Radical dishonesty cannot provide a foundation for enduring financial
value. This assumption suffices to expose the otherwise scarcely
comprehensible rottenness of American public affairs, to organize an
integral understanding of the gathering calamity, and to marginalize his
work as the over-excited howl of a lonely crank.
In any society where minimal standards of civil decency were still even
tenuously remembered, his ideas would be simple common sense. In the
bedlamite orgy we in fact inhabit, Stockman’s thoughts appear wildly
counter-intuitive, rigidly structured by uninterpretable imperatives, and
suffused by an improbable aura of doom. In fact Stockman is quite clear —
implicitly — that under American political conditions
sanity was strictly unobtainable. The coming calamity fulfills a
(bi-partisan) democratic destiny — but that is to anticipate.
Stockman’s
latest
compressed overview of our contemporary crisis — generated by
the accelerated demolition of economic civilization over the last
quarter-century — explains the “Sundown in America” — “a dystopic ‘new
normal’ where historic notions of perpetual progress and robust economic
growth no longer pertain.” It outlines a vision that supports a
theoretical bet, or short speculation on the economic infrastructure of
the Cathedral: “Now the American state — the agency which was supposed to
save capitalism from its inherent flaws and imperfections — careens wildly
into dysfunction and incoherence. […] Washington’s machinery of national
governance is literally melting-down. It is the victim of 80 years of
Keynesian error — much of it nurtured in the environs of Harvard Yard —
about the nature of the business cycle and the capacity of the state —
especially its central banking branch — to ameliorate the alleged
imperfections of free market capitalism.” The enemy will never again have
a record of effective economic performance to legitimate itself through.
What it is doing — and has to do — however politically efficacious, is
locked tightly into an inescapable vector that can lead nowhere except
utter financial ruin. (Neoreaction should bifurcate on this point, because
adaptation to an alternative possibility is something so completely
different, very little of strategic substance will translate across.)
Stockman is able to draw upon his own biography to reveal where the GOP
went wrong — the political necessities of democratic acceptance drove
economic policy into the abyss:
… the circumstances of my own ex-communication from the supply-side
church underscore the Reaganite embrace of the Keynesian gospel. The
true-believers — led by Art Laffer, an economist with a Magic Napkin,
and Jude Wanniski, an ex-Wall Street Journal agit-prop man who chanced
to stuff said napkin into his pocket — were militantly opposed to
spending cuts designed to offset the revenue loss from the Reagan tax
reductions.
They called this “root canal” economics and insisted that the
Republican Party could never compete with the Keynesian Democrats unless
it abandoned its historic commitment to balanced budgets and fiscal
rectitude, and instead, campaigned on tax cuts everywhere and always and
a fiscal free lunch owing to a purported cornucopia of economic
growth.
Winning elections was conditional upon fiscal barbarism, given only the
quite reasonable assumption that nothing except radical dishonesty could
ever be popular. Insane promises, short-termism, and whole-hearted
participation in a bi-partisan conspiracy to eradicate the last vestiges
of responsible government were indispensable steps towards the exercise of
power.
The fiscal end game — policy paralysis and the eventual bankruptcy of
the state — thus became visible. All of the beltway players –Republican,
Democrats and central bankers alike — are now so hooked on the Keynesian
cool-aid that they cannot imagine the Main Street economy standing on
its own two feet without continuous, massive injections of state
largesse. […] the stimulus bill was not a rational economic plan at all;
it was a spasmodic eruption of beltway larceny that has now become our
standard form of governance.
Hence the Stockman forecast:
… the Federal budget has become a doomsday machine because the
processes of fiscal governance are paralyzed and broken. There will be
recurrent debt ceiling and shutdown crises like the carnage scheduled
for next week, as far as the eye can see.
Indeed, notwithstanding the assurances of debt deniers like professor
Krugman, the honest structural deficit is $1-2 trillion annually for the
next decade and then it will get far worse. In fact, when you set aside
the Rosy Scenario used by CBO and its preposterous Keynesian assumption
that we will reach full employment in 2017 and never fall short of
potential GDP ever again for all eternity, the fiscal equation is
irremediable.
Under these conditions what remains of our free enterprise economy will
… buckle under the weight of taxes and crisis. Sundown in America is
well-nigh unavoidable.
This is the terrain that neoreaction takes root within. It frames our
problems, opportunities, and expectations. The overwhelmingly preponderant
part of our intellectual energies should be targeted at the future it
anticipates.
October 6, 2013The Decline Frame
This point is important enough to restate well, as Foseti
does:
The crux of [Scott Alexander’s] argument is that, “It is a staple of Reactionary thought that
everything is getting gradually worse.” He then goes on to show that not
everything is getting worse. […] It is not a staple of reactionary
thought that everything is getting worse. To the contrary, I’ve never
read that argument from any reactionary anywhere. […] Let’s correct his
statement: It is a staple of Reactionary thought that massive
improvements in technology have been very effective in masking massive
declines in virtually all other aspects of society.
The progressive assumption, which neoreaction contests, is that it is
natural and good to spend the advances of civilization on causes unrelated
to civilizational advance. A more controversial formulation (supported
here) is that the Cathedral spends capitalism on something other than
capitalism, and ultimately on the destruction of capitalism. It tolerates
a functional economy — to the extent that it does — only on the
understanding that it will be used for something else.
Elementary cybernetics predicts that if productivity is recycled into
productivity, the outcome is an explosive process of increasing returns.
Insofar as history is not manifesting accelerating productivity,
therefore, it can be assumed that social circuitry is being fed through
non-productive, and anti-productive links. Techno-commercial Modernity is
being squandered on (Neo-Puritan) Progressivism. In the West, at least,
that is what is getting worse.
October 23, 2013Nemesis
Neoreaction, at its core, is a critical analysis of the Cathedral. It
should surprise nobody, therefore, to see it hurtled into public
consciousness, as the sole cultural agency able to name the self-evident
configuration of contemporary sovereignty.
As the Cathedral becomes a self-confident public performance, its only
remotely-articulate analyst is drawn into prominence, in its wake. In this
regard, we haven’t seen anything yet.
Even had the Obama administration consciously decided to select the
Cathedral as a branding device, it could not have been epitomized any more
perfectly. Sacralized progressivism, ivory tower ‘brahminism’,
academic-media fusion as the exclusive source of recognizable authority,
and the absolute identification of governance with public relations have
reached a zenith that tilts into self-parody. Soft fascist
self-transcending hyper-Calvinism has been lucidly distilled into
blitz-promoted political iconography. Everyone with a television set now
knows that the Cathedral is in power, and merely await the terminological
confirmation of their perceptions. Enthusiasts and dissidents are seeing
more-or-less the same thing, characterized in approximately the same
words. The only serious matter of controversy is the quantity of spiritual
devotion such a regime, faith, and symbolic order reasonably commands.
Politics-as-religious-experience has been seen in America before.
Arguably, it is even typical. What has not been seen since William
Jennings Bryan at the dawn of the progressive movement, and never at all
before then, is democracy pitched to such rapturous extremities of
soteriological expectation — and Bryan was stopped. By identifying himself
deliberately with a promise of comprehensive socio-spiritual redemption,
Obama has more fully exemplified hubris than any leader in the
history of the United States. The appropriate frame of political
explanation, therefore, is tragic.
Tragedy is the fundamental teaching of
Classical Occidental Antiquity, nucleated upon the insight that
hubris escalates to nemesis. It finds its most lucid
philosophical articulation in the fragment of Anaximander:
Whence things originate,
Thence they return to destruction,
According to necessity;
For they reciprocate justice and pay recompense
For their injustice
In conformity with the ordinance of Time.
This conception strongly resonates with neoreactionary fatalism
(anti-politics), and with the formation of ideas around
wu wei (laissez faire) in the Chinese cultural context. Nemesis,
the agency of cosmic justice (Δίκη) eventuates automatically, as
a retarded consequence that is nevertheless inalienably bound to the
hubris of political action. The fatal stroke is delivered — at
the right time — from the intersection of power and fate, rather than by
any kind of considered remedy or political dialectic. Tragic rectification
completes itself.
If there is a ‘strategic’ lesson from tragedy, it is not opposition, but
non-participation. To become entangled in hubris is to invite
nemesis. To the greatest extent possible, hubristic power should be left
to its fate. The less interrupted its acceleration into concentrated
nemesis, the more spectacularly cosmic justice is displayed, and the more
effectively the audience is educated.
If you’re sitting comfortably, you can pass around the popcorn now,
because the American tragedy is a real doozy. We already know that Obama
is playing the part of the tragic hero with exceptional genius, as the
very personification of immoderate political ambition and narcissistic
blindness. Far more unexpectedly, his GOP opposition has somehow reached
beyond its corrupt dementia to discover the fatal stance of
non-participation, unanimously rejecting the President’s key-stone
domestic initiative, and also distancing itself from his foreign policy
agenda in overwhelming numbers. Unilateral Cathedralism reigns,
uncompromised. This is the secret to the unprecedented delights of the
current epoch.
Jonah Goldberg
describes
the spectacle well:
If you can’t take some joy, some modicum of relief and mirth, in the
unprecedentedly spectacular beclowning of the president, his
administration, its enablers, and, to no small degree, liberalism
itself, then you need to ask yourself why you’re following politics in
the first place. Because, frankly, this has been one of the most
enjoyable political moments of my lifetime. I wake up in the morning and
rush to find my just-delivered newspaper with a joyful expectation of
worsening news so intense, I feel like Morgan Freeman should be
narrating my trek to the front lawn. Indeed, not since Dan Rather
handcuffed himself to a fraudulent typewriter, hurled it into the abyss,
and saw his career plummet like Ted Kennedy was behind the wheel have I
enjoyed a story more.
Alas, the English language is not well equipped to capture the
sensation I’m describing, which is why we must all thank the Germans for
giving us the term “schadenfreude” — the joy one feels at the misfortune
or failure of others. The primary wellspring of schadenfreude can be
attributed to Barack Obama’s hubris — another immigrant word, which
means a sinful pride or arrogance that causes someone to believe he has
a godlike immunity to the rules of life.
The catharsis is so harsh and pure that even the invertebrate Buckleyites
at The National Review are beginning to get it, for a short,
exquisite moment, at least. As Konkvistador warns (in
this thread), a
far less radically degraded group of people will nevertheless “forget all
about these insights [as] the next election cycle warms up, indeed
elections with their promise of power for conservatives and
pseudo-conservatives [have] historically served as their mindwipe.
Election cycles are when conservative obsolete Progressivism is updated to
a slightly less obsolete version.” The sojourn of conservatism on the
Outer Right, where tragic non-participation holds, cannot be expected to
last. Yet even as a brief intermission from vile ambition, it allows
nemesis the space to express itself in its full, planet-shuddering
splendor.
Whatever the disagreements and divergences among the strands of
neoreaction, there is one message that has to remain unwaveringly
consistent: The Cathedral owns this (totally). Less than a
quarter of the way into Obama’s second term, full-spectrum catastrophe is
already written across the heavens in letters of incandescent sulfur.
Obamacare is wrecked before it has even rolled out, Yellen has all-but
promised to dedicate the Fed to full-throttle bubble-mania, metropolitan
bankruptcy is burning through the nation’s cities like a zombie virus,
crime is angling sharply upwards, American foreign policy lies in smoking
ruins … there is simply no way this disintegrating jalopy holds together
for another three years.
Let in burn — in the Cathedral’s hands.
ADDED: Advice from Michael Walsh to the GOP: “Don’t do something, just stand
there. You didn’t vote for it, not once, not a single time, ever. […]
Obama threw a spanner into his own Rube Goldberg machine yesterday and the
best thing you can do is to sit down, shut up, get out of the way, and
enjoy the show.”
ADDED: For Democrats, Obamacare Unfolding Like a Greek Tragedy
ADDED: “Hubris has a way of ruining grand designs. And like reality, it
bites.”
November 15, 2013Nemesis II
Less than a year after
surrendering
corporate governance to SJWs,
this
happens. There’s plenty of room for arguments about the tangles of
causality here. Nevertheless, as a dramatic exemplification of harsh
Cosmic Law it’s going to be difficult to beat.
ADDED: Mr. Archenemy
recommends
a link far superior to those given above. Eric Raymond writes: “… all I
can think is “They brought the fate they deserved on themselves.” Because
principles matter – and in 2014 the Mozilla Foundation abandoned and
betrayed one of the core covenants of open source. […] I refer, of course,
to the Foundation’s disgraceful failure to defend its newly promoted
Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich against a political mob.”
March 9, 2015No Way Home
It follows from the analysis of socio-political modernity
as a
degenerative ratchet that
identification of deterioration does not in itself amount to a program
for reversing it. The vividness of this problem is directly proportional to the
seriousness with which the nature of time, as a practical consideration,
is addressed. The essential difference between reaction and
neoreaction is adequately articulated as soon as this point is made.
‘Past orientation’ is an impressively defensible value (even by
techno-commercial
criteria). Retro-directed action, in contrast, is sheer error. This is too
obvious an idea to labor over. Those who do not get it have chosen not to.
Unlike the many unsettled controversies of neoreaction, the temptation to
simply return, however well-intentioned, merits no more than
condescension. In this case — as in so many others — an image is worth a
thousand words:
(click on image to enlarge)
April 21, 2014End of the Ratchet?
Richard Fernandez
makes
a basic, but essential point:
Mention repealing Obamacare and you are told it is impossible; even
John Boehner said, it’s the ‘law of the land’. Brown vs Board is the law
of the land, Roe vs Wade is the law of the land, but Hobby Lobby or
Citizens United is an abomination to be repealed or ignored soonest.
It’s like a ratchet. It moves only in the way of the approved
narrative.
This is the same insight
identified
by this blog as The Idea of Neoreaction, which is to say:
recognition of a degenerative ratchet as the central mechanism of
‘progress’ (to the Left). Fernandez draws explicit attention to its
constitutive asymmetry. Partisan polarity is revealed as a one-way
conveyor, alternating between ‘stop’ and ‘go left’. Two-party democratic
politics is structurally-established as an inevitable loser’s game for the
Right. Once this is seen, how is the thought of ‘conservative activism’ in
any way sustainable, except as a transparently futile joke? Hasn’t the
line already been crossed to the dark side?
Fernandez is still hedging:
… the real news is this: it’s not working any more. Even Obamacare
might actually be repealed. Liberal foreign policy might really go down
in flames. Already the authorities are warning of bombs on inbound
airline flights. And Obama might actually be the worst president since
World War 2. Things used to be under control; what happened? […] History
suggests that over time all conflict becomes symmetrical. Eventually
both sides become equally brutal. […] If there is any lesson taught by
history it is that man when driven far enough is the most dangerous and
merciless life form on the planet.
It’s not at all clear to me what’s really being said here. Is this an
anticipation of counter-revolution? Or is it merely the tired claim that
the next election could really make a difference?
Even in the most depressing case, something is being seen that would very
much rather not be seen. If acute conservative opinion is tiring of its
role as the Cathedral’s loyal opposition, it indicates that the mechanism
is beginning to break down.
July 3, 2014Ratchets and Catastrophes
Perhaps all significant ideological distinctions — at the level of
philosophical abstraction — can be derived from this proposition. For the
progressive, it represents the purest expression of history’s “moral
arc“. For the Conservative (or, more desperately, the Reactionary), it
describes an unfolding historical catastrophe. For the Neoreactionary, it
indicates a problem in need of theorization. Moldbug lays out the problem
in this (now classic)
formulation:
Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left. Isn’t that
interesting?
Where is the John Birch Society, now? What about the NAACP? Cthulhu
swims left, and left, and left. There are a few brief periods of true
reaction in American history — the post-Reconstruction era or
Redemption, the Return to Normalcy of Harding, and a couple of others.
But they are unusual and feeble compared to the great leftward
shift.
The specific Moldbuggian solution to this problem, whether approached
historically through the Ultra-Calvinism Thesis, or systemically through
the analysis of the Cathedral, invokes a dynamic model of Occidental
religious modernization. The irreversible bifurcations, symmetry breaks,
or schisms that lock Western modernity into its “great leftward shift”
correspond to successive episodes of cladistic fission within Protestant
Christianity (abstractly understood). The religious history of modernity
is constituted by a degenerative ratchet (as touched upon here,
1,
2,
3).
Discussing a recent
critique
of the Euro by Keith Humphreys, Megan McArdle
converges
upon the same insight. She writes:
As a longtime euroskeptic, who has frequently flirted with the idea
that the euro must eventually destroy itself, I am sympathetic to
Humphreys’ point. But let me attempt to offer a partial defense of the
hapless eurocrats: However stupid the creation of the euro was, undoing
it will not be easy. […] Yes, we’re back to our old friend path
dependence. As
I noted
the other day, the fact that you can avoid some sort of terrible fate by
stopping something before it starts does not mean that you can later
achieve the same salutary effects by ceasing whatever stupid thing you
have done. It would have been painless just to not have the euro. But it
will be painful indeed to get rid of it.
She encounters the signature nonlinearities of such lock-in phenomena in
noting: “No wonder that no one wants even to discuss it. Especially since
even discussing a dissolution of the euro area makes a crisis more likely
…”
Progressivism as a process, rather than a mere attitude, is always and
everywhere a matter of degenerative ratchets. Consider, very briefly, some
of the most prominent examples:
(1) Democratization. Every extension of the franchise is effectively
irreversible. This is why the promotion of democratic reform in Hong Kong,
in a complete rupture from its local traditions, is so breathtakingly
irresponsible. (No link, because I have yet to encounter an article on the
subject worthy of recommendation.)
(2) Welfare systems (and positive rights in general). The irreversibility
of these socio-economic innovations is widely recognized. Once
implemented, they cannot be rolled back without the infliction of massive
suffering. Obamacare is a more-or-less cynical attempt to exploit this
lock-in dynamic.
(3) Immigration. Welcoming newcomers is effortless, removing them all-but
impossible (or at least entirely unprecedented in the modern West).
Immigration policy, by its nature, can only “swim left”. It consists of
freezes and floods (but never reversals) — epitomizing the ratchet
pattern.
(4) Macroeconomic politicized money (central banking, fiat currency,
inflationary normalization, and debt financing). Easing is easy,
tightening is terrifying, roll back unattempted (since Jackson in the
mid-19th century).
My contention:
There is no substantial topic of Neoreactionary concern that does not
conform to this basic pattern. The degenerative ratchet is the problem, abstractly conceived.
This is why NRx is dark. The only way out of a degenerative ratchet is
catastrophe. Such processes are essentially unreformable, and this
conclusion captures the critique of political conservatism from which NRx
has been born. The only non-disastrous solution to a DR, or progressive
lock-in dynamic, is to avoid entering into it. Once it has begun, normal
politics can only modulate the speed of deterioration, and then only to a
relatively limited degree. It will reach its end, which will be seriously
horrible. NRx forecasting begins and ends with this thesis.
Our doomsterism is not a psychological tic, but a rigorous theoretical
obligation. It follows, ineluctably, from iron historical law. Looking on
the dark side is the only way to see.
September 2, 2014Down-slopes
The Outer-Right, in all its principal strands, has a horrified fascination
with decline. Is this basic proposition even slightly controversial? It’s
not easy to see how it could be. This is a zone of convergence of such
intimidating enormity that even beginning to heap up link support seems
futile. Taking the Trichotomy as a rough guide reveals the pattern
starkly:
(1) Religious traditionalists see a continuous decline trend from the
Reformation to the most recent frenzy of evangelical hyper-secularism.
(2) Ethno-Nationalists see a process of accelerating demographic
destruction driven — or at least lucidly articulated — by left-wing race
politics.
(3) Techno-Commercialists see the systematic destruction of capital by
cancerous Leviathan and macroeconomic high-fraudulence, undermining
economic incentives, crushing time-horizons, and garbling price-discovery
into fiat noise.
In each case, the online-ecologies (and associated micro-cultures) sharing
the respective deep intuitions of progressive ruin are too enormous to
conveniently apprehend. What everyone on the Outer-Right shares (and I’m
now hardening this up, into a definition) is the adamantine confidence
that the basic socio-political process is radically morbid, and is leading
inexorably to utter ruin.
No surprise, then, that John Michael Greer finds many attentive readers in
our camp. His latest (and still incomplete) series on
Dark Age America resonates with particular strength. The most
recent
installment, which discusses the impending collapse of the market system, through
quasi-Marxist crisis, on its way to many centuries of neo-feudalism, is
bound to raise some tech-comm eyebrows, but it nevertheless occupies the
same broad forecast space. If people are stocking their basements with
ammo, silver coins, and dried beans for Greer reasons rather than
Stockman
ones, they might cut back a little on the coins, but they’re not going to
stop stocking the basement. Differences seem to lie in the details.
The differences in the details are actually
fairly substantial. Even if Winter is coming, we’re not
necessarily talking about the same thing. To begin with, Greer is not a
figure of the Outer-Right at all, because his (extremely interesting)
cybernetic engine of descent is ecological and resource-based, carried by
a deep eco-historical ‘correction’ or dominating (negative) feedback cycle
whose proxy is fossil-fuel abundance. Modernity, roughly speaking, simply
runs out of gas. His cultural criticism is ultimately anchored in — and
limited to — that. When describing (drawn-out, and incremental)
civilizational collapse, he forecasts the automatic nemesis of a system
doomed by its unsustainable excess. Further engagement with this model
belongs elsewhere. It’s an important discussion to have.
The more immediate concern, here, is with the very different components of
‘winter’ — of which three, in particular, stand-out. Each is, in itself,
huge. The directions in which they point, however, are not obviously
coherent.
(1) Closest to the Greer vision are bad global-systems dynamics. These
tend to prevail on the Outer-Right, but they typically lack the
theoretical resolution Greer provides. It is understandable that those who
strongly identify with specific declining ethnies (or Super-Phyles),
whether theologically, racially, or traditionally conceived, are
disinclined to distinguish their progressive dilapidation from a
generalized global calamity. This is certainly
not
merely stupid, however much it offends prevailing moral fashion. The
extent to which it supplies an adequate preparation for the events to come
is questionable, nevertheless. Without an explicit defense of its
specificity, it can all too easily confuse its own winter
sicknesses with a universal predicament.
(2) What can easily be under-estimated is the localization of the
unfolding disaster, in a specifically Occidental collapse. This is, of
course, Spengler’s Decline of the West, among other things, and
even though this is a work Greer explicitly acknowledges, the inherent
globality of his model tends to eclipse its particularism. For Greer, the
impending decline of China (for instance) follows upon its complicity in
fossil-fueled industrial modernity, even if, for rhetorical effect, it is
to be permitted a few decades of comparative ascendancy. The Outer-Right
tends to be Greerian in this respect, although without equivalent positive
reason. It is not asked, often enough, how much of the deepening winter is
— quite narrowly — ours. Greer has an argument for why Western
Modernity has consumed the future for everyone. Unless the fundamentals of
this theory are accepted, is there any reason to accept its predictive
consequences?
(3) The third ‘winter’ is modeled by the rhythmic troughs of the
Kondratiev cycle. This tends to localize in time, rather than space,
dividing the merely seasonal from the cumulative, secular trend. While a
comprehensive attribution of our malaise to such a cycle would constitute
an exit from the Outer-Right, passing into a far more complacent diagnosis
of the global, or merely Western, calamity, to dismiss it entirely from
consideration is to court profound cognitive (and predictive) imbalance.
In the opinion of this blog, Greer’s model is grievously afflicted by such
imbalance, and — once again — this seems to be a syndrome of far wider
prevalence. Scarcely anybody on the Outer-Right is prepared for rhythmic
amelioration of significant modern pathologies, through renewal of
techno-commercial vitality
even under conditions of secular civilizational decline. Yet even
glancing attention to the working of the (~ half century)
long waves suggests that such neglect is simply unrealistic.
Unless the K-wave is now dead — an extraordinarily extreme proposition,
which surely merits explicit assertion — some proportion of the present
decay is inherently transitional. New industrial structures based on
blockchained communications — and thus designed to route around
socio-cultural sclerosis — will support an explosion of innovation
dwarfing any yet imagined (including synthetic economic agents, quantum
computing, neuromorphic chips, large-scale space activity, applied
genomics, VR media systems, drone-robotics, commercialized security …
maybe
Urbit). Even if Greer is absolutely right about the deep historical pattern
being played out — and I’m fully confident he isn’t — the next K-wave
upswing is going to be vast, dazzling, and, almost incomprehensibly
distracting. There’s perhaps a decade remaining in which uncompromising
gloom-core will make sense, after which the Outer-Right risks utter
eclipse during two decades of upswing euphoria. It would make a lot of
sense to pre-adapt to it, beginning with a reminder that the Outer-Right
case is not that everything will
continually deteriorate.
I’ve run out the clock on myself for now … but I’ll get back to this.
November 8, 2014
CHAPTER FIVE - REALISM AND TIME STRUCTURE
Reality Check
Foseti, commenting at his own place,
asks
rhetorically:
Don’t you think that writing to save the world is – in itself –
fundamentally progressive in nature (not to say wildly
presumptuous)?
Even those tempted to answer in the negative need to think this through
patiently, because the pretensions this question punctures are typically
distinguished by their thoughtlessness. Modern politics became psychotic
when agitated scribblers convinced themselves that they had the tools, the
right, and even the duty to re-order the world in accordance with
their pamphlets. This is a Left tradition that few have yet derided
enough.
To carve out cognitive independence is one thing, to deform it into
practical idealism is quite another. Indeed, dripping our dark poisons
into the milk of idealism might easily be the most
practical difference we can make. Soaring words and rallying
cries have already done far too much. It makes sense to take a step back,
into skepticism, humor, undistorted proportion, and the hypothetical mode,
before advancing further down our tracks … wherever they lead.
May 29, 2013Neoreactionary Realism
The easiest place to start is with what neoreactionary realism isn’t,
which is
this:
For a reactionary state to be established in the West in our lifetimes,
we’ll need to articulate the need for one in a language millions of
people can understand. If not to produce nationalists, to at least
produce a large contingent of sympathizers. The question,
“What is it, exactly, that you propose to do?”
must be answered, first in simple terms, then in detailed terms that
directly support the simple arguments. The urge to develop esoteric
theories of causes and circumstances should be tossed aside, and
replaced with concrete proposals for a novel form of government that
harmonizes with perennial principles. This can be achieved by producing
positive theories for a new order, rather than analyzing the nuts and
bolts of a decaying order.
Beginning with a model of an ideal society is a
procedure that already has a name, and a different one: Utopianism. It’s
not a difficult way to think. For instance, imagine a political regime
based on
commutative tax politics. As far as economic considerations are concerned, the political problem
is solved. Policy choices are aligned with practical incentives, and the
manifestly irresistible democratic impulse to redistributive violation of
property rights is immediately terminated. The trouble with this idea? —
There’s no practical way to get to it. The real problem of political
philosophy does not lie in the conceptual effort of modeling an ideal
society, but in departing from where we are, in a direction that
tends to the optimization of a selected value (equality stinks, utility
doesn’t work, freedom is OK, intelligence is best).
Where can we get to from here? Unless this question controls
political theory, the result is utopian irrelevance. The initial
real problem is escape. In consequence, two broad avenues of
realistic neoreactionary reflection are open:
(1) Elaborate escape. This topic naturally bifurcates in turn, into the
identification and investment of exit-based institutions, and the
promotion of secessionist options (from fissional
federalism to
seasteading). An escape-based
society, unlike a utopia, is structured in the same way it is reached.
Upon arriving in a world made of the right sort of fragments — splintered
by political philosophy rather than tribal variety — all kinds of real
possibilities arise. (Tribes are a useless distraction, because they
resonate to defective philosophies — a world of Benetton differentiated
failing social democracies is the one we are being herded into now.)
(2) Defend diversity. Once again, ethnic diversity — as such — means next
to nothing (at best). Every ‘people’ has shown itself capable of political
idiocy. What deserves preservation is fracture, defined over against
Cathedral universalism. Any place that can practically count as ‘offshore’
is a base for the future. In particular, the East Asian antidemocratic
technocapitalist tradition merits ferocious ideological defense against
Cathedralist subversion. Within the West, domestic enclaves that have
resisted macrosocial absorption — from Amish communities to survivalist
militia movements — have comparable value. Wherever political globalism
fails, neoreaction wins.
The very last thing neoreaction has to usefully declare is
I have a dream. Dream-mongering is the enemy. The only future
worth striving for is splintered into myriads, loosely webbed together by
free-exit connections, and conducting innumerable experiments in
government, the vast majority of which will fail.
We do not, and cannot, know what we want, anymore than we can know what
the machines of the next century will be like, because
real potentials need to be discovered, not imagined. Realism is
the negative of an unfounded pretense to knowledge, no less in political
sociology than information technology. Invention is not planning, and
sky-castles offer no refuge from the Cathedral. If there’s one thing we
need to have learned, and never to forget, it’s that.
ADDED: Adventures in Exiting
July 4, 2013Dark Moments
Gloom and realism can be hard to
distinguish, but it’s important to carry on. Curmudgeonry without stubbornness isn’t
worth a damn. Even in the worst case, relentless, sluggishly
deterioriating ghastliness can at least be interesting. It shouldn’t be
necessary to cheer up, in order to continue, and there might be some
lessons worth attending to in the slough of despond.
I’d go further. Despair can get things started, if it means the
abandonment of diverting idols. A full, immersive soaking, which leaves no
doubt about certain things being over, is morbidly therapeutic,
and even something like a first step (at least a first
slouch). There are
hopes that have to die, and the sooner the better, although if they die
slowly and horribly, they are perhaps less likely to need killing twice.
Here’s the argument:
Nothing is going anywhere without preliminary disintegration.
That’s the cheerful part. It seems to me an absolutely irresistible claim,
and this post was to have been designed to rally consensus around it. Then
I made the ‘mistake’ of watching
this.
Allow me to walk you into this little knot of gloom in stages, punctuated
by theses, each of which marks an essential but incomplete discussion. The
meta-assertion is that there is no other way. Push-back against that, met
at any of its way-stations, will make the dire swamp-thrashing to follow
worthwhile.
Thesis-1: There is no more basic preliminary to effective neoreactionary
transformation than schism. This can take many forms. Simple retirement
into the private sphere — as strongly advocated by Nick B. Steves in
particular — represents one significant pole. At the other lies secession,
and other forms of macro-political disintegration (with science fiction
variants extending from seasteading out to space colonization). The
essential point is that
a consolidation of disagreement in space is substituted for a
resolution of disagreement in time. As far as practicality is concerned, this is the overwhelming
priority.
Thesis-2: There can be no agreement. The recent flurry of interest in
Emmanuel Todd should suffice as confirmation (this
critical summary by Craig Willy is excellent). In a very small nutshell,
Todd argues that “… political ideologies in the modern age are projections
of a people’s unconscious premodern family values.” Europe has four basic
family types (all exogamous), programming its varied political ideals.
The inegalitarian (classical) liberalism of mercantile North-West
Europeans, corresponds to the ‘Absolute nuclear family’.
Weird Franco-Italian ‘egalitarian liberalism’ corresponds to the
‘egalitarian nuclear family’ (Todd’s own ancestral type and value
model).
The Germanic ‘Authoritarian family’ tends to German stuff, and
The (Slav-Orthodox) ‘Community family’ breeds communists.
If you haven’t read Willy yet, you’ll be glad you did. The sole take-away
here: People are different (oops, that’s a signature judgement of
the inegalitarian liberal type), with no tendency to converge upon common
ideals, even among Europeans. There are people who think communism is
natural and good, and they’re not going to be argued out of it. Only a
small minority think what you do, and that isn’t going to change. You
either have to kill them, dominate them, be dominated by them,
or escape them. Escaping them is best.
Thesis-3: It’s America that matters (for Anglophone neoreactionaries, at
least). It’s the only country with traditions of freedom that can be
broken into large and influential pieces, and its residual federal
structure provides a virtual template for doing exactly that. For
practical purposes, therefore, the future of liberty —
even if you want to read that as the liberty to conduct experiments in
ethnonationalist or theocratic government
— is entirely dependent upon the development of American federalism.
Further centralized consolidation is losing, and disintegration is
winning. Compared to that, in terms of political practicality, everything
else is of vanishing irrelevance. Dreaming up schemes for ideal
authoritarian regimes, in particular, is simply a hobby (but you know that
already, right?).
The only road to the future, or the past, leads through a Disunited States
of America. Now listen to those Bloggingheads again, and wind up
the gloom to scream volume. It’s absolutely clear from a strictly
technical point of view that the sole conceivable platform for an escape
from Leviathan’s degenerative ratchet would be a
Confederate States of America, and we can probably agree that
historical sensitivities make that a non-starter. Setting out on a path
away from futile arguments — between people who will never agree — leads
straight back into America’s racial nightmare, and horrible, draining,
unresolvable wrangling that amounts to:
Freedom is banned forever, because … what happened to black people.
Those arguments are stupidity itself. They go nowhere. And that is
precisely the point.
[Don’t kill yourself, or shut down your blog — but a stiff drink is
positively recommended]
ADDED: Why the GOP has to die.
July 18, 2013Reaction, Repetition, and Time
Whether considered within the registers of physics, physiology,
or politics, ‘reaction’ is a time-structured notion. It follows an action
or stimulus, which it reaches back through, in order to annul or
counteract a disequilibrium or disturbance. Whilst subsequent to an
action, it operates in alignment with what came before: the track, or
legacy, that defines the path of reversal, or the target of restoration.
It therefore envelops the present, to contest it from all sides. The
Outside of the dominant moment is its space.
Reaction forges, or excavates, an occult pact between the future and the
past, setting both against the present, in concert, and thus
differentiating itself from progressivism (which unites the present and
future against the past), and conservatism (which unites past and present
against the future). Its bond with time as
outsideness carries it ever further beyond the moment and its
decay, into a twin horizon of anterior and posterior remoteness. It is a
Shadow Out of Time.
There is a far more immediately practical reason for reaction to involve
itself in the exploration of time, however: to take steps to avoid what it
could scarcely otherwise avoid becoming — a sterile orgy of
disgruntlement. Finding nothing in the present except deteriorated hints
of other things, reaction soon slides into what it most detests: an
impotent micro-culture of vocal, repetitive protest.
This isn’t right, this isn’t right, this isn’t right quickly becomes white noise, or worse (intelligible
whining). Even when it escapes the ceaseless, mechanical reiteration of a
critical diagnosis (whose tedium is commensurate to the narrowed times it
damns), its schemes of restoration fall prey to a more extended
repetition, which calls only — and uselessly — for what has been to be
once more.
If the New Reaction is not to bore itself into a coma, it has to learn to
run innovation and tradition together as Siamese twins, and for that it
needs to think time, into distant conclusions, in its ‘own’ way.
That can be done, seriously. Of course, a demonstration is called
for …
[Note: ‘physics’ deleted from the first line to pre-emptively evade a
righteous spanking from enraged Newtonians insisting upon the strict
simultaneity of actions and reactions within classical mechanics]
February 19, 2013Anti-Greer
Mix
this
with the
Archdruid
Report, and you begin to get why the world is so confusing. One of the crucial
defenses of the term ‘Neoreaction’ — and thus an argument for clinging to
it despite all
frustrations
— is its intrinsic orientation to grasping both of these perspectives at
the same time. (Do that without time-spirals, and you’ve come up with something I’ve yet to consider.)
January 23, 2015
CHAPTER SIX - OTHERS
Cambrian Explosion
Scharlach’s
Habitable Worlds was
created less than a month ago, and is presently expanding faster than the
known universe. Then this massive
brain-cycle munching machine appeared. Then
this one. And then there’s
this. That’s a selective list
of blogs that I know I want to follow closely,
none of which existed four weeks ago. Keeping up with this chaos
of creation is becoming impossible. Can someone please hurry up with the
delivery of my brain-accelerator chip.
May 9, 2013On Goulding
James Goulding is a thinker of truly extraordinary brilliance. His
intellectual stance is closer to that of Outside in than almost
any other blog listed in our sidebar. It is with considerable sadness,
therefore, that I have sought to comply with his shifted self-definition
by moving the link to
suspiria de profundis
out of the ‘neoreaction’ category.
Goulding is subtle, complex, and difficult, and his central ideas remain
only partially digested here. In addition, my grasp of the stakes in his
new direction is extremely unformed. There are nevertheless a few
preliminary remarks that I hope are worth making.
Neoreaction, or the Dark Enlightenment, has as
its most essential tendency the insistence upon
an alternative to fascism. Its realism does not embrace optimism
readily, so it would be insincere to pretend that this alternative is
destined for success. What cannot be convincingly denied, however, is that
a reaction to the Cathedral is coming, that fascist modes of political
rectification are well-placed to profit from it, and that Western — indeed
all modern — societies default to fascism during crisis conditions. By
separating himself from the new reaction, Goulding risks surrendering it
to ominous potentialities that might otherwise be avoidable.
This matters. Whatever Goulding’s talents [add well-deserved
superlatives], marketing and propaganda are not among them. He has never
been less convincing than when
suggesting
that ‘Movement X’ is a credible attractor for the disenchanted. As
conservatism dies of chronic failure, what replaces it will be a reaction
to the status quo, unashamed to identify itself as such, and
positively exulting in the abominated label reactionary. Goulding
seems to be sure that this prediction is wrong, for no very obvious
reason, and this certainty plays to his own greatest intellectual
weaknesses.
I beseech him, in the bowels of Gnon, to think it possible that he may
be mistaken.
The practitioners of Machiavellian politics are politicians. They expose
each other every day through their political machines, and
House of Cards is already popular culture.
Everybody knows this stuff, and it has no deep consequence.
Politics is porn, an inane tangle of primate idiocy. It is unworthy of
Goulding’s focused intelligence.
We have suffered our first wound. It seriously hurts.
ADDED: Note to trolls (e.g. ‘Donny Farp’) if you can bring yourself to
stop sounding like a jerk, I’ll stop deleting you. This blog has a
zero-tolerance policy for anonymous snark.
June 2, 2013Reddit Shift
The moderators of the Outer Right information exchange / discussion forum
at
/r/DarkEnlightenment
are mulling an overhaul (i.e. “gutting the hell out of the … sidebar”).
Any suggestions? This is a piece of dissident Cyberspace with a
significant defining role.
May 22, 2014Neo-Feudalism
There’s an intellectual Sistine Chapel
calling out for your
support. The next Pope Leo X has to be out there somewhere, eager to
patronize the hungry culture of our age. Here’s the chance. (I’ve
“dedicated posts to far sillier things” apparently.)
(OK, the Sistine Chapel ceiling was patronized by Julius II, but let’s try
not to be pedantic — Leo X had cooler mirror-shades.)
March 25, 2015Alexander on Reaction
Foseti was
persuasive
enough to motivate a second look at Scott Alexander’s continuing
engagement with reaction (even after the dismally unimpressive first
installment).
It
is indeed “awesome,” and merits a serious response (later this week?).
For an immediate response, simple translation has to suffice, stripping
away the slanted “survive/thrive” language, and getting right to the
point. Reactionaries think leftists are spoiled*:
decadent, self-indulgent, hedonistic fantasists, debauching an inheritance
they are incapable of adding to.
Degeneracy is degeneracy**, whether it’s affordable or not. To the
reactionary right it looks horrible, even in the absence of zombie
apocalypse (but we’re getting one anyway).
* How can a theory of left/right differentiation demonstrate such
insensitive disregard for ‘the wretched of the earth’? It is that
‘problem’ — readily admitted by Alexander — that makes his explanation
truly awesome. The Left has nothing to do with what the
downtrodden ‘think’, and everyone — once pressed — is relieved to admit
that. Now everything makes sense. We’re discussing a
thought-pattern (Leftism) exclusively native to affluent
degenerates, with the social sub-strata occasionally latching on,
opportunistically, and uncomprehendingly.
** Yes, the word ‘degeneracy’ is historically spicy — if we were being
responsible about it, it would make us nervous. Slicing diagonally through
biology, culture, economics — even technology — it’s what reactionaries
think socio-political ‘progress’ really is. In that respect, it’s
indispensable.
So what is degeneration? — in any conversation entirely
internal to reaction, that would be the central topic of
discussion. (The Outside in definition: degeneracy is whatever
makes you more stupid.)
ADDED: Scott Alexander paraphrased: The Right doesn’t think we can afford
to degenerate, whilst the Left thinks we can.
Scott Alexander nudged: The Right decries degeneration, even when it seems
(in the short term) affordable. The Left advocates degeneration (in the
medium term) even when, in the short term, we obviously can’t afford it.
ADDED: ‘Survive vs thrive’ or
Crunchy vs Soggy
(via Glenn Reynolds)?
ADDED: Goad on fire
viz
affluent degenerates (via SDL in the comments).
March 17, 2013DE Q&A
Matt Sigl of Vocativ is writing an
article on the Dark Enlightenment, both the ‘thing’ and the ‘manifesto’
(I’ve already told him why this description is misleadingly
over-generous). His questions suggest a sincere attempt to understand what
is going on.
Among the lines of inquiry he is pursuing (my compressions): Why Now?
What’s the ‘Cathedral’ business? How does the Dark Enlightenment relate to
transhumanism/futurism, libertarianism, fascism, white supremacism,
anti-semitism, social Darwinism? Where is the Dark Enlightenment going?
How does it respond to criticisms that (a) capitalism is to blame, (b)
everything’s basically OK?
I have tried to respond as objectively as possible, whilst attempting to
be clear about those answers which express my own idiosyncratic decisions
regarding unsettled/disputed matters. Predictably, I have emphasized the
Moldbuggian origins of the Dark Enlightenment / Neoreaction as a definite
cultural phenomenon (distinct from pre-existing right-libertarian,
traditionalist, and paleo-reactionary streams of thought).
Readers who think they can help Matt get this portrait right are
encouraged to make relevant points here.
ADDED:
Foseti on ‘Why Now?’
ADDED: Handle on progress.
ADDED: Mike Anissimov (via Twitter): “Nothing good will come of a
neoreactionary dialogue with Matt Sigl. … I predict we’ll regret this in
the end.”
September 29, 2013Zacked
Whilst it’s undoubtedly flattering to be the target of a brutal, lazy, and
dishonest hit
piece, it’s also vaguely irritating. Couldn’t Kuznicki have stoked the hate
sufficiently with the rejection of democracy, HBD sympathies,
anti-egalitarianism, market-fundamentalism, disintegrationism, and
Shoggoth-whispering, without also making up a bunch of stuff?
Anyway, just for the record:
* I’m not a proponent of “white nationalistic race ‘realism’.”
* I nowhere make the “case that white nationalism and market liberalism
somehow belong together.”
* I have never made a “case against markets” of any kind, let alone that
they “stand behind democracy with a tyrannical, unpredictable veto”
[whatever than means]
* I have never advocated for “racial purity”
There’s no doubt a number of people who turn up here who wish that I did
make some of these arguments, and by distancing myself from them I’m not
wanting to endorse Kuznicki’s suggestion that they’re mere slurs.
As far as Kuznicki’s own substantial points are concerned — defense of
dialectics, voice, meliorative politics — I’m not really interested enough
to engage.
This sort of situation tends to stress
objectivity, so I won’t pretend to perfect balance on the subject. There
seem to be lessons, though, of a quite general nature.
To begin with, the problem of ‘engagement’ with the media is a real one,
which can only get more pressing in strict proportion to ‘success’. They
have to come after Mencius Moldbug at some point, insofar as anything
interesting is brewing up, so there will probably be further test runs
against secondary targets. The whole target selection question is
potentially interesting, but I’ve no special insight to share on that
topic at this point.
Clearly I’ve lucked out in this case. China doesn’t seem
Cathedral-compliant (as Stirner points out in the excellent comments
thread), so direct social pressure is seriously dulled. Kuznicki is
neither the sharpest knife in the drawer, nor a pitbull, so
weakness has been the ‘dominant’ impression. The site he posts
from, despite its Magazine-style format, is quite incredibly marginal —
the traffic from this little blog to his has been running at two-to-three
times the reverse (which I would never have imagined — they have ten
contributors listed there). Umlaut also allows comments, which
has been a comprehensive fiasco for them this time (check it out). All the
visitors have been ripping into Kuznicki, and using the up/down vote
system to quantify the point. I’m biased, but I’ve found it utterly
hilarious. It’s worth noting, however, that the left media machine has
been stripping out its comment threads, which makes them far more
effective as no-comeback attack machines. Finally, Twitter has been an
extraordinary resource. It’s an absolutely critical component of our
capability to defend ourselves.
Drawing all this together: We have to learn, prepare, and anticipate. The
fights coming up are worth getting right. Any fatalistic depression about
the might of our enemies is both self-fulfilling defeatism and to a
considerable extent simply false. There’s no reason to think that the
‘destiny’ of media is under their control, or even that its trends are
generally favorable to them. Practice is our friend. This stuff is going
to matter more and more. Luck won’t always run so obviously one way.
ADDED: Handle
explores
the limits of civility and reason.
ADDED: Nerves? Not to mention
this, and
this.
ADDED: Jason Kuznicki is magnanimous enough to write
this.
It’s appreciated.
October 17, 2013Dorks for the Norks!
There are hints of a theme here:
From a
TC
piece comment by ‘Bah’: “Neoreactionaries should really move to North
Korea, it’s much closer to what they want for the world.”
David
Brin: “Some of you know the experiment to which he refers. North and South
Korea.”
Charlie
Stross
(in his own comment thread): “The reason I think the reactionaries are
full of shit is because we have a modern-day poster child for the
hereditary king of a nation that embodies all their declared virtues: Kim
Jong-Un.”
(Moldbug
responds
to this ‘analysis’. Much more by others on the TC thread.)
If anyone finds the variant of Neoreaction espoused here indistinguishable
from Juche, I’m just going to suck it up.
November 29, 2013Lewis on NR
Matt K. Lewis, in The Week, shows that a critical
appraisal
of Neoreaction really doesn’t require hysteria. (The second half of the
article is especially impressive.) If the custodians of Cathedral
orthodoxy don’t find a way to punish him for his sobriety, this piece
could set a new standard for public discussion of the anti-democratic
right.
… these movements tacitly accept that conservatism as a political force
is utterly incapable of slowing the leftward march of liberalism. By
definition, conservatives, who want to conserve the good things about
the past, are always playing defense. When you consider that many of my
conservative views aren’t terribly different from John F. Kennedy’s
views in 1960, this becomes self-evident.
Can this degree of honesty be allowable?
ADDED: At The American Conservative,
two (instantly forgettable) response pieces, by
Noah Millman, and
Rod Dreher.
ADDED: Jonah Goldberg isn’t shrieking either: “Lewis goes on to talk about
the neoreactionaries, an interesting intellectual subculture from what I
can tell, but calling them extremely marginal to the mainstream right
probably still gives them too much credit.” These kind of responses are
making it ever more obvious how unhinged the libertarian commentary has
been (with
Cato-types being the most despicable).
January 6, 2014Scrapping
Due to a mixture of out-in-the-stickitude, device deficiency, and
technical incompetence I can’t even link to the Demos attack on ‘the dark
enlightenment’ hosted by The Daily Telegraph (at the right edge of the UK
MSM). I’ll be grateful for a link to this piece in the comments here
(complacently confident there’ll be one).
Some not-quite-random remarks:
1. The article is dismally poor, even by the standards of these things.
Neoreaction is something cooked up by Moldy and me, apparently, starting
from “two blogs”. It’s also ‘neofascism’.
2. The comment thread isn’t remotely cooperating.
3. Demos has an interesting history.
4. As this nonsense gets bigger, it’s descending into sheer self-parody.
Cathedral culture is a kind of chaos, which makes the strategic issues far
more intriguing than the quality of this material might suggest.
January 20, 2014Scrap note #4
Into the closing days of this Cambodian escape, I’m now in Kep, on the
coast of the Gulf of Thailand. It’s an interesting place (which I’ll say
something about in the Cambodia scrap
log). Note the
link there? There haven’t been any of those for a while. The reason it has
now become possible is the Kep Lodge guest computer, which leaves
my tablet in the dust. Links, cursor control, copy-and-paste … ecstasy. So
I have to try and seize the opportunity …
Starting meta, there are two media-reaction compilation resources which
everyone needs to know about (and I’m sure just about everyone already
does). Both are finding it increasingly difficult to keep up. Handle’s (here) might by updating sluggishly for a few weeks, because the
Hausmeister is taking a well-earned break. It might fall upon
Amos & Gromar (here) to track developments, which are getting steadily more encouraging.
The American Thinker isn’t exactly
MSM, but it’s still highly significant that Christopher Chantrill has
written the first Dark Enlightenment
commentary
for a relatively mainstream conservative site that doesn’t engage in any
skirt-clutching whatsoever. It’s a short, friendly piece that is best
understood as a deliberate exercise in de-toxification. Prediction: this
brewing media storm is going to start opening consequential fault-lines in
the conservative movement, which as far as any DE strategic schedule is
concerned, gets us to first base. It follows, of course, that
establishment conservative responses will get even more hysterical (and
that also counts as a win).
Some substantial engagement from beyond the reactosphere is also in
prospect from Adam Gurri (who has some genuinely productive lines of
criticism). There’s also Patri Friedman (link?– can’t get it to work from here), who commits to exploring “a more
politically correct dark enlightenment” (via @MikeAnissimov twitter) which
has to — at the very least — be extremely entertaining. Given the
prevailing distribution of forces, confusion has to be our friend
(right?).
Related developments of interest include a tendency within the HBD
‘community’ to seize the ‘Dark Enlightenment’ (brand) for themselves,
chucking out all the awkward right-wingery (via rumorous twitter). I’ve no
sense at all of the mechanism by which ‘they’ think they can achieve that,
but the impulse is disorganizing, and therefore probably to be approved
(although, of course, at the same time fiercely contested).
Accepting that chaos is ‘bad’, it seems to me that it is especially bad
for our opponents, whose piecemeal suppression strategy requires social
conditioning by a maximally-simple aversion response. Their stage-1
campaign is based on something like a “Neoreaction — yuk, Nazis!” reflex.
Anything that leads instead to “What? Hang on a minute …” reaction counts
(for them) as a major fail. There can be no serious doubt that we’re well
into that (as the comment threads of all the hit-pieces so far attest).
So, prediction-2: we’re going to see a second phase hostile media approach
emerging really soon — over the next few months — adapted to important
constituencies who are refusing the desired stimulus-response programming.
I’ve no idea what this will look like, but it’s almost bound to be more
intellectually engaging than anything we’ve seen so far.
Some straggly extras:
At the risk of getting Matt Sigl into trouble, it’s quite obvious that
he’s a thoughtful guy who deserves better editors. Are we going to see
another piece by him (stripped of the Cathedral tics) some time this year?
Tim Stanley is a pathetic tool, but there are some impressive
Telegraph writers (Ed West, James Dellingpole …), are
they going to jump in at some point?
If the Telegraph can be cracked (still uncertain), how about the
National Review? If Steyn has problems with us, they won’t be
stupid, and he really doesn’t like witch hunters.
We’ll get so bored by this expression, if we aren’t already, but —
interesting times.
ADDED: See
this
by Amos & Gromar. The people who seem to be getting front
rank exposure in the current media wave are Mencius Moldbug (naturally),
Michael Anissimov, and me. To make a very obvious point explicit, however,
this is wildly disproportionate, and — I suspect — not long sustainable.
Moldbug is a transcendental master, about whom enough can never be said,
but Mike and I are both highly atypical representatives of (very
different) neoreactionary extremes. If Amos & Gromar (for
non-random instance) was shifted to center stage, the whole phenomenon
would become vastly more sane. (In this particular case, I suspect that an
A&G has a branding issue, because media get confused about ‘who’
exactly they’re pointing at — and frankly I think I’m pretty good at that
stuff. MARKETING people!)
ADDED: Nicholas Pell has written a thoughtful
piece
on the DE for takimag that has garnered glowing responses from
all corners so far. (I’m certainly highly appreciative.)
ADDED: John Derbyshire is
in
the house.
ADDED: The Daily Telegraph is done:
January 28, 2014Lord of the Trolls
Mark Shea might not quite be the most ludicrous idiot alive (judge for
yourself), but he earnestly
shares
the following warning — received from one of his readers. I’m putting the
whole story here, because Shea’s credulity about it is so radically
humiliating I can only assume he’ll want to take it down.
The Dark Enlightenment Exposed
I first heard about the Dark Enlightenment (aka “Neo-Reaction” or just
“Reaction”) last year, the year after I graduated from college and was
interning at a conservative think tank. I briefly become involved with
the Dark Enlightenment and then left the movement in disgust. Here is
what I learned:
– The Dark Enlightenment is controlled by what the media call “Sith
Lords”. You have more public Lords like Mencius Moldbug and Nick Land,
but there are even some Lords up higher whose names are not revealed.
They say the Master Lord says ‘Et Ego in Arcadia’ which is an anagram
for ‘Tego Arcana Dei’ (“I hide the secrets of God”).
– But only the media call them ‘Sith Lords’. In Inner Speak, they will
often use phrases like the Men of Númenor or the Eldars.
– I never met any of the higher Eldars, but I did once meet an Eldar in
Training. I don’t know his real name but people called him Legolas. He
had long blond hair, was dressed like a 19th century count, and wore a
pendant that had both a Christian Cross and Thor’s Hammer on it.
– The movement is a weird mixture of ethno-nationalists, futurists,
monarchists, PUAs (“pick-up artists” like Chateau Heartiste), Trad
Catholics, Trad Protestants, etc. They all believe in HBD (what they
call “human biodiversity” i.e. racism) but disagree on some other minor
points.
– The religious people in the movement (both Christians and pagans)
practice what is called “identitarian religion” (religion that doesn’t
deny ethnic identity).
– Some of the rising stars of the Dark Enlightenment on the internet
seem to be Radish Magazine, Occam’s Razor Mag, and Theden TV.
– The Dark Enlightenment allegedly has millions of dollars of money to
play with. They have a couple big donors. One is rumored to be a major
tech tycoon in Silicon Valley. They actually had a private 3-day meeting
on an island which was furnished with a French chef, etc. Different
forms of formal attire were required for each day (tuxedos, 3-piece
suits, etc), and some weird costumes were required too (capes, hoods,
etc) — which sound like a pagan cult. (I wasn’t at this function but
heard about it.)
– I was initiated into the first stages of the Dark Enlightenment,
which involved me stripping down naked so people could “inspect my
phenotype”. I was then given a series of very personal questions, often
relating to sexual matters. I was then told to put on a black cape. (I
really regret doing this but at the time I was younger, more
impressionable and eager to please.)
– For the initial oath taking, everyone must swear on a copy of
Darwin’s Origin of Species, just to show their fidelity to HBD. After
that, for the later oaths, seculars will swear again on Darwin, while
Christians will swear on the Bible, and pagans on the Prose Edda or
Iliad.
– At one of the meetings I heard someone continuously chanting “gens
alba conservanda est” (Latin for “the white race must be preserved”) and
then others were chanting things in Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse and Old
German, but I don’t know those languages so I can’t remember exactly
what they were saying.
– They also have all their own secret handshakes, and their own
terminology [like the Cathedral (“political correctness”), thedening
(“re-establishing ethnic group identity”), genophilia (“love of one’s
own race”), NRx (“neoreaction”), etc.].
– On the philosophical level, this movement is not entirely original.
Much of it is borrowed from the Identitarian movement in Europe. They
also all detest democracy. They are not trying to be a “populist
movement” but are only trying to convert other elites to their way of
thinking.
This whole movement is like a secret cult, which is why I left. Also,
because of the valiant and brave efforts of people on the net exposing
this movement, I saw this cult for the evil it truly is. Please stay
away from it.
(Thanks to Alex for pointing me at this.)
ADDED: It’s been a big day for NRx
exposure. (This one’s via @realmattforney.)
ADDED: The post at Shea’s blog has already gone — but too late to rescue
the bearded one from an eternity of shame. … And now it’s back up again,
hard to keep track. [Please, please Gnon, let Shea be trying to do a Dan
Rather and brazen this out.]
ADDED: Some essential developments
here
(at Shea’s place) and
here
(at Occam’s Razor). I’m strongly sympathetic to this:
February 13, 2014Hit-Piece of the Week
This
one
is actually pretty interesting (as well as reaching a whole new level of
batshit insane).
ADDED: One hit piece in a week? Oh
come
on!
ADDED: A micro-crucial moment —
June 13, 2014Alexander on the Ratchet
It’s carefully hedged (and ultimately contested), but it’s well worth
noting. He begins the relevant section of a recent
post
by revisiting the self-observation: “In the past two months I have
inexplicably and very very suddenly become much more conservative.”
(Pass-the-popcorn.)
The explanation I like least is that it comes from reading too much
neoreaction. I originally rejected this hypothesis because I don’t
believe most what I read. But I’m starting to worry that there are memes
that, like
Bohr’s horseshoe, affect you whether you believe them or not: memes that
crystallize the wrong pattern, or close the wrong
feedback loop. I have long suspected social justice contains some of these. Now I
worry neoreaction contains others.
In particular I worry about the neoreactionary assumption that leftism
always increases with time, and that today’s leftism confined to a few
fringe idiots whom nobody really supports today becomes tomorrow’s
mainstream left and the day after tomorrow’s “you will be fired if you
disagree with them”. Without me ever really evaluating its truth-value
it has wormed its way into my brain and started haunting my
nightmares.
I’m usually reluctant to take Alexander seriously when he tells us what
Neoreaction is, but in this case I think he gets it right.
He embeds this passage in an encompassing theory, aiming to frame the
degenerative ratchet within a directionless random-walk of fashion (driven
by something like abstract cellular automata). The theory is clever, but
its historical fit is so poor I don’t expect it to last indefinitely. In
the best case, during the few months it takes for this psychic-defense
system to start falling apart and strewing parts along the doom-route of
accelerating Left-Singularity, Alexander can dedicate his exceptional mind
to collecting alternative cognitive defense-mechanisms and testing them to
destruction. In this way he can contribute to clearing the desert at the
end of our world.
ADDED: The voyage into darkness continues …
July 6, 2014Castillo on Nrx
From the perspective of an intrigued (and thoughtfully critical)
libertarian, Andrea Castillo offers an initial
appraisal
of Neoreaction. It’s definitely the most dispassionate yet, and in various
ways the most perceptive (which isn’t to forget how admirable Adam Gurri’s
more obviously polemical
engagement
was).
The greatest structural merit of the piece is the firm positioning of
Mencius Moldbug at the foundations of the phenomenon. Unlike most of the
critical NRx commentary so far, Castillo has clearly read Moldbug with
some care. This is basically enough in itself to ensure that something
real is being seen.
Steve Sailer, who served Castillo unwittingly as a gateway into the
darkness, receives disproportionate attention given his manifest lack of
affiliation with NRx. Of course, he’s hugely-respected throughout the
reactosphere due to his rare refusal to stop ‘noticing‘ upon firm request. Beyond the fact he hasn’t let the Cathedral put his
eyes out, however, there’s nothing very much to differentiate him from
mainstream American conservatism. Still, Sailer’s presence in the piece
does much useful work. In particular, it helps to mark out the boundary
controversies defining contemporary libertarianism (the immigration topic
prominent among them).
Since she’s already got herself into trouble, it can’t make much more to
add that @anjiecast was
already one of my favorite people in the world (remember
this
for instance?). A little bit more now.
July 29, 2014Chu on this
Arthur Chu wasn’t prepared to put in the work to write the worst
NRx-denunciation screed yet, but he’s done his
best. Too many absurd errors to enumerate, and AC proudly declared on twitter
that life’s too short to bother with right-wing garbage like facts. Still,
the spreading menace has reached The Daily Beast now. (They just
can’t stop themselves.)
(In context it’s easier to recognize that “nodding thoughtfully at
racists” is a cute way of saying ‘reading stuff’.)
ADDED: This (from the article) is morbidly intriguing:
I’ve known who Moldbug was since he was just starting his career of
intellectual trolling … […] I’ve known about the “neoreactionaries” a
lot longer, before they were given that name—back when they were just
teenagers on the Internet, like me, furious that there were people less
intelligent than us who dared tell us what to do. […] I never bought
into the ideology fully, but I understand its appeal.
A smidgen of identification? Careful Arthur, that could be very dangerous.
ADDED: More on JT at The Daily Dot. (Still
more, at Twitchy.)
August 1, 2014NRx @ LW
Matthew Opitz has put up an insightful
post
at Less Wrong, attempting to make sense of Neoreaction through contrast
with Progressivism. Given the great internal diversity of NRx, combined
with its embryonic stage of self-formulation (in many respects), the
lucidity Opitz brings to the topic is no slight achievement. His post is
among the most impressive Ideological Turing
Test
performances I have yet seen.
The core paragraph (among much else of great interest):
Neoreaction says, “There is objective value in the
principle of “perpetuating biological and/or civilizational complexity”
itself*; the best way to perpetuate biological and/or civilizational
complexity is to “serve Gnon” (i.e. devote our efforts to fulfilling
nature’s pre-requisites for perpetuating our biologial and/or
civilizational complexity); our subjective values are spandrels
manufactured by natural selection/Gnon; insofar as our subjective values
motivate us to serve Gnon and thereby ensure the perpetuation of
biological and/or civilizational complexity, our subjective values are
useful. (For example, natural selection makes sex a subjective value by
making it pleasurable, which then motivates us to perpetuate our
biological complexity). But, insofar as our subjective values mislead us
from serving Gnon (such as by making non-procreative sex still feel
good) and jeopardize our biological/civilizational perpetuation, we must
sacrifice our subjective values for the objective good of perpetuating
our biological/civilizational complexity” (such as by buckling down and
having procreative sex even if one would personally rather not enjoy
raising kids).
Most LessWrongers probably agree with neoreactionaries on this
fundamental normative assumption, with the typical objective good of
LessWrongers being “human complexity/Godshatter,” and thus the
“techno-commercialist” wing of neoreaction being the one that typically
finds the most interest among LessWrongers.
Opitz’s ‘Godshatter’ reference
link.
XoS will do its best to follow this discussion as it goes forward.
This
attractively odd thing might be found at least vaguely relevant.
September 6, 2014De-Triggering
A
statement
to be preserved for the fascinated scrutiny of generations yet unborn:
I am experimentally
tabooing
the words “neoreaction”, “neoreactionary”, and “NRx” in this blog’s
comments effective immediately. It’s emotionally charged and politicized
in a way that I think potential substitutes aren’t. I got my first
exposure to far-right ideas from the neoreactionaries and so
historically I’ve viewed rightism through their lens and spread that to
my readers, but I think that this emphasis was a mistake. Also, nobody
agrees on what “neoreactionary” means, least of all self-identified
neoreactionaries. If you want to talk about monarchists, call them
monarchists. If you want to talk about traditionalists, call them
traditionalists. If you want to talk about the far right, call it the
far right. If you want to talk about HBD, call it HBD. If you want to
talk about Mencius Moldbug, call him Mencius Moldbug. First infraction
will be punished with a warning, second with burning eternally in the
caldera of the Volcano God.
(If I followed SA’s comment threads more diligently, I’d have a better
sense of the context for this. Seems like an interesting experiment in any
case. It also says something about triggers — or memetic virulence —
although that’s still a little blurry …)
I have to add the ‘mind-control’ tag — but it works both ways.
October 25, 2015The Darkness at the End of the Tunnel
While not quite living up to its (superb) title,
this
critical leftist exploration of the NRx-AI nexus makes some suggestive
connections.
… in the decades since, as the consumer-oriented liberalism of Bill
Gates and Steve Jobs gave way to the technological authoritarianism of
Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, this strange foundation paved the way for
even stranger tendencies. The strangest of these is known as
“neoreaction,” or, in a distorted echo of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s vision,
the “Dark Enlightenment.” It emerged from the same chaotic process that
yielded the anarchic political collective Anonymous, a product of the
hivemind generated by the cybernetic assemblages of social media. More
than a school of thought, it resembles a meme. The genealogy of this new
intellectual current is refracted in the mirror of the most dangerous
meme ever created: Roko’s Basilisk.
Stand-out line:
The further right Silicon Valley shifts, the more dangerous their
machines will become.
Running the connection through Roko’s
Basilisk
is sufficiently non-obvious that Sandifer’s
book
(which does the same) clearly merited a mention.
(Park MacDougald does it better, though,
1,
2.)
March 31, 2017A Disturbance in the Force
Is anyone else beginning to get a little … I think the technical term is
‘weirded out’ by what is
happening
in the media?
Given that the central convergence point of neoreaction is an analysis of
media power as the consummation of the (Anglophone) mainstream trend in
global political history, it’s impossible to find this sort of thing
simply amusing. Cathedral theory predicts a quasi-stable closed
loop in which left-progressive academic self-organization obtains ever
more comprehensive social dominion through a conductive media system. When
the media strays off message, by allowing things to be noticed that —
entirely lacking academic endorsement — cannot legitimately exist,
something of profound social significance is taking place.
There might be any number of intriguing opportunities in these (still
deeply cryptic) developments. For Mencius Moldbug, however, I suspect life
could soon become uncomfortably interesting. The attack dogs of
the left have left him alone, in the hope that he would remain unknown and
ignored. Once that hope dies, the leashes are sure to come off.
[I haven’t forgotten that I owe Bryce a
What is Neoreaction? review — but I hadn’t expected I’d be in a
race to complete it before the New York Times gets to the
finishing post.]
November 9, 2013Strangeloop
XS has nothing to say about
this, beyond a tweet (by the slightly better half). Posting this as the
pretext for a discussion thread, on the assumption that regulars here are
likely to be engaged with the event, and the various tributaries feeding
into it.
ADDED: Comstockery for communists.
ADDED: Breitbart’s take (sound).
ADDED: Punishment is vindication.
ADDED: Strange Loop sponsors.
ADDED:
two
more
(both excellent).
June 5, 2015Strangeloop II
The Hacker News discussion
thread on The
Moldbug Affair is not to be missed. To call it ‘historic’ wouldn’t be
(much of) and exaggeration. It’s well-worth a look just for the Urbit
insights alone. In addition (and quite separately from the last point)
‘yarvin9’ pops up to make an impressive demonstration of not groveling to
the mob. That, hopefully, could provide a model for the many others who
will find themselves in analogous witch-trial hot-seats over the months
and years to come.
A few highlights.
devalier , on Urbit:
It wasn’t the code itself that I learned from. I have more been
enriched and stimulated by reading the blog posts, documentation, hacker
news threads, and mailing list. A couple of the more interesting ideas
are:
* He created Nock, which in a way is bytecode language, like compiled
java bytecode or the .NET CIL. But his idea was that this bytecode
should be the simplest possible thing, far, far simpler than the CLR. In
fact, it should be versioned in Kelvin versioning, starting at 5,000 and
counting down, until it is finally perfected and will never need to
change. Going forward, all consumer apps will always compile down to
this bytecode. All new hardware platforms can build interpreters for
this bytecode. I think that is a pretty novel and neat approach. If it
caught on, it would ensure that any program we wrote now could be run
for the next thousand years.
* His view is that to beat spam, you simply need to have a finite number
of cryptographically secured identities. This number can be large. But
if it is finite, that means accounts will not be costless, which means
the market over time will be able to solve the problems of trust and
filtering out spam in a way far superior to how it works today.
It’s hard to do the ideas justice by trying to repeat them myself. In
reading through the material it was just lots of little things, where I
said to myself, “Ah, that is a neat solution to that problem, I wonder
if he’ll be able to make it work.”
Quality sarcasm from 13thLetter:
What a crazy coincidence. This talk was accepted when nobody knew who
Yarvin was, but now that you and your friends want to cast him out into
the wilderness for disagreeing with your political opinions, all of a
sudden you realize that the talk was technically uninteresting anyway.
What are the odds, huh?
yarvin9 on racism:
I shouldn’t post as urbit. Quite a few other people, few of whom agree
with me on anything, have worked on the project.
The word “racist” and its conjugations does not appear in the English
language until the 1920s – see Peter Frost’s cultural history
*. If you asked
Shakespeare if he was a “racist,” he would not know what you meant.
“Racist” is essentially a term of abuse which no group or party has ever
applied to itself. Like most such epithets, it has two meanings – a
clear objective one, describing a person who fails to believe in the
anthropological theories of human equality which became first popular,
then universal in the mid-20th century; and a caricature of the vices,
personal or political, typically engaged in by such a foul
unbeliever.
[This non-apology under pressure is truly glorious]
topynate on the realistic micro-sociology of crimethink
definition:
Kicking people from your tech conference because they were racist
outside of it hands veto power to whoever determines what racism is and
when something is ‘too racist’. The same goes for the other
beyond-the-pale isms like sexism, fascism, etc.
paxdickinson on precedent:
It’ll be [Alex Miller’s] decision next time too. And now that the Red
Guards know he’ll succumb to even the slightest bit of pressure, there
will certainly be a next time.
convexfunction on prophecy:
It’s funny because he definitely
saw
this coming.
djur on “this is so … I can’t even …”
This is a core tenet of Moldbuggian neoreaction, that American and
European politics are run by a “Cathedral” that adheres to communist
beliefs. Claiming that mainstream political positions are communism is
absolutely insane.
corporealist on perspective:
This guy is a rightwinger (outside of his industry) and somebody didn’t
like it. What an embarrassment. They’re proving the right’s points.
ShardPhoenix on more perspective:
… socialism is much worse than racism. Socialism (actual socialism, not
“social democracy” aka capitalist welfare state) destroys countries (eg
North Korea), while racism is merely a moderate problem (eg South Korea
is very racist but doing fine).
ADDED: So I guess the Streisand Effect really is a thing.
June 8, 2015Smear-ghouls
It’s only one tweet, but I’m going to treat it as massively indicative,
because:
(1) It’s Friday night
(2) It’s more entertaining that way, and
(3) It actually might be massively indicative
Plunging straight into madness’ maw, therefore, we have this:
Some immediate take-away? ‘Neoreactionary’ (the word) has crossed a
currency threshold, and its destiny is now vastly senseless. It’s
retrospectively obvious that if anything was going to happen to it in the
wider culture, it was going to be this. Roughly, it’s becoming what
‘neoconservative’ and ‘neoliberal’ were, and are: a political term that
circulates socially because it designates something vague and scary to its
enemies, who then use it as a smear-ghoul to tar things they don’t
understand, and don’t like. This probably sounds bad, but if we think so,
it’s a sign of how unrealistic we’ve been about the dominant semiotic
processes in degenerating democracies. It wasn’t ever going to be any
other way.
Running isn’t going to work. There’s an argument to be made for fleeing
territory, but to flee signs is utterly pointless. There’s no superior
semiotic position to be escaped to. The way this is happening is the way
it happens. It has to be understood, worked through, played with. As the
Wittgenstein-tendency
of NRx would surely be the first to concur, private languages are
intrinsically delusive. When your antagonist is a titanic cultural control
apparatus, your words are going to get messed with in ways that seem
simply insane. That’s the way it is.
It’s not — by any means — an altogether disastrous situation, at least,
not any more than the situation in general is
disastrous.
Even if the dominant public sense of a co-opted word is allusive,
polemical, and strategically abusive, there is still a subtle undercurrent
of awkwardness.
“Oh man, those Tea-Party morons are like total tools of the
neoreactionaries!”
“Yeah, too right! *snork* *snork* *snork*” (What the hell is a neoreactionary? Gotta Google that m***********.)
And really, it doesn’t matter what they think — except right out on the
margin, where things slip. It’s obviously going to be the targets of the
smear-ghouling, in a few peculiar cases, who ask:
If this ‘neoreaction’ business is creating so much fear and loathing
among our enemies, there might be something to it that I’d like.
SoBL has a quite brilliant tweet on the topic:
Conspiracy construction is an essential part of the process. It’s a way
the Left-establishment digests threats without having to think about them,
keeping the problem purely strategic, rather than ideological. One
consequence — eventually it brings a conspiracy into being. If war has
been declared, you might as well fight back. In this sense, the swelling
wave of Silicon Valley conspiracy mongering on the Left strikes me as
wholly positive, its absurdity notwithstanding. Tech billionaires who find
themselves in the cross-hairs of this stuff are pretty much forced to
acknowledge that appeasement isn’t working. Some of them are going to get
the idea that the Cathedral wants to destroy them. At that point, they
start looking for options.
You can have the CIA angle thrown in for free:
How long before some elements within the intelligence services start to
wonder whether they have some unexplored options, too?
July 25, 2014HuffPo NRx?
After
this
(linked in the
last Chaos
Patch), comes
another
pointed lesson from the same Tech-Comm island bastion, with a title that
doesn’t even try to distance itself from hardcore Dark Enlightenment
through use of a strategic question mark: “Singapore Challenges the Idea
That Democracy Is the Best Form of Governance.”
It’s written by a Westerner this time, Graham Allison, who — to complete
the extremity of infiltration — is “Director, Belfer Center for Science
and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School” (XS
emphasis). So he can say anything he wants, and he says this.
For a provocative analogy, think of countries as if they were hotels
and citizens as guests. … Rarely do guests offer views about the
ownership of the hotel or how it is governed.
[That last sentence is about as close to pure Moldbug as you can get
without actually quoting the
guy monster.] …
“Liberty” … includes both “freedom from” and “freedom to.” … Singapore
stands at the top of the international competition on “freedoms from:”
It ranks first internationally in the World Bank’s measure of
“regulatory quality” and second on The Heritage Foundation’s scale of
economic freedom
[First, of course, is Hong Kong],
while the U.S. comes in 13th. Gallup’s 2014 World Poll found that eight
in 10 Americans see “widespread corruption” in the U.S. government,
compared with seven in the Philippines, six in Zimbabwe and one in
Singapore. On the World Bank’s “rule of law” index, Singapore scores in
the 95th percentile of nations, the U.S. scores in the 91st, the
Philippines in the 42nd and Zimbabwe in the 2nd. With a population of
almost six million,
Singapore’s incidents of robbery
were only a seventh of
Boston’s, which has a population of only 650,000. … When we turn to “freedom
to” metrics, however, one-party Singapore scores well below the U.S. on
three of our core freedoms: “freedom of expression and belief,”
“associational and organizational rights” and “political pluralism and
participation.” … When one asks “hotel customers” for feedback, the
results are even more troubling for Americans. As the table below shows,
four out of five Singaporeans are satisfied customers. They have
confidence in their elections, their judicial system, their local police
and their national leadership. In contrast, only one in three Americans
has confidence in our national government and the country’s leadership;
fewer than half regard elections as honest; and three-quarters of the
population sees widespread corruption in government.
Look at SingGov as a business corporation (“hotel”) and it’s delivering an
efficient, attractive service. WashCorp, not so much.
Next up from HuffPo —
Is decomposition of the United States into Patchwork micro-states an
idea who’s time has come?
(Unlike Allison’s editors, I’ve thrown in the question mark there out of
fidelity to liberal traditions.)
August 10, 2015Counter Fund
XS has a few quibbles with
this project, while nevertheless
thinking it’s probably the most intelligent thing taking place on the
right at the moment. (Some highly interesting chat
here, or directly
here.)
The reliance on personal discretion for ideological vetting is a sign of
immaturity (as Pax seems to accept, since it’s intended to be temporary).
Less protocol governance-oriented types will probably find this less of a
needling issue than this blog does. In any case, the scheme is inclined
towards trustlessness, which is the primary functional criterion for all
21st Century social technology.
A more intriguing quibble is that the “co-op grocery store” model runs
directly contrary to basic NeoCam principles, since it deliberately offers
a role in governance to customers. This could be the basis for an
important conversation down the road.
Main positive, as always with Pax Dickinson initiatives, is that it aims
(competently) to latch onto the grain of the Internet, and that of
auto-catalytic social machinery more generally. Whenever the “What is to
be Done?” question arises, this is the type of thing that needs pointing
to. Pieces of the future manifestly drift back into it.
Here are the first three installments of the Counter.Fund Gentle
Introduction (1,
2,
3). The first is written by Pax Dickinson, the next two co-written with
Anthony Demarco.
July 16, 2017
SECTION A - NRX SKIRMISHES
Flavors of Reaction
Once it is accepted that the right can never agree about anything, the
opportunity arises to luxuriate in the delights of diversity.
Libertarianism already rivaled Trotskyism as a source of almost
incomprehensibly compact dissensus, but the New Reaction looks set to take
internecine micro-factionalism into previously unimagined territories. We
might as well enjoy it.
From crypto-fascists,
theonomists, and
romantic royalists, to
jaded classical liberals and
hard-core constitutionalists, the reaction contains an entire ideological cosmos within itself.
Hostility to coercive egalitarianism and a sense that Western civilization
is going to hell will probably suffice to get you into the club. Agreeing
on anything much beyond that? Forget it.
There’s one dimension of reactionary diversity that strikes
Outside in as particularly consequential (insofar as anything out
here in the frozen wastes has consequences): the articulation of
reaction and politics. Specifically: is the reaction an
alternative politics, or a lucid (= cynically realistic) anti-politics? Is
democracy bad politics, or simply politics, elaborated towards the limit
of its inherently poisonous potential?
Outside in sides emphatically with the anti-political ‘camp’.
Our cause is depoliticization (or catallaxy, negatively
apprehended).
The tradition of spontaneous order
is our heritage. The New Reaction warns that the tide is against us.
Intelligence will be required, in abundance, if we are to swim the other
way, and we agree with the theonomists at least in this: if it is drawn
from non-human sources, so much the better. Markets, machines, and
monsters might inspire us. Rulers of any kind? Not so much.
February 19, 2013Trichotomy
The ‘Spandrellian Trichotomy’ (Nick B. Steves’ coinage, based on
this
post) has become an awesome engine of discussion. The topic is seething to
such an extent that any linkage list will be out of date as soon as it is
compiled. Among the most obvious way-markers are
this,
this,
this,
this, and
this. Given the need to refer to this complex succinctly, I trust that
abbreviating it to ‘the Trichotomy’ will not be interpreted as a clumsy
attempt to obstruct Spandrell’s Nobel Peace Prize candidacy.
What is already broadly agreed?
(1) There is a substratum of neoreactionary
consensus, involving a variety of abominated realist insights, especially
the contribution of deep heritage to socio-political outcomes. Whilst
emphasis differs, an ultra-Burkean attitude is tacitly shared, and among
those writers who self-identify with the Dark Enlightenment, the
importance of HBD is generally foregrounded.
(2) Neoreaction also shares an enemy: the Cathedral (as
delineated by Mencius Moldbug). On the nature of this enemy much is
agreed, not least that it is defined by a project of deep heritage erasure
— both ideological and practical — which simultaneously effaces its own
deep heritage as a profound religious syndrome, of a peculiar type.
Further elaboration of Cathedral genealogy, however, ventures into
controversy. (In particular, its consistency with Christianity is a
fiercely contested topic.)
(3) As neoreactionary perspectives are systematized, they tend to fall
into a trichotomous pattern of dissensus. This, ironically, is
something that can be agreed. The Trichotomy, or neoreactionary
triad, is determined by divergent identifications of the Western tradition
that the Cathedral primarily suppresses: Christian, Caucasian, or
Capitalist.
My
preferred terms for the resultant neoreactionary strains are,
respectively, the Theonomist; the Ethno-Nationalist; and
the Techno-Commercial. These labels are intended to be accurate,
neutral descriptions, without intrinsic polemical baggage.
It is to be expected — at least initially, and occasionally — that each
strain will seek to dismiss, subordinate, or amalgamate the other two. If
they were not so tempted, their trichotomous disintegration would never
have arisen. Each must believe that it, alone, has the truth, or
the road to truth, unless sheer insincerity reigns.
Outside in does not pretend to impartiality, but it asserts an
invincible disillusionment.
— If the Trichotomy was reducible, the new reaction would already be one
thing. It isn’t, and it isn’t (soon) going to be.
— As astrology reveals, and more ‘sophisticated’ systems confirm, people
delight in being categorized, accepting non-universality as the real price
of identification. (The response to Scharlach’s diagram attests to
that.)
— Accepting the Trichotomy and the arguments it organizes is a way to be
tested, and any neoreactionary position that refuses it will die a flabby
death.
— The Trichotomy makes it impossible for neoreaction to play at dialectics
with the Cathedral. For that reason alone, we should be grateful to it.
Unity — even oppositional unity — was never on our side.
April 30, 2013Visual Trichotomy
Nick B. Steves sent this along to keep the discussion moving forward:
[Click on the image to enlarge]
May 2, 2013White Out
According
to the White Nationalist fraternity, the Dark Enlightenment tends to like
civilized people even when they aren’t really white. I think
that’s right (and Right), although — of course — it’s supposed to be a
problem.
It’s certainly amusing that the only people who don’t think we’re Nazis
are the Nazis. They recognize that “cognitive elitists” are inherently
prone to race treachery — which could be pushed all the way out to species
treachery (if I have anything to do with it).
Optimize for intelligence isn’t any kind of key to racial
solidarity, or solidarity of any other kind. Even HBD, they generally
insist, isn’t them (it’s too attentive to PISA
ratings
and such). There are some seriously interesting controversies implicit in
all this, although rage is likely to break them up before they get very
far. It makes me realize that one thing I appreciate about the Neoreaction
is its anger management, which is inextricable from its taste for irony
(and probably also from its decadence).
At Amos & Gromar
there’s
some worthwhile comment, and commentators.
Boundaries should always be appreciated, whoever is drawing them.
December 13, 2013Retro-Dialectics
Nobody familiar with contemporary Western societies can be intellectually
challenged by the idea of a great dialectical resolution to the problem of
liberalism. Coercion and liberty are fused in a political order that
directs authority towards the maximization of choice without consequence.
Stupidity is sacred, and neither tradition nor natural necessity has the
right to inhibit it. Preserving the freedom to fathom the limits of
dysfunction in every direction is the primary social obligation, with the
full resources of Leviathan behind it. If that’s not exactly where we are,
it will be soon.
Against this backdrop, Neoreaction emerges as a de-synthesizing impulse,
splintering along multiple paths, but especially two. In reacting against
authoritarian irresponsibility (or ‘anarcho-tyranny’) it tends to
a restoration of the Old Antithesis: either hierarchical
solidarity, or a ruthless dis-solidarity (and as it undoes the
progressive dialectic, ‘either’ fragments into ‘both’ — separately). Only
the state protected irresponsibility of resolved Left-liberalism
is strictly intolerable, because that has been historically demonstrated
to be an engine of degeneration. Neoreaction, initially conceived, is
anything else.
As the West unravels back to the Old
Antithesis, the primary argumentative polarity of Neoreaction is exposed
with increasing clarity (Neoreaction is this exposure). Given
that irresponsibility is not to be protected, is it to be prevented (by a
new paternalism) or abandoned to its intrinsic consequences (through
reversion to Social Darwinism)? In other words, is the dominant theme
hierarchy or exit? Any attempt to force a rapid decision
— however tempting this might be — is to trivialize the submerged grandeur
of the abyss. The degenerative dialectic has at least half a millennium of
heritage behind it — and perhaps at least two millennia. The Old
Antithesis is far greater than either of its constituent ‘options’.
When More Right
outlines
its ‘Premises of Reactionary Thought’ there can be no doubt which side of
the antithesis is being promoted. It thereby declares that
the Left-liberal synthesis is dead, establishing itself as the
articulation of a Neoreactionary stance. Its partiality, however, is
overt. (Outside in advances a counter-partiality.)
If failure is — eventually — no longer to be sustained, it either has to
be prevented, or intensified. Neither stop it failing nor
let it fail are remotely equivalent to
let it continue failing forever, but neither are coercion and
neglect commensurable to each other. The Old Antithesis is going to keep
us on edge during 2014. If Neoreaction can even more explicitly
be the unraveling, it will go far, but it will not obviously be
one thing. The ‘one thing’ is virtually dead. What comes next
arrives in pieces.
December 29, 20132014: A Prophecy
As has been said innumerable times before, any prophecy concerning
outcomes that involve the ‘prophet’ as an agent are seriously suspect. For
the (apparent) moment, such concerns are being pushed up the road into the
future.
There they have already made themselves ‘at home’ — along with much else
related to the general phenomenon of prediction (which is strictly
indistinguishable from time travel, when incisively understood).
Present
knowledge of the future is an action of the future upon the present, but all that can wait, since — of course — it doesn’t need to.
For now, the Prophecy:
2014 is the year in which Neoreaction tears itself apart.
This is not at all to say, the year in which it dies. On the
contrary, it will end the year strengthened in ways it has not to this
point envisaged, having carved out vast tracts of clarity, hardened itself
through close intellectual combat, refined its methods of de-synthesis (or
catabolism), and — most importantly of all — made schism an internal
dynamic principle. What integrates Neoreaction by the end of the year will
no longer be elective tenets (reflecting the more-or-less precarious
ideological preferences of individuals) but conflict-toughened structures
of objective micro-cultural cohesion, selected and sculpted by many months
of ferocious storms.
The approximate contours of these impending ruptures will provide the
content for the first 2014 Prognoses post (which is
already overdue). In anticipation, it need only be noted: the Dark
Enlightenment finds nothing external to itself that is
hard enough to sharpen its claws. It has feasted on soft, fat,
bleating lambs long enough. Thus the introverted ripping begins …
ADDED: Rigorous evidence for time travel still thin.
January 5, 2014Timing
I’m repeating an initial twitter interaction here because it seems quite
critical to some of the plate tectonic rumblings working through NRx. My
prompt was:
To which Michael Anissimov immediately replied:
(Of course there was more — interesting stuff.)
For some suggestive remarks about social prospects and differential
speeds, see Andrea Castillo’s latest (and excellent)
article
on the tech-economy at Umlaut.
February 11, 2014Anarchy in the NRx
Arthur R. Harrison (@AvengingRedHand) makes the incisive observation:
“Well the thing is NRx is a specific kind of post-libertarianism, or it
was. Now it seems to be just a name for reaction post-Moldbug.” There
could be people who don’t see that as degeneration. In fact, it seems
there are.
Reactotwitter is lurching into sheer delirium (as *ahem*
forecast). To
begin with, it seems no longer to concur on what it begins with:
(Not in my army.)
It’s time to choose your own tradition and slap an NRx sticker on it. Is
anyone envisaging any limits to this:
So NRx is a formless anarchy telling the world how to put itself in order?
Actually, I think this is probably right, and theoretically interesting,
but it clearly needs thinking about. How can there imaginably be an
‘entryism’ threat when command control is a teeming chaos? What does this
example of radical disorder suggest?
Here’s the NRx anarcho-chaos already pouring through the pipe:
Everyone has a voice, and we respect that … oh wait …
[Some intriguing hints elsewhere on twitter that
Urbit might eventually sort this
shrieking insanity out.]
ADDED: Occam’s Razor puts things in sensible perspective.
February 18, 2014Ideological Chaos
Occupy Wall Street founder, now working for
Cyberdyne Google
calls
for Neocameralism in a communist newspaper.
I’ll just let that simmer for a while …
ADDED: There have been some strange goings on
at The Guardian recently, for instance,
this
article on seasteading — because climate change.
ADDED: Now in The Telegraph: “The self-described ‘champagne
tranarchist’, who launched Occupy Wall Street in 2011, said that if the
technology industry was to take over the US government she would be
‘prancing around skipping for joy’, but accepted that it was unlikely.”
ADDED: Contemplationist (@i_contemplate_) catches this:
“If [this] is not neocameralism, I don’t know what is.” Quite.
ADDED: Justine Tunney interviewed by Christopher Mims (definitely not to be
missed by anyone interested in this peculiar episode).
March 20, 2014Crossing the Line
So, it’s happened:
This strikes me as a poly-dimensional crisis moment — or at least cultural
storm signal — (for NRx, for Google, and for the USA), so I’m obviously on
tenterhooks to hear what people think.
ADDED: The anti-Tunney (or one of them).
April 28, 2014Scrap note (#11)
With all coherent productivity sucked into a knotty accelerationism essay
at the moment, some fragments:
Fission update — apparently the geniuses in the NRx
peanut gallery are now convinced
that Justine Tunney has usurped Michael Anissimov in his
universally-acknowledged holy office as God-Emperor of the New Reaction.
Anissimov, to his great credit, is bemused. Is this stuff going to burn
out in its own radiant insanity, or amplify to some yet unimagined level
of crazy? The responsible option would be to abandon the ship of fools
now, but it’s way too entertaining for that. Signalling some distance is
becoming absolutely imperative, however.
One point that has to be emphasized with renewed fervor is the absolute
priority of territorial fragmentation to any line of NRx discussion which
begins to imagine itself ‘political’. Universalist models of the good
society are entirely inconsistent with NRx at its foundations, and to turn
such differences into political argument is to have wandered hopelessly
off script. The whole point of neoreactionary social arrangements is to
eliminate political argument, replacing it with practical problems of
micro-migration. Facilitating homelands for one’s antagonists is even more
important than designing them for one’s friends. (Even the old Republic of
South Africa knew that — although it botched the execution.) Geographical
sorting dispels dialectics.
***
Brett Stevens (of the Amerika
blog, @amerika_blog) has gone
super-nova on Twitter in a way that screams impending burn-out, but for
the moment he’s a source of superb commentary and linkage. Among very
recent gems, these
two
pieces, raising
questions about the restoration of sophisticated teleological ideas within
natural science.
Also,
another
two
on the Cathedralization of SF literary institutions, unfolding in public.
***
Mark Steyn comes
out
as a
Sailer
reader. No huge surprise there, I guess, but the darkness grows …
***
From what I have seen of the
Transcendence
response, the movie has been almost universally misunderstood. Immodestly,
I think my as-yet-unwritten blog post on the topic gets it with the title
Easter of the Nerds. Idiotically, most reviewers describe it as
being about the dangers of artificial super-intelligence. In reality, it’s
about the human sin of fear and denial of God, culminating in the murder
of the Messiah (as computationally-incarnated divinity), and his quiet
return, in a garden, framing the entire picture in the promise of
resurrection. It thus exposes Transhumanism not only as a Christian
sub-clade, but as a remarkably conservative sub-clade (certainly in
comparison to Mainline Protestantism). The significance of this needs
exploring at some point …
May 1, 2014Fission
This
is going to continue happening, and to get more intense. The superficial
cause is obvious, both Michael Anissimov and myself are extreme, twitchy
ideologues, massively invested in NRx, with utterly divergent
understandings of its implications. We both know this fight has to come,
and that tactical timing is everything. (It’s really not personal, and I
hope it doesn’t become so, but when monarchical ideas are involved it’s
very easy for “the personal is political” to take a right-wing form.)
It’s worth remembering
this
diagram, before going further. It suggests that divergence is essential to
the far right, which yawns open across an anarcho-autocratic spectrum.
Since a disinclination to moderation has already been indicated by anyone
arriving at the far right fringe, it should scarcely be surprising when
this same tendency rifts the far right itself. Then consider this:
The strict Outside in complement to this would be something like:
disintegrative Social Darwinism through ruthless competition is what
the Far Right is all about. A formula of roughly this kind will inevitably come into play as the
conflict evolves. Momentarily, though, I’m more interested in
situating the clashes to come than initiating them.
Whatever the contrary assertions — and they will come (doubtless from both
sides) — the entire arena is located on the ultra-right, oriented
vertically on the ideological space diagram, rather than horizontally
(between positions whose primary differentiation is between the
more-and-less right).
Stated crudely, but I think reasonably
accurately, the controversy polarizes Neocameralism against
Identitarian Community. My suspicion is that Michael Anissimov
will ultimately attenuate the Moldbuggian elements of his neoreactionary
strain to the edge of disappearance, and that his hesitation about doing
this rapidly is a matter of political strategy rather than philosophical
commitment. From this ideological war, which he is conducting with obvious
ability, he wants “Neoreaction” to end up with the people (or followers
(who I don’t remotely care about)), whereas I want it to hold onto the
Moldbug micro-tradition (which he sees as finally dispensable). The only
thing that is really being scrapped over is the name, but we both think
this semiotic real estate is of extraordinary value — although for very
different reasons.
One remark worth citing as supportive evidence, because its driving ideas
are exemplary:
While I deeply value intellectual engagement with the smartest of these
“trads” I would consider it a complete victory if they were to abandon the
NRx tag and re-brand themselves as Animissovites, or Neo-Evolans, or
whatever, and depart in pursuit of a Monarcho-traditionalist homeland in
Idaho. If NRx was socially reduced to a tenth (or less) of its size, but
those remaining were Moldbuggian fundamentalists, working to refine the
Neocameralist theoretical model for restraint of government through
Patchwork Exit-dynamics, it would be strengthened immeasurably in all the
ways that matter to this blog. It would also then simply be the case that
media accusations of Neo-Feudal or White Nationalist romanticism —
accompanied by ambitions for personal political power — were idiotic media
slurs. Sadly, this cannot be said with total confidence as things stand.
The Neocameralism campaign will almost certainly come first, but it is
still only March, and nothing needs to unfold with unseemly haste …
ADDED: Some valuable thoughts from Anomaly UK. (Includes bonus
Bitcoin reference.)
March 22, 2014Rift Markers
The commentator going by the tag Saddam Hussein’s Whirling Aluminium Tubes
has produced some of the most brilliant criticism this blog has been
subjected to. Arguing against the techno-commercial strain of NRx from a
hardline paleoreactionary standpoint, his contribution to
this thread is
the high-water mark of his engagement here. That, even at the climax of
the assault, Outside in is unable to decline the diagnosis
offered, with the exception of only the very slightest, marginal
reservations, is a fact that attests to the lucidity of his vision. (Some
minute editorial adjustments have been made for consistency — the original
can be checked at the link provided.) SHWAT writes:
Admin’s analogy of Techno-Commercialism to the colonial government
structures in the time of the East India company is absolutely correct
and it provides a decisive clarification. This is like that time when
one group stayed in Europe while the other group went and made their
fortune in the New World.
Reaction: Stable order (as a value, if not a practical
effect), hereditary position
Techno-commercialism: Disintegrative competition,
dynamism
Reaction: Conservatism, tradition, the old ways
Techno-commercialism: Disintegrative competition,
innovation
Reaction: Romantic lost cause
Techno-commercialism: Disturbingly plausible, in the
sense that somebody like Google guy was probably going to end up on top
anyway, and he might listen to those who flatter him.
So, I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is that [you
techno-commercialists will] probably get a lot of what you want in the
future. The bad news is that you’re not reactionaries, not even a little
bit. You’re classical liberals, it was just a little bit obscured
because you are English classical liberals, rather than American or
French ones. Hence the lack of interest in revolutions. The modern
equivalent of those East India Company classical liberal guys.
Anyway, at this point we should probably go our separate ways and start
plotting against each other. Thanks for some enjoyable reading.
If this really is a good-bye note, it’s the most magnificent example I
have ever seen. I’m almost tempted to say, with enemies like this, who
needs allies?
There are twists and intricacies to be added to this stark cartography of
schism, including those the schism will make to itself. From the current
perspective of Outside in (which it of course suspects to be
something else), the guideline to these is the complication of time
through spiromorphism, or innovative restorations, which neither cycles
nor simple escape trajectories can capture. These ultimately re-shape
everything, but they can wait (while the wound creatively festers).
Fission releases energy. Perhaps ironically — SHWAT has demonstrated that
beyond all controversy.
March 25, 2014Race to the Bottom
As the foggiest two-thirds of ‘NRx’ continues its devolution into
ENR-style ethno-socialism and activist voluntarism, it is inevitable that
Europe’s populist ‘far right’ will increasingly be seized upon as a source
of inspiration, and even as a model for emulation. This is, of course, an
indication of degenerate insanity, and all the more to be expected on that
account. On the positive side, the practical incompetence of ‘activist
neoreaction’ will most probably spare it from the full measure of the
embarrassment it is due. Nevertheless, whatever applause it offers to the
vile antics of the European mob will not be soon forgotten.
It would be a distraction at this point to seek to distinguish the
classical (Aristotelian) conception of action from the mire of
modern political activism, or mass mobilization. That is the
topic for another occasion. It suffices here to accept the integrated
democratic understanding of popular activism for what it is, and to seek
distance from it with unreserved disdain, under any convenient sign. If
passivism makes this point, the suitability of the term is
thereby ensured. The important thing is to make no contribution to the
triumph of the mob and, secondarily, to draw no vicarious satisfaction
from its advances.
To be as clear as possible: What the ‘far right’ advance in Continental
Europe represents is a consummation of democratic morbidity. It
is nothing at all like a restoration. At best, it is what ‘hitting bottom’
is to an alcoholic — the crisis at the end of a deteriorating trend, after
which something else can begin. (The bottom, it has to be noted, is a very
long way down.)
Writing
in The Telegraph, Roger Bootle casts a cold eye upon the prospects for
France:
What is going to happen? I cannot see much prospect of France
recovering to match Germany again without really fundamental reform –
which French governments have traditionally been incapable of
delivering. Accordingly, France will continue to decline relative to
Germany. Interestingly, the recent beneficiary of French voters’
protests, Marine Le Pen, does not want to open France up to more
competition but rather to use withdrawal from the EU to strengthen the
powers of the French state to overrule market forces. This does not bode
well.
Indeed, far from being part of the hard northern core of the euro,
France is increasingly coming to resemble the soft southern underbelly.
Accordingly, for how much longer can the Franco-German “motor” continue
to drive the EU? Won’t Germany increasingly realise its own strength and
want to break free from its shackles to France? And won’t France
increasingly resent the increased power of her neighbour?
I don’t know how this is going to happen or when but I suspect that we
are coming close to one of those periodic explosions that have shaped
French history. When this happens the EU will never be the same
again.
Europe is almost certainly going to complete its descent into Hell. It
would be the ultimate condemnation of NRx — definitive proof that it had
learnt nothing of value — if the specific shape of Europe’s damnation, as
it reaches its nadir, were to be confused with a rightist ideal.
ADDED: Convergence on a different line of thought. [Don’t bother clicking,
NBS has just pulled this (excellent) post for some reason yet to be
disclosed.] Update:
OK.
Update: It’s
back
(with a much better name).
ADDED: Paul Gottfried’s take.
ADDED: Der Spiegel
interviews
Marine Le Pen.
Purely for entertainment value, an apocalyptic quasi-fnording
of Marine Le Pen, edited irresponsibly into
grossly misleading Cathedral-media nightmare fuel:
I want to destroy the EU … Europe is war. Economic war. It is the
increase of hostilities between the countries. … The EU is deeply
harmful, it is an anti-democratic monster. I want to prevent it from
becoming fatter, from continuing to breathe, from grabbing everything
with its paws and from extending its tentacles into all areas of our
legislation. … A strong euro is ruining our economy. … It was created by
Germany, for Germany. … the model we are advocating is less positive for
Germany than the current model. Germany has become the economic heart of
Europe because our leaders are weak. But Germany should never forget
that France is Europe’s political heart. … Be careful Ms. Merkel. If you
don’t see the suffering that has been imposed on the rest of the
European people, then Germany will make itself hated. … she wants to
impose her policies on others. This will lead to an explosion of the
European Union. … If we don’t all leave the euro behind, it will
explode. Either there will be a popular revolt because the people no
longer want to be bled out. Or the Germans will say: Stop, we can’t pay
for the poor anymore. … David Cameron says that UKIP members are crazy and racist. I think it is good that UKIP is as
strong as we are. … We have the same fundamental approach to Europe. …
We used to be one of the richest countries in the world, but we are now
on a path towards under-development. This austerity that has been
imposed on the people doesn’t work. The people will not allow themselves
to be throttled without revolting. … We need an intelligent
protectionism. We need customs duties again … The problem is the total
opening of borders and allowing the law of the jungle to prevail: The
further a company goes today to find slaves, which it then treats like
animals and pays a pittance, without regard for environmental laws, the
more it earns. … I don’t want (Germany’s) Siemens to buy Alstom. I want
Alstom to remain French. That is strategically important for my
country’s independence. … One could nationalize a company, even if only
temporarily, in order to stabilize it. … democracy is collapsing here in
France. … I have a certain admiration for Vladimir Putin because he
doesn’t allow decisions to be forced upon him by other countries. I
think he focuses first and foremost on what is good for Russia and the
Russians. … there are many things said about Russia because they have
been demonized for years at the behest of the USA. … The Americans are
trying to expand their influence in the world, particularly in Europe …
defending their own interests, not ours.
Plus: Who’s going to shrink the state?
ADDED: Communism good, fascism bad. (This is apparently what passes for
intelligence among the chatterati.)
June 3, 2014Mises or Jesus?
There’s been a lot of
this
kind of thing around recently. It’s mainly been arriving in a link storm
from Wagner Clemente Soto, who’s
too unambiguously Throne-and-Altar in orientation to identify as NRx or
333, so it’s probably an exercise in internal discipline taking place in
another camp. Still, it’s difficult not to ask: Could this be the next
fission pile building up?
Here‘s a link to Jörg
Guido Hülsman’s (excellent) Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism,
which seems to have provided the background citations for the recent round
of attacks. (This agitation always takes me back to
Der
Zauberberg.)
ADDED: Or is it “Moses to Mises”?
ADDED: NBS provides a useful ‘Capitalism Week’ round-up.
ADDED: A (loosely) connected argument from Brett Stevens.
July 2, 2014Outsideness
In an alternative universe, in which there was nobody except Michael
Anissimov and me
tussling over the identity of Neoreaction, I’d propose a distinction
between ‘Inner-‘ and ‘Outer-Nrx’ as the most suitable axis of fission.
Naturally, in this actual universe, such a dimension transects a rich
fabric of nodes, tensions, and differences.
For the inner faction, a firmly consolidated core identity is the central
ambition. (It’s worth noting however that a so-far uninterrogated relation
to
transhumanism
seems no less problematic, in principle, than the vastly more fiercely
contested relation to libertarianism has shown itself to be.) Inner-NRx,
as a micro-culture, models itself on a protected state, in which belonging
is sacred, and boundaries rigorously policed.
Outer-NRx, defined primarily by Exit, relates itself to what it escapes.
It is refuge and periphery, more than a substitute core. It does not ever
expect to rule anything at all (above the most microscopic level of social
reality, and then under quite different names). The Patchwork is for it a
set of options, and opportunities for leverage, rather than a menu of
potential homes. It is intrinsically nomad, unsettled, and
micro-agitational. Its culture consists of departures it does not regret.
(While not remotely globalist, it is unmistakably cosmopolitan — with the
understanding that the ‘cosmos’ consists of chances to split.)
Outer-NRx tends to like libertarians, at least
those of a
hard-right persuasion, and the gateway that has enabled it to be outside
libertarianism is the ideological zone to which it gravitates. Leaving
libertarianism (rightwards) has made it what it is, and continues to
nourish it. ‘Entryism’ — as has been frequently noted — is not a
significant anxiety for Outer-NRx, but far more of a stimulation and, at
its most acute, a welcome intellectual provocation. It is not the dodgy
refugees from the
ZAP who threaten to
reduce its exteriority, and return it to a trap.
The Outside is the ‘place’ of strategic advantage. To be cast out there is
no cause for lamentation, in the slightest.
August 1, 2014Fission II
The Umlaut has
long
been
doing
an embarrassing amount of our thinking for us, and perhaps even more of
our controversy. The latest installment, by Dalibor Rohac, is
here. The connections it makes are frankly disturbing to this blog, whose
pro-capitalist,
post-libertarian, and general
Atlantean
sympathies have been pushed as hard as realistically possible, along with
an explicit attempt at
differentiation
from those tendencies with an opposite — I would argue self-evidently
anti-Moldbuggian — valency. It is going to be difficult to condemn
conflations of NRx with the
ENR
for so long as the ‘voice’ of Neoreaction includes remarks of this kind:
NRx, across its whole spectrum, is neither libertarian nor fascist. There
is, however, a remarkable polarity — our axis of fission — which is based
upon which of these associations is found most disreputable. From my
perspective, this distinction lines up extremely neatly with Alexander
Dugin’s Hyperborean / Atlantean continental forever war. It seems to me
beyond any serious question that the inheritance from Mencius Moldbug lies
unproblematically on the Atlantean side of this divide. The standing
Outside in
prophecy is
that, by the end of this year, a definitive break along these lines will
have taken place. There’s no reason I can see to back-track on that
expectation.
ADDED: “One could see a situation in which libertarian inattentiveness to
political concerns, in the face of masses of people that are growing
frustrated with democracy, abets extremism. If freedom and democracy are
incompatible, like Peter Thiel thinks, it is important to articulate ways
to preserve freedom.”
August 6, 2014Circles of Concern
A brief, perfectly balanced
post
at Mangan’s pulls together HBD and political history into the suggestion
that nationalism is just a phase we’ve been going through.
… the paradox of nationalism is that the same forces that led to its
development are leading to its denou[e]ment. But what is to be done
about that I don’t know.
Some quality comments there too. You’re all welcome back here after
checking it out, with any relevant responses and arguments.
Nationalism is the one modern progressive ideology that gets off the hook
far too easily in NRx circles. (And “what is to be done?” is Lenin’s
question, adopted from
this
guy. It shouldn’t be proscribed, but it should definitely be subjected to
disciplined suspicion.)
September 10, 2014Trike Lines
Michael Anissimov has been conducting an online
poll of NRx affinities. While
questions of principle and method might have delayed this experiment, such
procrastination would have been a mistake. The results have already
contributed significant information. Most obviously (as already widely
noted) the pattern of primary allegiance to the the different
trike-tendencies is far more evenly balanced than many had expected. As an
intellectual theme — and now as a demonstrated distribution — the
‘Spandrellian Trichotomy’ shows a remarkably resilient
stability. The
integral pluralism of NRx is becoming impossible to sideline.
Nyan Sandwich has posted a Trike-theory
response
at More Right. While ultimately skeptical about the pluralist
interpretation of the Trichotomy, the order of his argument respects it as
a primary phenomenon. Nyan is among
those who expect NRx to
incline to a concentrated synthesis, or compact unity — superseding its
distribution.
Thus it doesn’t really make sense to ask what branch of NRx one
identifies with. It’s like asking a physicist whether they think quantum
mechanics or general relativity is more true. The point is that the
truth is a synthesis of the component theories, not a disjunction.
The natural counter-position to this would be a defense of irreducibly
plural integrity, or operational disunity. The lines of
controversy released here do not correspond to Trike ‘branches’ but cut
across them, and through a number of critical topics, certainly including:
(1) The existence of irreducible triangular schemas within all of the
world’s great civilizations, represented within the Christian West by
trinitarian theology. How is the relation between the triad and the monad
to be conceived? Does this relation vary fundamentally between world
cultures? (These decidedly pre-NRx
remarks seem very
old now, but they remain at least suggestively relevant.)
This is the principal
Hindu articulation.
(2) To what extent is NRx inherently critical of structurally (rather than
demotically)
divided
powers? (Among the ironies of any consensual NRx commitment to
absolute
monarchy would be its radical anti-feudalism, or proto-modernism.)
(3) The techno-rationalist aspiration to a super-intelligent ‘Singleton‘ clearly assumes suppression of sovereign plurality. This fully suffices
to graft the NRx controversy into the moral-political and theoretical
debates over (Right)
Singularity.
As a matter of fact, there is scarcely anything NRx agrees upon more
consistently than the structure of its disagreements. There are three
basic (dyadic) conflicts implicit within the Trichotomy, of which only one
has — to this point — been seriously initiated. (Our ‘Theonomists’ have
yet to get scrappy.) Much turmoil still lies ahead.
September 25, 2014Questions of Identity
There’s a remarkably bad-tempered
argument
taking place
among
racial identitarians at the moment (some links
here), which
makes the civility and intelligence of
these remarks
all the more notable. (For this blog, the
Social Matter discussion was a reminder of the — similarly
civilized — exchange with Matt Parrott that took place in the comment
thread here.)
In case anyone is somehow unclear about the quality of the neighborhood
White Nationalism finds itself in, or adjacent to, it’s worth a brief
composite citation from the Andrew Anglin post cited above:
You [Colin Liddell] agree with Jewish agendas, which is why you would
wish to obfuscate the fact that Jews are responsible for everything by
claiming we shouldn’t blame the Jews for our problems. … The reason
these two [CL plus Greg Johnson] are on the same side against me is that
they share the quality that they have no interest in a popular movement,
and despise anyone who would attempt to take that route. … I am,
unashamedly, a populist. Every successful revolutionary movement in
history has been populist in nature … Hitler was a populist.
While I have to confess to finding Anglin entertaining, I hope it goes
without saying that this kind of thinking has nothing at all to do with
NRx. In fact, revolutionary populism almost perfectly captures what
Neoreaction is not. NRx is notoriously fissiparous, but on the gulf
dividing all its variants from racial Jacobinism there can surely be no
controversy. So the barking you can hear in the background serves as
necessary context. (This does not count as an objection to the Neo-Nazis
acquiring their own state, since that would make it even easier not to
live among them than it is already. Unfortunately, it is not easy to
imagine the separatist negotiations going smoothly.)
Because everything further to be said on this
topic is complicated, I’m restricting my ambitions here to a series of
discussion points, roughly sketched:
(1) NRx diversity conflicts are considerably less heated than those
presently gripping the WNs, in part — no doubt — because the immediate
political stakes are even smaller. It nevertheless introduces a massively
complicating factor. For those (not exclusively found in the Tech-Comm
camp, but I suspect concentrated there) who consider
Moldbug‘s work canonical, the distinction between NRx and
White
Nationalism
(as also
antisemitism) is already quite clearly defined. Among those of a predominantly
Eth-Nat. inclination, on the other hand, far more border-blurriness
exists.
(2) The relationship between White Nationalism and
HBD is also complex. From outside, the two are regularly
conflated, but this is a crude error. The zone of intersection —
exemplified by Frank
Salter
(and perhaps Kevin
MacDonald)
— is characterized by a concern with ethnic genetic interests, but this is
by no means an axiomatic theoretical or practical commitment among HBD
bloggers. More typically, HBD-orientation is associated with cosmopolitan
spirit of scientific neutrality, meritocratic elitism, and a suspicion of
the deleterious consequences of inbreeding, often accompanied by a
tendency to philosemitism and sinophilia. Racial solidarity does not
follow necessarily from biorealism, but requires an extraneous political
impulse. Whatever connection is forged between WN and HBD owes more to
their common opposition to the West’s dominant Lysenkoism and Leftist
(blank-slate, victimological) race politics than to any firm internal
bond.
(3) The triangular linkages between NRX, WN, and
libertarianism are also intricate. Consider this
(fascinating)
talk
by Richard Spencer, to a libertarian audience, for a quick sense of the
territory being navigated. The moment of dark enlightenment for
libertarians tends to accompany the recognition that the cultural
foundations of laissez-faire social arrangements have an extreme
‘ethnic’ specificity. This accommodation of right libertarians to
neoreactionary ideas is not associated with a comparable approximation to
White Nationalism, however, since the very ethnic characteristics being
accentuated — the high-trust cosmopolitan openness of strongly outbred
populations — are exactly those provoking WN despair as the roots of
pathological
altruism
and
ethnomasochism. (This is a ruinous paradox basic to the relevant
ruminations
here.)
(4) A closely-connected problem is that of cutting ethnies at the joints.
(Within NRx, this is the
thede topic.) While there are no doubt
some neoreactionaries comfortable with the category of ‘whites’ as a
positive thede, for others it seems far too broad —
whether due to its inconsistency within any historical nation, its
amalgamation of populations culturally divided by the Hajnal
line, its aggregation across relatively hard
regional,
class, and
ideological
divisions, or generally because — almost without exception — the most
bitter and ruthless enemy of any given group of white people has been
another group of white people. When WNs
speak
of a ‘World Brotherhood of Europeans’ it strikes most neoreactionaries (I
suspect) as scarcely less comical than an appeal for universal human
brotherhood, since it blithely encompasses the most vicious and
ineliminable antagonisms in the world.
(5) Finally (for now) there’s the relation of NRx to the
ENR — already a
grating concern, and (since the ENR is
also already highly diverse) beyond the scope of anything but the
most glancing treatment. From the perspective of this blog, the most
aggravating figure is
undoubtedly
Alain de Benoist — whose brilliance is directed towards the most radical
articulation of anti-capitalism to be found anywhere outside the Marxist
tradition (and even within it). NRx Tech-Comms have the same level of
sympathy for such ideas as they do for the legacy of Saloth Sar or Hugo
Chavez, and insofar as they are proposed as an element of a potential
coalition, the enterprise is immediately collapsed to a farce. This
touches upon the wider concern that WN thinking often appears to skirt,
and on occasions to overtly embrace, a simple racial socialism and thus by
some definitions reduce to a leftist — even extreme leftist — ideology.
Seen from Outside in, there are far superior prospects to be
found in the realist darkening of right libertarians than in
coalition-building with clear-eyed collectivists.
(6) Things we can agree upon without much difficulty: The
dominant power structure is racially obsessed and (schizophrenically)
committed to the effacement of all racial reality; racial differences have
substantial social consequences; the native populations of historically
white societies are being subjected to an ideological (and criminal)
onslaught of deranged intensity; the legal concept of ‘disparate impact’
is fundamentally corrupt; universal prescriptions for the social,
political, cultural, and economic arrangements of diverse groups are
doomed to failure; ethnic separatism (of any kind) is a legitimate
political aspiration; free association and freedom of conscience are
principles to be unconditionally defended; science is not answerable to
ideology; … this list could no doubt be extended. (I am more uncertain
about whether there is anything here that either NRxers or WNs would want
to deduct.)
Clearly, and in general, there is much more to be said about all of this,
with every reason for confidence that it will be said.
ADDED: Gregory Hood on the First Identitarian Congress.
ADDED: Fred Reed on monstrous über-racist Jared Taylor.
ADDED: Only tangentially connected, but too eloquent to miss out on, Charles
Murray on the 20th anniversary of The Bell Curve: “… the roof is
about to crash in on those who insist on a purely environmental
explanation of all sorts of ethnic differences, not just intelligence.
Since the decoding of the genome, it has been securely established that
race is not a social construct, evolution continued long after humans left
Africa along different paths in different parts of the world, and recent
evolution involves cognitive as well as physiological functioning. […] The
best summary of the evidence is found in the early chapters of
Nicholas Wade’s recent book, ‘A Troublesome Inheritance.’
We’re not talking about another 20 years before the purely environmental
position is discredited, but probably less than a decade. What happens
when a linchpin of political correctness becomes scientifically untenable?
It should be interesting to watch. I confess to a problem with
schadenfreude.”
October 16, 2014Entryism
If NRx is spiraling back into a second phase of entryism paranoia, it
looks as if it might be a lot more reflexively intense — and therefore
more creative — than the
last
one. It’s still too early to get a firm grip at this point, and it is
quite possible that the very nature of the threat makes confident
apprehension an unrealistic expectation. Subversion is an abstract horror,
or integral obscurity, presumed to be actively restraining itself from
emergence as a phenomenon. However, some stimulating indicators:
The self-exemplification (by Konkvistador) here has surely to be taken as
the provocation to a more abstract suggestion.
If ‘I’ could do it, then others could too. The generalization is
strongly encouraged:
Nydwracu has some ideas about the beds ‘we’
should be looking under:
And then there’s the ultimate entryist T-shirt slogan:
Much entertainment in store — and perhaps even some functional ideas — if
we can avoid going entirely insane. After all, the last wave of
involutionary paranoia brought us some valuable thoughts (among which the
best were probably
this, this, and
this). I’ve probably missed some critical moments, where attempts at
institutional self-immunization became productive, and experimental.
Keeping social maneuvers virtual helps to ward off incontinent public
activism, so any opportunity to experiment with Machiavellian
micro-politics is worth seizing with dark glee.
There’s no need for it to remain trivially humanistic. Remember
this?
October 25, 2014Caste
Mark Yuray has made me a believer. From nominal head-nodding towards the
Moldbug
model
of caste identities, I’ve been dragged into utter compliance (with an even
simpler variant), in awe-struck wonder at its explanatory power.
This model processes the NRx / Rx
gulf difference to my
entire satisfaction. It works beyond the Anglosphere, too:
It’s far less an ideological difference, than a difference over
the importance of ideology. It’s also a matter of thede, rather
than
phyle (I’m assuming). The initial, obvious, and somewhat disconcerting
implication is that nothing is going to be shifted anywhere significant by
ideological maneuvers. NRx and Rx will each attract their core
constituencies, after which there’s only pointless bickering. On the
positive side, there’s our work to do …
ADDED: A slightly different tack (from June). “NRx is signalling to
‘open-minded progressives’ aka ‘cool people’.”
ADDED: Heading back a little further (to December 2013), contains much of
relevance and interest.
November 5, 2014Against the Ant People
The heated
controversy
running through biology right now — pronounced, at least, in its zone of
intersection with the wider public sphere — seems like something that
should be inciting fission within the NRx. The collision between
Hamiltonian kin selection (defended most prominently in this case by
Richard Dawkins) and group selection (E. O. Wilson) drives a wedge between
the baseline biorealism accepted by all tendencies within the
Neoreactionary
Trike and the much
stronger version of racial identitarianism that flourishes within the
ethno-nationalist faction. Until recent times, proto-Hamiltonian
hereditarianism has been strongly aligned with classical liberalism, while
ideological racial collectivism represents a later — and very different —
political tradition. Not so much as a chirp yet, though. Are people
unpersuaded about this argument’s relevance?
On a slight tangent (but ultimately, only a slight one) Nick Szabo’s
epically brilliant
essay ‘Shelling
Out’ is remarkable — among other things — for its profound biorealist
foundations. It makes an excellent theoretical preparation for Jim’s
paper on ‘Natural Law and Natural
Rights’, which also draws productively upon John Maynard Smith’s
game-theoretic model of the ‘evolutionary stable strategy’ as the natural
substrate of psychological and cultural deep-structure.
This is an important opportunity to put down some discriminatory markers.
Can we turf group selectionist ideas out of NRx entirely, or do we have to
fight about it?
December 9, 2014Ellipsis …
Populo:
Attack! Attack! The time for action has come. Resistance! Struggle! We
have to do something, and do it now. Enough with these
endless streams of words!
Crypton:
Still shouting in the name of silence, Populo?
Populo:
Hardly silence, Crypton. Not at all. Even the contrary. In the name,
rather, of the voice of true men, rediscovering their pride and
fortitude, and joining together to make a stand against intolerable
abuse.
Crypton: Ah yes, that.
Populo: So what brings you here Crypton?
Crypton:
I was rather hoping we might continue our little chat about the
Deep State.
Populo:
Terrific! That’s a topic close to my heart, as you know. Those
slithering parasites hidden beneath the rotten log of the Cathedral.
It’s time to expose them, denounce them, burn them out!
Crypton: They’re the enemy then?
Populo:
Of course they’re the enemy! They run the Cathedral, don’t they? Try
not to sophisticate matters beyond all common sense.
Crypton:
Did you find time to take a look at that little Daniel Krawisz
article
I mentioned?
Populo:
Yes, it was vaguely interesting, I suppose.
Crypton: So you didn’t like it much?
Populo:
Frankly Crypton, it reminded me of the side of you I like least, and
having downed a few horns of ale, I’ll be double frank — it had a whiff
of … well … treachery about it. To spend so much
attention upon the subtleties of potential defections, it’s unmanly,
somehow.
Crypton:
That’s excellent Populo, because I was going to suggest that gaming-out
Deep State defections is the only practical strategic
topic worthy of NRx consideration. It seems that we have our
conversation plotted for us.
Populo:
Agreed, a fine joust! But let me start by telling you something about
yourself Crypton, which I’m not sure you clearly see.
Ironically, as you would no doubt say, your attraction
to this shadowy topic is driven by psychological motivations that are as
bright as a beacon. It’s clandestine, by nature, and therefore
necessarily passes into ellipsis. That makes it an excuse for
abstraction. Squalid actuality is unmentionable, so that the
conversation is steered inevitably into the virtual. In other words, it
tends by subterranean design to be a flight from action. That’s perfect
for me, of course, because by crushing you in this argument through
unimagined neutronium-densities of humiliation, I will be serving the
noble cause of public resistance, implicitly, even though that’s the
last thing you want to talk about. So make your case.
Crypton:
Maximally compressed it’s this — in the near future, only
crypto-conflict is serious. Public politics is purely for the popcorn
industry.
Populo:
So we’re already diving under the rotting log?
Crypton: If that’s your preferred image.
Populo:
And beside these occult transactions, nothing matters?
Crypton: Precisely.
Populo:
But then, by the very nature of the thing, we have no idea what we’re
doing, or who we’re trying to communicate with. We have nothing to offer
them. We don’t even know whether they exist … Oh do stop it Crypton,
your eyes are gleaming.
Crypton:
Don’t you catch even the slightest aroma of
basilisk?
Populo:
By which, I’m assuming, you don’t mean merely
involution into psychosis?
Crypton:
More specifically: acausal trade, and transcendental games.
Populo:
There you go! Utter, ineffectual abstraction, within two sentences.
Let’s start somewhere else — with the alphabet agencies.
Crypton: OK.
Populo:
You’re proposing some kind of cryptic alliance with them — or elements
within them — or you’re not proposing anything at all.
Crypton: Fair. At least, that’s part of it.
Populo: And the rest of it?
Crypton:
You know I’m a skeptic on enumerative methods.
Populo: Some of it, then.
Crypton:
It seems impossible that the AAs could know what they ultimately are,
teleologically — what they are becoming. These organizations include
some very smart people, with a taste for puzzles. Is it likely they
could not be intrigued by their institutional destiny?
Populo:
As usual, I have no idea at all what you’re suggesting.
Crypton:
There is a properly cryptic plane of communication
with the Deep State, that does not conform to the political plaintext of
conspiratorial engagement. It concerns the keys of fate. Concretely,
there is an implicit alliance around the escalation of cryptographic
technology — as also, one even more implicitly against it, and against
the AAs as such, on those fundamental grounds. If
crypsis — camouflage — is a hidden end, and not merely
— as it superficially appears — a means to the fulfillment of vulgar or
exoteric goals, then the pact is sealed somewhere outside the AAs
themselves. The AAs have an occult cosmic purpose, far exceeding their
national security functions. Not that these latter are uninteresting
…
Populo: So let’s, please, talk about them.
Crypton:
If there’s any place in the social structure where such matters are
entirely detached from questions of demotic ideological legitimation,
popular politics, or even merely public relations, it has surely to be
the Deep State. Is the Deep State, then, in this regard, not already a
model of Exit? It has departed the public political sphere, for the
shadows, at least, if it has managed to obtain the operational liberty
from democratic accountability, of which its critics so vociferously
accuse it.
Populo:
You don’t think the NSA has diversity monitors?
Crypton:
If it has, America deserves to perish, and it’s our task to explain
why.
Populo:
You’d give up on the American people because the NSA has Otherkin
bathrooms!?
[To be continued …]
December 17, 2014New Low
If
this
is NRx I’m Mao Zedong.
Necessary Twitter self-citation for context:
Quite.
ADDED: Hurlock is (very calmly) on the case.
ADDED: Anomaly UK reminds us of a (very relevant) post on pre-Marxist
Anglosphere leftism.
ADDED: Essential.
January 20, 2015#HRx
The basic tenets of Heroic Reaction:
— Moldbug is over-rated.
— Capitalism needs to be brought under control.
— The errors of fascism are dwarfed by those of libertarianism.
— White racial community is the core.
— ‘Atomization’ is a serious problem.
— Answers are already easily available, so over-thinking is unhelpful, and
even seriously pathological.
Unlike #NRx, #HRx is primarily a political movement. Its
theoretical appetite is modest, since it has faith that everything it
truly needs can be retrieved — more-or-less straightforwardly — from the
folkish past.
Among the many myriads confusedly aligned with ‘Neoreaction’, a number
have already expressed an explicit interest in abandoning this odd cult
for a bolder, brasher, more politically dynamic successor, stripped of
techno-commercial Vulcanism, race-treachery, and intellectual
circumlocution. Far more would join the exodus (from #NRx) if
energetically led. Others would pour in from elsewhere. All #HRx still
requires is a commander. Then it could be huge.
From the moment #HRx is born, the scale of (apparent) #NRx would shrink
dramatically. That is an outcome, I suspect, that could be endured among
the remnant with serene stoicism.
ADDED: Brett Stevens has some thoughtful commentary. (See also below.)
April 11, 2015#HRx II
This
is well-done, insightful, and even comparatively civil.
The diremption:
Moldbug, by laying an
immense foundation, was
complex enough to be interpreted in very distinct manners. NRx
concentrates on his economic writings and proposed solutions:
stockholder sovereigns, Patchwork, block-chain protocols, exit,
financial incentives, Austrianism, [Bitcoin], ‘the reset’.
Alternatively, HRx concentrates on his reading suggestions and
historical/international writings: Carly[l]e worship,
high-Toryism/Jacobitism, classical international law, Absolute monarchy,
generalist historiography, imperialism apologia, political theory, and
the general aesthetic. It’s fair enough to say that neither side is
willing to embrace the whole package; unless Mencius comes back and
picks a side we’re going to keep on squabbling over who are his true
followers. Regardless, we all agree on MM’s critiques of Democracy,
bureaucracy, progressive morality, and the dominant institutions. […] I
believe this dichotomy is fundamentally spiritual. NRx is a materialist
ideology, post-Ancap in essence, it’s no surprise then that many
Neoreactionaries started out as Marxists or Libertarians. Conversely,
HRx places the metaphysical at the root of all civic affairs. With raw
power politics also superseding catallaxy.
It’s not quibble proof, from the XS PoV, but it’s far closer to a cold,
realistic assessment than
anything we’ve seen
yet. (It’s impossible for me to avoid observing, in passing, that the
descent into spittle-flecked vulgarity seems to be a distinguishing
characteristic of these ‘higher souls’. Is it too much to ask for just a
little loftiness of tone from our political metaphysicians? Quite apart
from anything else, it would actually work better.)
There are many other points of interest in the Froude Society piece. Worth
noting in particular:
They reject the hero, they reject the sublime, and thus any exoteric
link to the Holy on High. Moreover, they do not even pretend to have any
solutions for non anglo-civilizations, we speak truths that ring true
for all peoples by historical precedent, that good governance and order
is always Good.
It wouldn’t surprise me, in the least, if the author of
Unqualified Reservations would tilt more to the HRx camp today
(although, rather weirdly, the
Urbit
innovator seems to have pushed even further into ‘protocol’ territory).
There is certainly no assertion on our (Tech-Comm) side, that he would
subscribe to the usage of his work that we find important. Nor do we, to
any serious extent, care whether he would do so. Neocameral-Patchwork
formalism, the theorization of fungible primary (sovereign) property, and
Exit-oriented geopolitical disintegration is the commitment we have here —
and without Moldbug none of that would have reached its present state of
articulation. The Jacobitism, monarchist theater, objective Anglophobia,
ahistorical contempt for emergent trustless governance systems, hyperbolic
anti-modernism, and romantic humanism we can do without.
(The original #HRx
post here might be
relevant.)
March 2, 2016Quote note (#233)
Alexander Dugin
understands
the (Tech-Comm) NRx vs HRx antagonism*
as well as anyone on earth:
Geopolitically, today’s Europe is an Atlanticist entity. Geopolitics,
as envisioned by the Englishman Sir H. Mackinder, asserts that there are
two types of civilization – the civilization of Sea (Seapower) and the
civilization of Land (Landpower). They are constructed on opposite
systems of values. While Seapower is purely mercantile, modernist, and
materialist, Landpower is traditionalist, spiritual, and heroic. This
dualism corresponds to Werner Sombart’s conceptual pair of Händlres and
Helden. Modern European society is fully integrated into the
civilization of Sea which manifests itself in the strategic hegemony of
North America and NATO.
The Hyperborean agenda: “We need to combat liberalism, refuse it, and
deconstruct it entirely. At the same time, we need to do so not in the
name of just class (as in Marxism) or in the name of the nation or race
(as in fascism), but in the name of the organic unity of the people,
social justice, and real democracy.”
Purge Atlanteanism (“Seapower”) of all that, through intensified
polarization, and it generates NeoCam Patchwork automatically. Space is
the coming sea.
(I guess people are allowed one irritating joke about my name, and then
we’re done with that.)
March 21, 2016Royal Blessings
Neoreactionary Royalism builds upon a tradition of masterful public
relations that dates back over three
centuries:
Unfortunately George I couldn’t speak English. He had rehearsed a
little speech to make when he landed in England, to reassure the English
that he had come for the good of all. He got the grammar mangled though,
and proclaimed: “I haff come for all your goods!”
May 14, 2015Putsch
As XS readers are most probably already aware, there’s an extremely
intriguing experiment in authority taking place within the
shadowy halls of NRx right now. The principal document, released by the
Hestia Society, can be found
here. It is succinct, sane, and merits careful digestion. Associated
re-adjustments are noted in
this
More Right post, announcing a new home for “the Rationalist
branch of NRx”, here.
In the absence of a formal foundation of sovereign property, a putsch is
an entirely unobjectionable mechanism for the transfer — and in this case,
more accurately, initial establishment — of social authority. The new
inner council has been remarkably well-selected for sobriety and judgment
(i.e., for what, in the English political parlance, is known as ‘bottom’).
In both psychological and ideological respects, it incarnates a promise of
sound government. The occasion for this development, as explained in the
HS statement, is worth repeating here, due to the commendable lucidity of
its diagnosis:
It’s become clear over the past year (mid 2014 to mid 2015) that
“Neoreaction” is suffering a tragedy of the commons and lack of formal
structure. Because no one has formally owned the #NRx brand, there have
been a lot of territorial skirmishes, confusion about who’s in, who’s
out, and who’s in charge, disruption of the interesting theoretical
work, and bad behaviour lasting months or years that wouldn’t last days
in a serious organization.
There are a great many, very interesting, theoretical questions
remaining about the viability of any authoritative institution in the
absence of definite disciplinary mechanisms. This blog will certainly be
delving into such problems, in future posts. For the moment, however,
something approximating closely to a declaration of fealty seems
appropriate. From the Xenosystems perspective, the NRx brand has
never been entrusted to safer hands.
ADDED:
The Inner Council.
ADDED: Some background.
May 22, 2015Thick and Thin
Here‘s an
example of the distinction being used in a discussion between
libertarians. It would be surprising if the distinction lacked useful
application to NRx controversies. It goes without saying (I’m assuming)
that the NAP wouldn’t serve as the ultimate, irreducible axiom in that
case, but what would? Perhaps:
Maximal localization of consequences (and thus cybernetic
sensitivity)?
‘Privatization’ isn’t a bad compression of this principle. The case for
private (or commercialized) government would therefore be quite easily
enveloped by it.
August 29, 2015Twitter cuts (#49)
The Internet is a formalism engine. It will engineer consistency,
overwhelming all Cathedralist efforts to maintain ‘nuance’ (Left-oriented
asymmetry).
Either:
(a) “Hey, we want out Pride™ too!” or
(b) All “X Pride” is evident retardation.
Choose one, unless you’re running a grievance studies program at a
Cathedral institution (in which case, disintermediation is coming).
February 10, 2016NRx and Liberalism
In much of the neoreactionary camp, ‘liberalism’ is the end-point of
discussion. Its argumentative function is exactly that of
‘racism’ for the left. The only question, as far as this stance is
concerned, is whether the term can be made to stick. Once the scarlet
letter of micro-cultural ostracism is attached, there’s nothing further to
discuss. This is unlikely to change, except at the margin.
The obvious preliminary to this topic is, if not quite ‘American English’,
something like it. ‘Liberalism’ in the American tongue has arrived in a
strange space, unique to that continent. It is notable, and
uncontroversial, for instance that the notion of a ‘right-wing liberal’ is
considered a straight oxymoron by American speakers, where in Europe — and
especially mainland Europe — it is closer to a pleonasm. Since we still,
to a very considerable extent, inhabit an American world, the expanded
term ‘classical liberal’ is now required to convey the traditional sense.
A Briton, of capitalistic inclinations, is likely to favor ‘Manchester
Liberal’ for its historical associations with the explicit ideology of
industrial revolution. In any case, the discussion has been unquestionably
complicated.
Political language tends to become dialectical, in the most depraved
(Hegelian) sense of this term. It lurches wildly into its opposite, as it
is switched like a contested flag between conflicting parties. Stable
political significances apply only to whatever the left (the ‘opposition’,
or ‘resistance’) hasn’t touched yet. Another consideration, then, for
those disposed to a naive faith in ideological signs as heraldic markers.
(It is one that threatens to divert this post into excessive digression,
and is thus to be left — in
Wikipedia language — as a ‘stub’.)
The proposal of this blog is to situate ‘liberal’ at the intersection of
three terms, each essential to any recoverable, culturally tenacious
meaning. It is irreducibly modern, English, and
counter-political. ‘Ancient liberties’ are at least imaginable,
but an ancient liberalism is not. Foreign liberalisms can be wished the
best of luck, because they will most certainly need it (an exception for
the Dutch, alone, is plausible here). Political liberalism is from the
beginning a practical paradox, although perhaps in certain rare cases one
worth pursuing.
Burke is, without serious room for doubt, a
liberal in this sense. He is even its epitomy.
The positive content of this liberalism is the non-state culture of
(early) English modernism, as represented (with some modicum of ethnic
irony) by the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, by the tradition of
spontaneous order in its Anglophone lineage, by the conception of
commercial society as relief from politics, and by (‘Darwinian’)
naturalistic approaches that position distributed, competitive dynamism as
an ultimate explanatory and genetic principle. This is the cultural
foundation that made English the common tongue of global modernity (as has
been widely
noted). In
political economy, its supreme principle is
catallaxy (and only
very conditionally, monarchy).
It is from this cultural matrix that Peter Thiel speaks, when he
says
(notoriously):
I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.
Democracy is criticized from the perspective of (the old)
liberalism. The insight is perfectly (if no doubt incompletely)
Hoppean. It is a break that prepared many (the author of this blog included) for
Moldbug, and structured his reception. It also set limits. Democracy is
denounced, fundamentally, for its betrayal of Anglo-Modernist liberty.
Hoppe’s
formulation
cannot be improved upon:
Democracy has nothing to do with freedom. Democracy is a soft variant
of communism, and rarely in the history of ideas has it been taken for
anything else.
Moldbug’s explicit comments on this point are remarkably consistent, but
not without ambiguity. He
writes
(I contend, typically):
The truth about “libertarianism” is that, in general,
although sovereignty is sovereignty, the sovereign whether man, woman or
committee is above the law by definition, and there is no formula or
science of government, libertarian policies tend to be good ones. Nor
did we need Hayek to tell us this. It was known to my namesake, over two
millennia ago.
[…]
Wu wei
– for this is its true name – is a public policy for a virtuous prince,
not a gigantic committee. The virtuous prince should practice
wu wei, and will; that is his nature. Men will flock to
his kingdom and prosper there. The evil prince will commit atrocities;
that is his nature. Men will flee his kingdom, and should do so ASAP
before he gets the minefields in.
Is this flocking and fleeing to be conceptually subordinated to
the analysis of sovereignty, or — in contrast (and in the way of
Cnut the Great) —
set above it, as the Mandate of Heaven above the Emperor, which is to say:
as the enveloping context of external relations, grounded only in the
Outside? Despite anticipated accusations of bad faith, this is a serious
question, and one that cannot be plausibly considered simply exterior to
Moldbug’s work and thought.
In any case, it is the lineage of English Liberty (and beyond it,
Wu wei, or the Mandate of Heaven) that commands our loyalty here.
Insofar as Moldbug contributes to that, he is an ally, otherwise a foe,
the brilliance and immense stimulation of his corpus notwithstanding. NRx,
as it now exists, similarly.
“… the State should not be managing the minds of its citizens”
writes
Moldbug. (That’s actually a little more moralistic — in an
admirably liberal direction — than I’m altogether comfortable with.)
March 23, 2016Lunatic Activism
So it
seems
quite definite that the maniac who murdered this lady was some kind of
riled-up Neo-Nazi (with mental health problems, if that isn’t a pleonasm).
The SPLC is being called upon to pitch in with information,
wholly understandably and predictably.
The news article notes:
In the wake of the attack, commentators questioned whether the tone of
the ongoing Brexit referendum on Britain’s future in the European Union
referendum campaign had been too divisive, pointing in particular to the
focus on immigration. […] Alex Massie, writing in the Spectator
magazine, blamed the “Leave” campaign for raising tensions. […] “When
you encourage rage you cannot then feign surprise when people become
enraged,” Mr Massie wrote. […] “When you present politics as a matter of
life and death, as a question of national survival, don’t be surprised
if someone takes you at your word.”
There’s absolutely no point insisting that this is bullshit, because to
the extent that it is
it’s nevertheless inevitable, and it will certainly be effective.
This is what incontinent activism produces. It’s free, super-charged
propaganda for the other side.
If the Right succeeds at making anything out of the collapse of the
reigning order, it will be because it has
pacified
its own fringe of lunatic activism. It’s far from clear that it’s capable
of doing that. What is clear though, is that the Alt-Right tendency —
taken generally — is not anywhere close to seriously trying. The idiots
pretending to be your friends will hurt you far more than the idiots on
the other side. Mere survival requires principled dissociation from anyone
promoting crime and terror as political tactics. Violent criminality is
not even slightly OK. (It’s questionable whether politics is even slightly
OK.)
If “no enemies on the right” moderates condemnation of rabid animals, it’s
a formula for political suicide.
Note: The first person to denounce this post as ‘virtue signaling’ loses.
(It’s non-hydrophobia signaling.)
ADDED: Alrenous comments.
June 17, 2016Frankenstein
This comment
thread makes it vividly clear what’s at stake in the Cathedral vs.
Alt-Right grudge match. It’s Frankenstein against his monster.
(No way China doesn’t end up inheriting everything, on current Occidental
degeneration trends.)
Moldbug
on
Breivik, cutting to the core of the right-wing activist delusion:
A restoration of traditional, pre-liberal or even pre-Christian Norway
is a herculean task of social and political engineering. It cannot
possibly be carried on without absolute sovereignty. Indeed, the task of
eradicating liberal institutions and liberal culture in Norway, though
tremendous (and itself requiring absolute sovereignty), pales before the
much more difficult task of recreating a genuine Norwegian society that
isn’t a ridiculous theme-park joke. […] The idea that
any incremental political change, achieved by
any sort of “activism” (from mass whining to mass
murder), can advance this project in any way at all, is
inherently retarded.
Of course, very few are capable of doing anything positively valuable,
such as inventing a new crypto-currency, or advancing some other practical
Exit technology, so the temptation is to do something retarded instead.
“Something needs to be done, and this is something.” Also, they’re
increasingly desperate, poor creatures.
(Humans are probably too stupid to live.)
June 18, 2016Broken
‘Absolutist neoreaction’ seems to think its techno-commercialist enemies
(and I think it’s fair to say, XS in particular) will have some kind of
fundamental problem with
this:
The history of ideas is the history of the resources behind them (which
has some overlap with the base superstructure of Marxism) but that this
is augmented and overridden by the action of Power, and power centres in
both unified, and un-unified political structures.
If there is some determined attempt to separate Power™ from
techno-economic capability, then incomprehension is probable. (But no one
could possibly be suggesting anything that preposterous, surely?)
To ignore the historical association of power disintegration with the
emergence of self-propelling techonomic competences also looks like a
serious blindness. Capitalism hatched in Europe because Europe was broken.
Keeping the world broken seems similarly indissociable from the survival
of capitalistic historical momentum, and breaking it more profoundly is
the route to capital intensification. Perhaps that’s the argument we’re
having (not that such arguments matter much).
The Idea that unified power is the reliable principle of social competence
is ethno-historically
French. That is where it has worked its magic since the epoch of the Sun King.
Under sufficiently dismal circumstances, the RF analysis might catch on
there.
August 19, 2016Twitter cuts (#92)
— Posted as an administrative contribution to the embryonic “the Cathedral
is functional for Capital escalation”
conversation.
October 7, 2016Quote note (#350)
This
paleo-reactionary outline and critique of Moldbug is superbly done, if (of
course) fundamentally unconvincing to those of a Tech-Comm persuasion. In
particular, it’s hard to imagine a more incisive series of feature-not-bug
points than this one:
That, then, covers the main aspects and positive sides of Moldbug’s
thought. But now it is time to point out his many shortcomings. […] All
of them ultimately flow from three things: 1) his “reservationist epistemology” which denies a place for sources of knowledge outside of “irreducible
and untranscendable reason,” 2) his Bodinian (and ultimately Roman)
conception of sovereignty, and 3) his Machiavellianism and frequent
resort to raison d’etat.
If the conclusion drawn is that Moldbug — all royalist trolling aside — is
in fact a consistent Cold Modernist, clarification is served.
April 24, 2017
SECTION B - THE CATHEDRAL
CHAPTER ONE - STRUCTURE
Mandarins
Many of the recent
short
posts here have
been inter-connected by the topic of international ‘soft power‘ tensions. Somewhat ironically, this is a subject that is peculiarly
prone to failures of insight. No cultural formation is disposed to a
self-understanding that would expose itself as something inherently
threatening.
The reactions of Western academic, media, entertainment, and ancillary
cultural powers to Chinese resistances and counter-actions are
characterized by a remarkable uniformity, and systematic refusal of
reflection. Doesn’t any obstruction of — or non-compliance with — these
highly-internationalized forces of communication indicate simple
fear of the truth? That is overwhelmingly the core assumption,
when such matters are discussed by those very organs of trans-cultural
agency which should be in question, but which manage very successfully not
to be. The ‘conversation’ is almost wholly controlled by those who would
be the topic of the conversation, if the conversation were permitted to
happen.
In this respect, the international
managed non-controversy closely echoes the domestic cultural cold
war in the United States. When one side in such a conflict claims to be
the incontestable authority on the nature of the conflict, the history
books are written by the victors before the history has even taken place.
Resistance to the cultural hegemon is predetermined as inarticulate,
unreasonable, and illegitimate. Assertions of academic and media ‘freedom’
are substituted for positive analyses of cultural powers and their
agendas, as if the very suspicion of concerted strategic influence were
self-evidently nonsensical, and reasonably pathologized as paranoid
conspiracy theorizing.
It becomes irresistible, therefore, to present
Nydrwracu‘s diagram of American
domestic cultural power, understand as the sovereign instance within its
society:
This is the preliminary diagrammatic exposition of ‘the Cathedral’ as
investigated in the writings of Mencius
Moldbug, where
the social elite it identifies are typically described as ‘Brahmins’. This
ruling class can be conceived, with equal plausibility, as an American
Mandarinate. The informal ‘officials’ of this Mandarinate are united by
the implicit and publicly-promoted belief that their only special interest
is the truth. If in service to the truth, they find themselves duty-bound
to tell everybody what to think, that can only be legitimately interpreted
as a spontaneous expression of cultural ‘freedom’ — and not at all as the
principle contemporary form of dominion.
Moldbug calls this academic-media Mandarinate the Cathedral, in part,
because it so evidently thinks and works as a State Church. It considers
itself solemnly obliged to inculcate correct belief, in order that popular
opinion makes the socio-political choices it should. With some modest
time-lag, consumed by the workings of ‘progress’, the Cathedral decides
what society is to agree upon. It is the pilot of American society, and
thus — to some very considerable extent — of the world. When it encounters
objections, it tells the world what to think about that, too.
If sophisticated Western opinion is to make sense of the emerging soft
power tensions in the world, it needs first to acknowledge the fact that
the Cathedral exists, that it is a definite, specifically-motivated,
immensely powerful entity, and that there are reasons to dislike it which
need have nothing whatsoever to do with a fear of freedom or truth. An
aggressively evangelizing religion, which refuses to recognize itself as
such, is a scary thing to share a planet with. If the American Mandarinate
cannot see that, it is likely that there are a very large number of other
things it cannot see.
ADDED: Hollywood
trolls Juche.
June 26, 2014Know the Enemy
More scrutiny and discussion needed — but this diagram looks highly
reliable (and extremely valuable) upon preliminary inspection.
(I can’t reproduce it here because its connective links get lost in the
darkness — torture.)
ADDED: It looks like this:
Radish gets back to basics:
June 26, 2014Know the Enemy II
The sobs of aesthetic bliss version:
ADDED: China vs. The
Cathedral, planetary soft-power cage fight.
June 26, 2014Cathedral Studies
Some sound
advice
from Post-Nietzschean: When listing the central organs of the
modern structure, be careful not ignore the PR industry, post-vocational
higher education (“crapademia”), and para-administrative organizations
(“NGO-i-stan”). This type of sociological concreteness represents an
important theoretical development pathway.
(via
(via))
ADDED: The latent topic here is NRx blog-ecology. It looks as if
Post-Nietzschean has already burnt out (last post in January). If
this one fizzles I’m
going to throw some kind of epic tantrum.
May 11, 2014Cathedral notes (#1)
To accompany
this (which
I’m treating as a very valuable work-in-progress [sic]), some initial
straggly commentary.
(1) Conceptual genealogists will insist on a link to
this, so here
it is. There’s a lot of discussion stimulation there. Some other time.
(2) Probably 90% of the ‘Cathedral’ discussion so far — insofar as this
has over-spilled the NRx dikes — has consisted of “why don’t we call it
the Synagogue?” Tedious as this may be, it’s a crucial question, because
it effectively draws the NRx contour. If the cooptation of Judaism by the
main cladistic trunk of dynamic modernity is not understood, nothing has
been. ‘The Cathedral’ is a term that captures the exclusive insight about
which NRx coalesces.
(3) Nydrwracu’s diagram, and
Radish’s, are no
doubt incomplete, but they are fully adequate to the most decisive point.
The Cathedral is an information system — even an ‘intelligence’ system —
that is characterized, through supreme irony, by a structural
inability to learn. The minimal requirement for any Cathedrogram
is that it displays a radical deficiency of significant feedback links to
the control core. Every apparatus of information
gathering occupies a strictly subordinate position, relative to
the sovereign Cathedral layer, which is defined exhaustively by
message promotion. Core-Cathedral is a structure of read only
memory. It is essentially write-protected. The whole of its power
(and also its vulnerability) is inextricable from this feature. It is pure
cultural genetics (and zero pragmatics).
(4) Because the Cathedral cannot be fundamentally modified, but only
exacerbated, or terminated, there is sadly no strategic option available
to its enemies that is not based upon extinguishing it without residue.
Extinctions happen. Evolution is a bitch.
(5) Any argument that could imaginably pretend to perturb the Cathedral is
going to be
hate. The
only role of rational ‘interchange’ with this entity is to expose its
absolutely inflexible dogmatism. Reason cannot kill it, although it can
help to demonstrate why it needs to be killed.
(6) The Cathedral is objective, supra-human
insanity.
(7) We are ruled, demonstrably, by a blind idiot god.
June 27, 2014Moron bites (#1)
Time for a new occasional series here — devoted to persistent
minimum-intelligence memes unworthy of serious attention, except as
socio-cultural symptoms. To be exhibited in this series, an ‘argument’ has
to be strictly beneath contempt. It’s sheer zombie thought — which means
it isn’t thought at all. (Recommendations will be collected, with
gratitude.)
To initiate Moron bites, it would surely be difficult to improve
upon this:
It is obviously essential to the genre that its instances are
inter-changeable, and familiar. They do not rise to a level of
sophistication consistent with significant differentiation, and the moron
reservoir from whose shallows they flop out onto the bubbling ooze, is
thrashed by a ceaseless ritual of zombie generation. This one is of course
a classic ad hominem argument, the laziest way to bury a
provocation beneath a slur, and the refuge of the half-wit throughout
history. Michael Anissimov has already done a sound
job
of incinerating it, noting its roots in infantile projection. Nothing
further is really necessary (if, in fact, anything at all was).
Still, there is something that can be added, and it is articulated very
clearly by Hans Hermann Hoppe in
this talk (about
29 minutes in). Aristocratic privileges are not difficult to acquire
today, by anyone of even very modest natural capability. They are
distributed lavishly in exchange for services to the Cathedral,
even of the most nominal kind. One need not rise to a position of special
prestige within the academy, media, or state bureaucracy to enjoy a
complacent sense of spiritual superiority, it suffices merely to identify
with the Elect. Linking
this
(again) is
irresistible. When you feel entitled — as a white person — to denounce
white people in general
without the slightest concern that such derision might be mistaken for
self-criticism, you are not socially positioned as a revolutionary, but as a degenerate
aristocrat. Your assumption of impregnable moral and social advantage is
so great that it has become entirely invisible to itself.
NRx is formalist. Insofar as it obsesses on questions of aristocratic
hierarchy — and this is far from a prevailing syndrome — it does to in
order to draw attention to the conservation of social rank even (if not
quite especially) in those social orders which most tediously
flaunt their demotist credentials. Those reiterating moron bite #1 are
unlikely to be the new nobles, but more probably low-grade flunkies, who
nevertheless esteem themselves through the spiritual bond with their
(academic and media) masters. In other words, they are scum posing as
members of an aristocracy. Their facility at projection is remarkable.
ADDED: Classy (and then ‘interesting’) response from Matt H. —
October 2, 2014Laundered
Joel Kotkin
on
the Cathedral Clerisy:
In “The New Class Conflict,” I describe this alliance as the New
Clerisy, which encompasses the media, the academy and the expanding
regulatory bureaucracy. This Clerisy already dominates American
intellectual and cultural life and increasingly has taken virtual
control of key governmental functions, as well as the educations of our
young people. […] Although usually somewhat progressive by inclination,
the Clerisy actually functions much like the old First Estate in France
– the clergy – helping determine the theology, morals and ideals of the
broader population. […] Against such established and accumulated power,
even a strong November showing by the GOP may have surprisingly little
effect. Indeed, even with a Republican in the White House, the Clerisy’s
ability to shape perceptions, educate the young and control key
regulatory agencies will not much diminish. The elevation of the Clerisy
to unprecedented influence may prove this president’s most important
“gift” to posterity.
Kotkin throws in some misdirection, towards “Daniel Bell [who 40 years
ago] predicted … [the rise to] ‘pre-eminence of the professional and
technical class.'” You can judge the credibility of this intellectual
genealogy for yourself.
(Link and title stolen from
Stirner.)
October 20, 2014Politics on the Job
A
bunch
of
charts
breaking down occupations by ideology are flying across the Internet at
the moment. Perhaps Robin Hanson
started
it? (Linked by Cowan
here.) Hanson includes a link to
this
NYT article, which focuses upon the Left-orientation of tertiary
education, but that’s a huge, perennial topic in itself.
Hanson has his own theory on the subject, based upon differences in risk
orientation, but my favorite analysis was provided by commenter
adrianratnapala:
Most of the data on those plots can be explained by a rule that says
“People who who tell other people what to think for a living lean left.
Nearly everyone else leans (nominally) right.”
Bonus (indirectly related) chart dug up from the web:
(The site it’s taken from
looks like a gold-mine for this kind of stuff, if rather popcorn-heavy.)
November 20, 2014Worrying
Very crudely re-stated, Moldbug’s Cathedral concept says that whatever is
happening in the universities is an authoritative rough draft of what
society more generally has coming to it. Politics is downstream of
prestige culture, which the academy commands. So
this
is huge.
The American academy has become a self-propelling anxiety machine, in
which steadily-consolidating totalitarianism and mental disintegration
have been run-together into a circuit of amplification that no one knows
how to turn off. Haidt and Lukianoff call it “vindictive protectiveness”
driven by “emotional reasoning” which it in turn (nonlinearly) promotes.
It corresponds to a systematic transfer of incontestable authority towards
feelings of grievance. Questioning the dynamic is considered to
be “blaming the victim” and thus a heinous crime in itself. Everyone gets
out of the way, if they’re not indeed joining in. Madness intensifies.
(It’s classic Left Singularity machinery.)
Nearly all of the campus mental-health directors surveyed in 2013 by
the American College Counseling Association reported that the number of
students with severe psychological problems was rising at their schools.
The rate of emotional distress reported by students themselves is also
high, and rising. In a 2014 survey by the American College Health
Association, 54 percent of college students surveyed said that they had
“felt overwhelming anxiety” in the past 12 months, up from 49 percent in
the same survey just five years earlier. Students seem to be reporting
more emotional crises; many seem fragile, and this has surely changed
the way university faculty and administrators interact with them.
The universities — being craven concentrations of cowardice, when not
actively evil — are scared to tell their students to stop being scared.
Radical feedback runs away unchecked. Victimological terror is sovereign.
This is what is coming down the tracks, so fast that the headlights have
started to dazzle people. Take a look at the future. It’s screaming.
August 12, 2015Sub-Cathedral Media
Journalism doesn’t occupy the sovereign position within the classic
(Moldbuggian) NRx
analysis
of the Cathedral. It is downstream of the academic clerisy, who establish
doctrine, and then perform high-level indoctrination, with journalism
schools as a relatively subservient node on the conveyor. Only the
quantitative propaganda function of the media, as the terminal
relay to the masses, produces the impression that it effectively rules.
Media apparatchiks have negligible intellectual productivity. They serve
the Zeitgeist, by trying to remember what their professors taught
them.
Still, as the question
goes:
If, when journalists and politicians conflict, the politicians always
go down in flames and the journalists always walk away without a
scratch, who exactly is wearing the pants in this place?
Disconcerting then, to read
this
story, in which the pants aren’t at all where they might be expected:
The emails
were obtained by Gawker
as part of a large Freedom of Information Act request it made back in
2012. They show a 2009 exchange between Marc Ambinder, then-politics
editor of The Atlantic, and Philippe Reines, a close assistant and
adviser to Clinton during her days as Secretary of State. […] Ambinder
asked Reines for an advance copy of a speech Clinton was scheduled to
give at the Council on Foreign Relations. Rather than simply say yes or
no, Reines cut a deal with Ambinder, turning over the speech provided
Ambinder agreed to three conditions:
1) You in your own voice describe [the speech] as “muscular”
2) You note that a look at the CFR seating plan shows that all the
envoys — from [Richard] Holbrooke to [George] Mitchell to [Dennis]
Ross — will be arrayed in front of her, which in your own clever way
you can say certainly not a coincidence and meant to convey
something
3) You don’t say you were blackmailed!
Number three is especially cynical:
Don’t, of course, admit to the truth.
Ambinder does what he’s told. He doesn’t even seem to be trying to pretend
otherwise:
“Since I can’t remember the exact exchange I can’t really muster up a
defense of the art, and frankly, I don’t really want to,” Ambinder told
Gawker.
At times, clearly, the Cathedral concept gives these degenerate propaganda
serfs way too much credit. They’ve got it all, and they still cheat.
It would be a mistake to head back to the drawing-board, nevertheless. The
Cathedral isn’t dysfunctional because its corrupt, but even — and most
dangerously — when it isn’t. Structural feedback pathology is the problem,
with semi-criminal hackery as a distraction.
Marx dismissed capitalist cheating — such as adulteration of goods — as an
ultimate irrelevance, that only confused the principal line of his
critique. NRx should hold to the same approach in its critique of the
Cathedral, insofar as it aims for theoretical resilience (rather than
anecdotal sniping). It has still to be admitted that the Ambinder-types
don’t help.
February 11, 2016Cathedralism
Imagine, hypothetically, that you wanted the regime to succeed. Would you
recommend Cathedralization? Cynically considered, the track record is, at
least, not bad. Planetary dominion is not to be sniffed at. (Suggestions
in this direction are not unknown, even in XS comment threads.)
The Cathedral, defined with this question in mind, is the subsumption of
politics into propaganda. It tends — as it develops — to convert all
administrative problems into public relations challenges. A solution —
actual or prospective — is a successful
management of perceptions.
For the mature Cathedral, a crisis takes the consistent form:
This
looks bad. It is not merely stupid. As Spandrell recently observes, in comments on
power,
“… power isn’t born out of the barrel of a gun. Power is born out of the
ability to have people with guns do what you tell them.” (XS
note.) The question of
legitimacy is, in a real sense, fundamental, when politics sets the
boundaries of the cosmos under consideration. (So Cathedralism is also the
hypertrophy of politics, to the point where a reality outside it loses all
credibility.)
Is your civilization decaying? Then you
need to persuade people that it is not. If there still seems to
be a mismatch between problem and solution here, Cathedralism has not
entirely consumed your brain. To speculate (confidently) further — you’re
not a senior power-broker in a modern Western state. You’re even, from a
certain perspective, a fossil.
Cathedralism works, in its own terms, as long as there are no definite
limits to the efficacy of propaganda. To pose the issue at a comparatively
shallow level, if the political response to a crisis simply
is the crisis, and that response can be effectively controlled
(through propaganda, broadly conceived), then the Cathedral commands an
indisputable practical wisdom. It would be sensible to go long on the
thing.
If however (imagine this, if you still can) manipulation of
the response to crisis is actually a suppression of the feedback
required to really tackle the crisis, then an altogether
different story is unfolding.
Is reality subordinated to the Cathedral because — and exactly so far as —
‘the people’ are? That is the question.
ADDED: Deeply relevant.
February 16, 2016Rectification of Names
Foseti
explains
(in his own comment thread) why our contemporary sovereign is properly
described as the Cathedral. The terms works because:
It mocks those who think they’re above religion, it conveys information
about the structure of their beliefs, and it’s beautifully concise.
(The effectiveness of this term is no reason to ignore its more technical
Moldbuggian complement, the Modern Structure,
suggests
Anomaly UK.)
July 13, 2013
CHAPTER TWO - FAITH
Oh, Spengler …
This
is Cathedralism dialed up to 11:
On moral grounds I sympathize with the African-American view, but there
is an even more urgent reason to rip down the Confederate flag. Our
refusal to look squarely at the evil character of the American
Confederacy turned us into idiots. It may be a bit late to remedy this
national lapse in mental capacity, but one has to start somewhere. …
That is American exceptionalism: the belief that America can be a better
kind of nation than the ethnocentric nations of Europe, in emulat[i]on
of the biblical Israel. That was the impulse of the Founders, born, as
Harvard’s Eric Nelson explains in The Hebrew Republic,
of the English Revolution’s attempt to design a polity on biblical
principles. The Civil War destroyed this impulse, because it killed too
many of the New Englanders who believed, as Lincoln put it, that America
was “an almost chosen nation.” … Protestantism in America shifted from
saving souls to social engineering. The sin of the South was too great
to acknowledge; after the sacrifice of nearly 30% of its military-age
man and the reduction of its standard of living by half, the defeated
white South could not admit to itself that it had gotten precisely what
was coming to it for wickedness of slavery. … the Confederates fought
with desperate courage, but for rapine rather than right. Crushing them
was the noblest thing the United States ever did. … The South could not
live in the knowledge that its heroic sacrifices were offered in a
wicked cause, and its response was to excise from religion the notion of
sin and virtue, and replace it with social engineering. … The Civil War
made us stupid. It persuaded us that we were better off playing God than
leaving the outcome to a God who might demand such terrible sacrifices
of us once again. … The trauma of the Civil War drove us towards
Wilsonian Universalism, which lives on in the form of George W. Bush’s
“world democratic revolution.” America confronts a number of cultures
that are bent on genosuicide. We fail to recognize the symptoms, because
we shut our eyes to one of modern history’s most striking examples of
civilizational self-destruction, namely the American South. America
can’t hope to make sense of the world if it refuses to think about its
own history.
Spengler appends some crucial explanatory remarks:
As many people have pointed out (Michael Novak, Meir Soloveichik),
there is a biblical (covenantal) as well as a natural law (contractual)
component to the Founding; in my view the covenantal component is
primary and in need trumps the natural-law component. … The
Constitutional mechanism broke down (in fact, the slave party controlled
the government for almost all of the period 1800-1860, and an eruption
of apocalyptic spirit was required to correct it — bringing to the fore
America’s Hebraic-Protestant mission. Of course Lincoln ran roughshod
over elements of the Constitution but this, in my view, was what the
Talmud calls “sin for the sake of heaven.” The natural-law apparatus
(checks and balances, separation of powers, states’ rights, etc.) is the
plumbing of government, and it is certainly necessary, but it is
contingent on the higher, covenantal imperative.
Yes, it’s a religion.
ADDED: ‘Genosuicide’ (just in case that looked like an uncorrected typo).
August 4, 2015Back to the Roots
In the age of
Corbyn-style socialist fundamentalism, George Monbiot
wants
the Left to get (still more) religion:
Evangelical groups unite around a set of core convictions, overt,
codified and non-negotiable. It would surely not be difficult to create
a similar set, common to all progressive movements, built around
empathy, kindness, forgiveness and self-worth
[you know, redemption].
A set of immutable convictions might make our movements less capricious
while reinforcing the commonality between the left’s many causes. […]
Evangelism is positive and propositional (to evangelise is to bring good
news). You cannot achieve lasting change unless you set the agenda,
rather than responding to that of your opponents. […] They welcome
everyone – but in particular the unconverted. Instead of anathematising
difference, doubt and hesitation, they explain and normalise these
responses as steps within a journey to belief.
The only reason this isn’t pure Left-Moldbuggianism is that it still seems
to think it’s doing something new.
(The Guardian actually used that picture to illustrate the
Monbiot piece, just in case you think I might be exaggerating what’s going
on here.)
September 16, 2015Progressive Religion
This
argument seems strangely familiar. Still, if the central thesis of
Neoreaction is becoming common wisdom on a path that bypasses Moldbug, it
remains something to be celebrated. Cultural convergence could simply be
an index of truth.
Jaded as I am by NRx, Goldman’s review doesn’t quite make me rush out to
buy the
book
(since we’ve been treating this argument as a basic reference for years).
It’s still good:
The desire to be redeemed from sin (redefined as a social fact)
identifies the post-Protestants as children of the Puritans. That
insight is what makes his new book a new and invaluable contribution to
our understanding of America’s frame of mind. Just what is a secular
religion, and how does it shape the spiritual lives of its adherents?
Bottum deftly peels the layers off the onion of liberal thinking to
reveal its Protestant provenance and inherited religious sensibility.
The Mainline Protestantism that once bestrode American public life never
died, but metamorphosed into a secular doctrine of redemption. And that
was made possible by the conversion of sin from a personal to a social
fact in Walter Rauschenberg’s version of the social gospel. Bottum
writes, “The new elite class of America is the old one: America’s
Mainline Protestant Christians, in both the glory and the annoyingness
of their moral confidence and spiritual certainty. They just stripped
out the Christianity along the way.” By redefining sin as social sin,
Rauschenberg raised up a new Satan and a new vocabulary of redemption
from his snares. According to Bottum, his “central demand is to see
social evil as really existing evil — a supernatural force of dark
magic.”
Is this a socially intolerable revelation, in
the sense that its acceptance would make the existing order of the world
impossible? In other words, can the Cathedral overtly embrace its own
Neo-Puritanism, without terminal disturbance? This is a question that
might rapidly become inescapable.
ADDED: The
(NRx-scrubbed) Ultrapuritanism Hypothesis gets Instalanched. Also, Rod
Dreher’s meta-review is
here.
ADDED: More Bottum-based mainstreaming.
March 19, 2014Dawkins’ Faith
The egalitarian religion finds the ways of the infidel difficult to
understand.
ADDED: Harsh-but-fair comment on Dawkins by ‘aisaac’ (2013/10/31, 7:00 am):
“Not only does he not dare to tell the truth, he doesn’t even keep his
mouth shut about things he doesn’t dare to tell the truth about.”
April 18, 2014Spiritual Progress
Alex passed the link along (in
this thread), so
I thought I’d foreground it:
It’s not really saying anything that will come as a surprise, but it’s
worth endlessly repeating (and the color scheme helps to get it through
the gate).
Whatever other arguments are available in favor of traditional religion,
they need to be supplemented by the recognition that man is simply too
damned
stupid
for the
Death
of
God.
June 8, 2014UNESCO Man
Via Cussans (dark
channels), comes
this
crucial document on the intersection of racial anthropology and
international institutional politics. The abstract:
From 1945 and the following 20 years UNESCO – the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization – was at the heart of
a dispute in international scientific circles over the correct
definition of the concept of race. This was essentially a dispute about
whether the natural sciences or the social sciences should take
precedence in determining the origins of human difference, of social
division and of the attribution of value. The article provides an
overview of the work on race carried out by UNESCO, examines the
measures it took to combat racism, pays special attention to their
political and social impact in various member states, and demonstrates
how UNESCO played a major part in imposing a new view of man: UNESCO
Man.
August 25, 2014Radish does Irreligion
The Moldbuggian sublime — a crushing immensity that releases intelligence
into awe-stricken ecstasy — has settled in at
Radish quite decisively. The latest
installment, which embeds the phenomenon of ‘New Atheism’ within the deep historical
tide of revolutionary rationalist irreligion, is a masterpiece of the
genre (and in its own right). After several thousand words of relentless
contextualization, it is impossible to read the confused stammerings of
contemporary ‘reason’ without hearing the clattering leftist ruin-ratchet
beneath. “[Skeptic magazine editor-in-chief and executive
director of the Skeptics Society Michael] Shermer is surprised, like
Lavoisier and Condorcet before him, to find his own head upon the chopping
block of Moral Progress, but no lessons are learned (2013) …”
By the time Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins are led, dazed and indignant,
to the scaffold of revolutionary disbelief, the entire process has an
almost hypnotic inevitability.
Wasn’t the cause supposed to be intellectual liberty? If, after
reading this piece, such derangement doesn’t elicit morbid amusement,
you’re probably going to need to read it again.
ADDED: Has Richard Dawkins lost the Mandate of Heaven?
September 23, 2014Cathedral History
… the (short) play:
A: We’ve got nothing against you personally. We don’t even know you.
It’s just that we’re more comfortable restricting club membership to
upper-income straight white male English-speaking Protestants.
B: Then you’re not very good Protestants!
A: Damn! You’re right …
January 21, 2015Quote note (#328)
Formally,
this
isn’t a new ‘Boldmug’ argument, but it’s stated neatly here:
Whether you choose to think about it or not, I have a very simple
explanation of Anglo-American success as it relates to democracy. […] If
you see democracy as a pest, like Dutch elm disease, it makes perfect
sense. Dutch elm disease originates in China. Therefore, Chinese elms
are resistant to Dutch elm disease. But not immune! It’s still a
crippling disease in China. But the trees live. […] The result of
globalization: Chinese elms dominate the world. And hybrids. An elm does
not live, anywhere in the world, unless its DNA is mostly Chinese. It
would be a mistake to conclude from this that Dutch elm disease is good
for elm trees, and the Chinese should export it to everyone. Unless
they’re just plain evil. […] All we have to observe, to show that this
is the case, is to show that politics in the Anglo-American tradition
(don’t forget, Marx wrote in the British Library, and his column
appeared in the New York Tribune), (a) frequently causes serious damage
to Anglo-American countries, and (b) always or almost always has two
results in other countries: it either causes massive, traumatic
disasters, or brings the country under effective Anglo-American
supervision, and/or both.
ADDED: Also, concisely reinforcing NeoCam basics —
Various kinds of elective monarchies have been tried, and worked
reasonably well (as does hereditary monarchy). But there is a real
qualitative difference between joint-stock governance and anything else.
Which is why joint-stock companies kill all competitors which experiment
with different operating systems.
The “monarchy” language is incredibly unhelpful to the communication of
the central point being made here. How many times is it possible to say
“the Neocameral CEO is nothing like a monarch as you understand the term”
without utter exasperation? ‘Boldmug’ clearly has more patience on this
front that I do.
ADDED: From another commentator, responding to the moron bite “[‘Boldmug’]
is defending returning to some sort of racially-segregated nationalistic
authoritarian regime.”
No. Mencius Moldburg advocates for neocameralism. Interestingly enough
it is the same as Scott Alexander’s Archipelago. The difference is
Moldburg has a mechanism to enforce things and Alexander never got
around to elaborating one. […] In case you don’t want to bother looking
it up, it basically means having a bunch of Singapore like city states
with free movement and explicitly based political power. It is the exact
opposite of ethno-nationalism.
ADDED: Augmentation from Information Processing.
February 6, 2017Tribal Epistemology
When you know who people identify with, you generally get a full-spectrum
insight into their beliefs for free.
As Fernandez
puts
it:
… while Western civilization pays lip service to “evidence based”
policy, in practice most human beings rely on
social proof
to decide what to believe. … The search for “social proof” as a
determinant of conviction is not wholly crazy. Few of us can say why a
pharmaceutical works. But if the doctor prescribes a pill, we drink it
without question. Most of the world is preoccupied with making a living
and consequently have a high level of
rational ignorance. “Rational ignorance occurs when the cost of educating oneself on an
issue exceeds the potential benefit that the knowledge would provide.”
It takes too long for us to figure things out from first principles, so
we find a “smart man” and do what he tells us.
While everybody is compelled to economize in this way to some extent,
skepticism — in its many different varieties — offers a measure of
practical defense. (One variant is simply the heuristic, inherited by all
Protestant clades, if quite commonly left idle by them, of
looking things up for yourself.)
“What do you do if the Church has been hijacked by demons?”
asked
Harold Lee. This is exactly the same concern, raised from another angle,
and escalated towards its essence. As trust in the machineries of critical
truth production is
eroded, in direct
proportion
to their
Cathedralization, the primary tendency is to tribalize ‘knowledge’ (as a signal of
belonging), and secondarily to promote a general nihilism, on the
ever-more plausible assumption that everything we have ever been told is a
lie.
This is how a civilization is burnt to the ground. By selling their souls
to the New Church, all epistemologically-relevant social institutions
trade authority for mere
power, or the capacity to command tribal allegiance and conformity. In
response, trustlessness is
installed as the
foundational principle of realistic socio-political analysis, or
informally manifested in a spreading and deepening cynicism. What little
exists of counter-knowledge is mostly sheer refusal, or opportunistic
deference to the enemy’s enemy. No
Antiversity
exists. It too is invoked, in the interim, only as a refusal. Its entire
meaning, up to this point, is that
we don’t any longer believe what we’ve been told.
We remember enough about what Science once was, or what market-honed
economic signals were, to know that tribal epistemology is cognitive
garbage. As we slide down the slope, increasingly, it’s the garbage heap
in which we all live.
July 29, 2015Politics is the Mindkiller
… That’s probably Yudkowsky greatest
line.
(It’s the adaptation of a Dune quote.)
Somewhat ironically (see previous post),
this
is one of the most significant ways it’s playing out right now:
… Literally none of that happened. [You’ll have to at least scan
the damn thing for context.]
Or at least there is zero evidence that it did. These are smart,
rational people falling for a scam. Why? It’s in part because Twitter
fosters this group-think and lack of critical thought — you just click a
button and, with little effort, you’ve spread whatever you want people
to believe — but it’s also because they’re so convinced of the
righteousness of their cause (electing Clinton/defeating Trump) that
they have cast all limits and constraints to the side, believing that
any narrative or accusation or smear, no matter how false or
conspiratorial, is justified in pursuit of it.
Naked consequentialist cynicism doesn’t make a good foundation for a
church. That’s part of the reason why it’s coming down.
October 13, 2016Quote note (#303)
Trump is unintelligible, in an interesting
way:
[President Elect Donald J. Trump is]
tapping into a broad resistance to contemporary moral beliefs, beliefs
that have become increasingly institutionalised over the past fifty
years. […] The problem is that these are precisely the beliefs that are
held above inquiry in the social sciences.
Not just a political crisis, then, but an epistmeological crisis
(precisely because it will be so difficult for the dominant
social organs of knowledge to accept the fact).
November 14, 2016
CHAPTER THREE - INSANITY
Forward!
That
was all thoroughly unambiguous. It turns out that Obama really is the FDR
for this turn of the gyre.
Nate Silver
and
Paul Krugman
are vindicated. The New York Times is the gospel of the age. Conservatism
is crushed and humiliated. The brake pedal has been hurled out of the
window. There’s no stopping it now.
The day before the election, Der Spiegel
described
“the United States as a country that doesn’t understand the signs of the
times and has almost willfully — flying in the face of all scientific
knowledge — chosen to be backward.” For the magazine’s staff writers, the
problem was utterly straightforward. “The hatred of big government has
reached a level in the United States that threatens the country’s very
existence.” Retrogressive forces were impeding the country’s progress by
refusing to grasp the obvious identity of Leviathan and social
advancement. It should now be obvious to everyone – even charred tea
partiers gibbering shell-shocked in the ruins — that contemporary American
democracy provides all the impetus necessary to bulldoze such
obstructionism aside. The State is God, and all shall bend to its will.
Forward!
With the ascension of USG to godhood, a new purity is attained, and a
fantastic (and
Titanic) experiment progresses to a new stage. It is no longer necessary to
enter into controversy with the shattered detritus of the right,
henceforth all that matters is the test of strength between concentrated
political motivation and the obduracy of reality itself. Which is to say:
the final resistance to be overcome is the insolent idea of a reality
principle, or outside. Once there is no longer any
way of things that exists independently of the State’s sovereign
desire, Left Singularity is attained. This is the eschatological promise
that sings its hallelujahs in every progressive breast. It translates
perfectly into the colloquial chant:
yes we can!
Of course, it needs to be clearly understood that ‘we’ – now and going
forward – means the State. Through the State we do anything and
everything, which we can, if not really, then at least truly, as promised.
The State is ‘us’ as God. Hegel already saw all this, but it took
progressive educational systems to generalize the insight. Now our time
has come, or is coming. All together now: yes we can! Nothing but a
brittle reactionary realism stands in our way, and that is
something we can be educated out of (yes we can). We have! See our blasted
enemies strewn in utter devastation before us.
The world is to be as we will it to be. Surely.
November 7, 2012Magical Thinking
The Left has finally
understood
who’s to blame for the collapse of Detroit, and it’s quite obvious when
you think about it — white racists did it with their super-powerful evil
thoughts:
As payback for the worldwide revolution symbolized by hot jazz, Smokey
Robinson dancin’ to keep from cryin’ and Eminem trading verses with
Rihanna, New Orleans and Detroit had to be punished. Specifically, they
had to be isolated, impoverished and almost literally destroyed, so they
could be held up as examples of what happens when black people are
allowed to govern themselves.
Hang on, you can stop composing that all-caps comment – I don’t
actually believe that what happened to Detroit and New Orleans resulted
from anyone’s conscious plan. Real history is much more complicated than
that. I do, however, think [sic]
that narrative has some validity on a psychological level …
(Apparently the psychic racist death rays were first tried out on New
Orleans, where they were “goosed along a bit by rising carbon emissions
and rising temperatures,” creating a massive atmospheric disturbance.)
Goodbye sanity, your day is done. Hail madness and gathering night …
July 29, 2013Musty
‘To Beat ISIS, the Arab World Must Promote Political and Religious
Reforms’, Rule Jebreal
tells
us. Picking on a writer for a headline is a mistake — who knows where it
came from in the editorial process? — and, besides, this one employs (the
exhortative) ‘must’ in its sole appropriate usage — as the completion of a
hypothetical imperative. “If you want X, you must do Y” — that’s OK. (Y is
a necessary condition for the accomplishment of X.) ‘Must’ is tolerable if
it’s kept on a leash.
Once it slips the collar, ‘must’ reverts to its status as the most
preposterous word in the English language, an instrument of sheer
obfuscation. Watch it go:
The United States must review its policies across the
Middle East. … It must take a stand against Riyadh’s
promotion of exclusionary Wahhabism. […] … Likewise, pressure
must be placed on Egypt to abandon its witch hunt of
the Muslim Brotherhood. In undertaking an effective counter terrorism
strategy, the United States must partner with the Arab
states to undertake political reforms that ultimately lead to
underwriting a social contract in which every group of the population
are represented and protected. […] … If the United States and Iraqi
government want to defeat ISIS, they must now ensure
the inclusion and protection of Iraqi Sunnis, Kurds and Yazidis, along
with the majority Shi’ites [this one is minimally OK]. […] … Eventually,
a process of reconciliation must be initiated between
Shi’ites and Sunnis. This centuries-old dispute is played out today in a
proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, which has produced a monster
that threatens the national security of not only Middle Eastern nations,
but also the United States. It must come to an end. […]
… The Obama Administration must pursue a policy of
severe sanctions against any and all countries that finance jihadist —
even if they are our own allies. … What will ultimately turn the tide in
the Middle East are groups that actively advocate for a democratic
culture and its values around the Arab world. A campaign to promote
these ideas on every level must begin, as part of the
counterterrorism initiative launched by Kerry.
[Emphases added.]
Must they, really? Will they? Can they?
It’s irritating to see moral fanaticism — betrayed by its distinctive
combination of groundless certainty and communicative fervor —
masquerading as realistic analysis. The disguise is only necessary because
the prescription so exorbitantly exceeds the diagnosis, tripping eagerly
into glassy-eyed deontological intellectual abandonment.
“The Middle East must stop being the Middle East, and America
must help to make this happen.” It can’t, and it won’t, on both
counts. The musty smell is simply annoying.
September 16, 2014Discombobulation
Salon has been bat-shit crazy for a long time, but right now it’s
really
going
over
the
edge. It’s almost as if the people there are getting worried
about
something.
[Thanks to VXXC for
pointers
into the bin]
My personal pick for comedy gold goes to the article on right-wing brain
washing (5th link), which includes this priceless classic: “He believed it
when Rush Limbaugh told him that climate change is a hoax. He called Al
Gore an ‘asshole’ even after watching the entire
An Inconvenient Truth …” (Especially funny for me because I knew
someone like that once — he thought Hitler was a dangerous demagogue, even
after watching Triumph of the Will.)
Panic!
They’re so brain-washed they don’t even believe our propaganda any
more.
ADDED: Da Tech Guy EBT follow-up.
October 14, 2013Scrap note #6
How much credit is to be given to honest dishonesty? Answers should be
addressed to Rod Dreher, in response to a truly astonishing blog
post
that sums up where we are right now more frankly than anything I have
seen.
Short summary: We have a duty to lie.
In Dreher’s own words:
Given the history of the 20th century, I flat-out don’t trust our
species to handle the knowledge of human biodiversity without turning it
into an ideology of dehumanization, racism, and at worst, genocide. Put
another way, I am hostile to this kind of thing not because I believe
it’s probably false, but because I believe a lot of it is probably true
— and we have shown that we, by our natures, can’t handle this kind of
truth. […] My point is simply that all of us believe that some facts are
too dangerous to be known; they are like the Ring Of Power, in that the
temptation to abuse them is too great for our natures to bear. […]
Admittedly, this puts me in a tight spot. Am I saying that we should
ignore reality? I suppose I am.
So there we have it — we have to ban acknowledgement of reality, because
Hitler. This stuff is all going to fall apart so quickly (and nastily)
that it will shock everyone.
(Like Moldbug, and the DE in general, I think
it’s seriously unwise to set things up in such a way that only Nazis get
to tell the truth.)
ADDED: Some
thoughts
on the Dreher piece from Occam’s Razor.
ADDED: Henry Dampier
on
Noble Lies.
January 30, 2014Ideo-Cannibalism
Is
intersectionality
just the greatest thing ever, or what?
Both [Laurie] Penny and [Richard] Seymour have made a point of arguing,
moreover, for the latest fad in leftist thinking:
intersectionality. “Intersectionality” supposedly means
taking seriously the many different oppressions, and how they intersect.
“My socialism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit,” Seymour
has made a point of saying. Given that they are so keen to speak out
against oppression in all its multi-layered forms, it seems really bad
luck that they should be accused of being “racist crackers” and “white
settlers.”
The entire article is comedy gold.
The Obama presidency AND intersectionality — does anyone still doubt that
God is hardcore NRx?
February 11, 2014Scientific Climate
(Click on image to enlarge.)
(Via.)
One thing to emphasize — ‘science’ is the data, as well as the error. This
is not a picture of black hole, uncorrectable reality denial, of the kind
familiar from political economy. That said, the speculative hypothesis was
turned into a story for public promotion, and then into something very
close to an official dogma. Now that it isn’t holding together,
this
type of thing starts happening.
Has the scientific establishment ever been so off-beam, in the entire
history of the West? Not only wrong, but aggressively doctrinaire, and
politically assertive in the direction of error? For anybody who esteems
the development of natural science as the single greatest historical
achievement of the Occidental world, the AGW saga has been a hideous
embarrassment. Our institutions are broken.
ADDED: It’s war.
ADDED: “This is the original sin of the global warming theory: that it was
founded in a presumption of guilt against industrial civilization. All of
the billions of dollars in government research funding and the entire
cultural establishment that has been built up around global warming were
founded on the presumption that we already knew the conclusion — we’re
‘ravaging the planet’ — and we’re only interested in evidence that
supports that conclusion.”
February 21, 2014Aristocracy of Outrage
Ezra Levant
evaluates
the new social hierarchy:
[First, the background:]
Faith McGregor is the lesbian who doesn’t like the girly cuts that they
do at a salon. She wants the boy’s hairdo. … Omar Mahrouk is the owner
of the Terminal Barber Shop in Toronto. He follows Shariah law, so he
thinks women have cooties. As Mahrouk and the other barbers there say,
they don’t believe in touching women other than their own wives. …
Mahrouk’s view is illiberal. But in Canada we believe in property rights
and freedom of association — and in this case, freedom of religion, too.
… McGregor ran to the Human Rights Tribunal and demanded that Mahrouk
give her a haircut.
[…]
Oh, McGregor is politically correct. But just not politically correct
enough. It’s like poker.
A white, Christian male has the lowest hand — it’s like he’s got just
one high card, maybe an ace. So almost everyone trumps him.
A white woman is just a bit higher — like a pair of twos. Enough to
beat a white man, but not much more.
A gay man is like having two pairs in poker.
A gay woman — a lesbian like McGregor — is like having three of a
kind.
A black lesbian is a full house — pretty tough to beat.
Unless she’s also in a wheelchair, which means she’s pretty much a
straight flush.
The only person who could trump that would be a royal flush. If the
late Sammy Davis Jr. — who was black, Jewish and half-blind — were to
convert to Islam and discover he was 1/64th Aboriginal.
So which is a better hand: A lesbian who wants a haircut or a Muslim
who doesn’t want to give it to her?
(via)
(It’s been nothing but crash-phase democracy self-cannibalization
everywhere I’ve looked today.)
February 28, 2014How it Ends
You thought Slate
had
a
lock
on
Cathedralist
direct
current? Then you probably haven’t been keeping up with The Atlantic.
I’m old enough to remember when The Atlantic Monthly was a
serious magazine. That was before James Fallows took it over, and drove it
into a ditch. It has since progressed to Atlantic Trench depths of
comprehensive
intellectual
ruin. Some gratitude is in order for the clarity with which it exposes our
destination, guided by the supreme Leftist Law:
Any cultural institution that is not dominated by the oppressed talking
about their oppression is oppressive.
As Professor Zaius
explains
in the comment section of the vibrant debate article:
… the judges, while they are experienced debaters and coaches
themselves, don’t by and large subscribe to the notion that the “best
argument” in conventional terms should win. Many, if not most, see
debate as a means for advancing social justice and dismantling
oppressive hierarchies of whiteness and patriarchy. Inasmuch as “logic”
upholds these hierarchies and personal experiences from POC and
non-linear storytelling and music fight them, then “logic” should
lose.
We’re so screwed.
ADDED: “… while one has some sympathy for Hardy and the other traditional
debate do-gooders, they seem to be pining for a format, and a world, that
has already passed. Have a look at Twitter. Or MSNBC. Or the
New York Times. Or Attorney General Eric Holder. Or any of the
rest of the grievance-mongering chattering class for whom the unbeatable
trump card these days is discerning ‘racism’ in their opponents. Debate
isn’t what it used to be. The college kids might as well learn this brute
fact sooner rather than later.”
April 18, 2014Quote notes (#88)
Charles Ponzi, call your IP lawyer.
This
is the kind of argument that makes sense when pursued without the
distractions of STEM training:
… the humanities crisis is largely a positive feedback loop created by
stressing out over economic outcomes. Research by government bureaus
held that people who studied STEM disciplines had better employment
prospects. As a result, state and federal education budgets consistently
made these subjects a priority. Enrollment in the humanities slumped, and this made it more difficult
for budding humanists and artists to succeed, not least because fewer
and fewer jobs were available in the academy.
Humanists are being educated to teach the humanities in higher-education,
why can’t anybody see there’s a model there that, like, could totally
work?
June 7, 2014More Madness
Insanity night continues here in Shanghai with this perfected distillation
of Leftist delirium:
Spoiler: He actually believes the initial hypothetical is true.
June 13, 2014Enablers
The BBC fog-machine at
work on the UK
child-predation story:
Child sexual exploitation is happening in a “number of towns” in
different parts of the country, according to the author of a damning
report into abuse in Rotherham. …
According to
an estimate
from the Children’s Commissioner for England three years ago, 2,409
children were identified as victims of exploitation by gangs over a
14-month period from 2010-11
…
Oxford …
Seven men were
sentenced to a total of 95 years
in June 2013, for offences including rape, facilitating child
prostitution and trafficking. [Follow the link for ethnic details censored by the BBC]
Derby … Nine men were convicted over three trials of
systematically grooming and sexually abusing teenage girls in 2010. … [Oh look, a clue –]
Speaking in 2011 after the jailing of two of the men, former Home
Secretary Jack Straw suggested some men of Pakistani origin saw white
girls as “easy meat”. The judge in the case said the race of the victims
and their abusers was “coincidental”. …
Rochdale … In May 2012, nine men were given sentences
ranging from four to 19 years after being found guilty of offences
including rape and conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with a
child.
…
Telford … Seven men were jailed after a series of
court cases related to a child prostitution ring. The charges included
rape, trafficking and prostitution, sometimes involving girls as young
as 13. …
Peterborough … A gang of five males was jailed in
February after being found guilty of raping and sexually assaulting five
vulnerable girls.
I’m going to assume that all the fanatically unspecified “men” (or
“males”) involved are Muslims of Pakistani origin (abusing
white children), unless presented
with definite evidence to the contrary. Any other default would be an act
of cognitive collaboration with Britain’s sordid little branch-operation
of the Cathedral, and we’ve now seen with stark clarity what that enables.
ADDED: Rotherham commentary from
hbd chick,
Breitbart
and
Spiked.
ADDED: Commentary, context, and links from TNIO.
ADDED: “… these children were victims of ‘anti-racism'” — Hard for me to see
how that could possibly be controversial at this point.
ADDED: Anarcho-Tyranny in the UK.
August 28, 2014Rotherham
“Hint: it’s not the crime, it’s the coverup,”
suggests Lesser Bull
persuasively. Mangan
fills
this out, with an especially valuable link to
this
round-up of orchestrated obliviousness.
Does the progressive media really think it can de-realize this festival of
cultural ruin with a standard inattention protocol? If so, it has to count
as an extraordinary peak hubris moment. Perhaps the left is
structurally incapable of preventing itself from pushing things over the
brink of catastrophe. It always has to take that one additional step, and
it has no sense at all of how to back down.
There have to be a lot of people in the UK right now who would be
delighted to see the media establishment strung up from lamp-posts, with
panic and defection rife in journalistic ranks. It’s surely not impossible
that the pattern now jutting into hideous visibility in Britain will evoke
a disturbing sense of recognition elsewhere, possibly throughout the
Anglosphere. As far as core Cathedral operating procedures are concerned,
this has to be a period of (possibly unprecedented) vulnerability. As a
source of regime threatening irritability, the Rotherham syndrome is the
droit du seigneur of the new nobility — even among a pitifully
broken people, it pushes some deeply atavistic buttons. Lies, sexual
exploitation, and foreign invasion — who’d want to be PR manager for this
cocktail of native degradation?
(Any cover-up -themed T-shirt slogan suggestions in the comment thread
will be very gratefully received.)
“So you have employed all the powers and
privileges at your disposal to make it impossible to investigate a
situation that has now deteriorated to mass child rape?”
“Look, a squirrel!”
ADDED: Help! I’m beginning to really like Richard Dawkins:
August 30, 2014Moron bites (#2)
Time for another of these. The rule, remember, is that the instance picked
upon has to exemplify a laughably mindless meme. Like this:
Politically incorrect research, however solidly established, is especially
singled out for this treatment. Some approved (i.e. Leftist) authority
somewhere has provided the excuse to dismiss awkward findings, so that the
painful stimulus can be suppressed, and — just to be safe — even the
pretext for suppressing it is best forgotten, leaving only the permission
to be undisturbed in public circulation. All crime-think has been ‘well
refuted’ (sociologically a priori) as far as these people are
concerned. “It’s been well refuted” means exactly “wouldn’t it be
nice if this didn’t exist?” (or “nice people have told us we don’t need to
worry about that”).
Refuted where?
Amused yet?
ADDED: A banquet of ‘well refuted’ science at Slate.
December 2, 2014Brown Scare
… can really mess up your head (and your
blog).
This detailed account of exactly how LGF lost everything — starting with
its mind — is a comedy masterpiece. My single favorite fun fact:
LGF decline stats, Dec 2012. Has a list of the top 21 most prolific commenters on LGF in
2007. All but 2 are now banned.
March 12, 2015#WrongSkin
Scarcely necessary to add the
backstory.
(I’m guessing there might be enthusiasm for conversation about this.
Please note Godfrey
Elfwick‘s example, and
try especially hard to keep it classy people.)
Is #AAA even imaginable in
this environment?
ADDED: Elfwick and the Duck in USA Today.
ADDED: The other master of trolling on this issue.
ADDED: “Now, some additional facts on the greatest story in human history …”
June 12, 2015Peak Insanity
“Why, oh why, is
this happening
to us?” (The human species is too stupid to live.)
(Via.)
Worth it just for the Bedlamite euphemism for the economy — “the
capitalist sector”.
If you’ve not had enough of sucking upon a weeping psychotic eyeball yet —
(also from Dark Albert), there’s
this.
They’re never going to stop doubling-down. Probably a good time to start
thinking realistically about where ‘hitting bottom’ is going to lead.
July 28, 2015Appearances
The worst thing about
this, we’re
told by all responsible authorities, is what it looks like. (It
might upset people, in the wrong way.)
The scale of the attacks on women at the city’s central railway station
has shocked Germany. About 1,000 drunk and aggressive young men were
involved. […] City police chief Wolfgang Albers called it “a completely
new dimension of crime”.
The men were of Arab or North African appearance, he
said.
(XS emphasis.)
Beside Cologne, “Women were also targeted in Hamburg. … Some similar
attacks were reported in Stuttgart.”
However, there was no official confirmation that asylum seekers had
been involved in the violence. Commentators in Germany were quick to
urge people not to jump to conclusions.
It’s hard to imagine that anyone really believes the approved narratives
are going to hold together for much longer. The orchestrated
media-political conjuring operation is already stressed beyond its
functional tolerance.
(Additional links in the last Chaos Patch comment thread.)
ADDED: Reality bites.
ADDED: Among much noticing —
ADDED: The Master of Noticing is a little miffed. (More.)
January 6, 2016
CHAPTER FOUR - THOUGHT POLICE
Doors of Perception
It’s a simplification to conceive the Cathedral as a media apparatus. As
simplifications go, however, one could do far worse. Media are essential
to the Cathedral, even if by no means casually synonymous with it.
It is surely noteworthy that ‘the media’ have become singular, in much the
same way as ‘the United States’ have done. ‘They’ have turned into a
thing, and one that is still far from being confidently understood. Even
when subjectively identifying with a residual plurality, they cannot but
identify themselves with a unitary effectiveness.
While it would be asking far too much to expect the Cathedral to identify
itself as a central causal factor in a world going insane, it gets close.
NYmag
expresses
deep concern about the consequences of the news machine:
A terrifying jihadist group is conquering and butchering its way across
big swaths of Iraq and Syria. Planes are falling out of the sky on what
seems like a weekly basis. Civilians are being killed in massive numbers
in the Israel-Gaza conflict. Others are falling prey to Ebola in West
Africa. The world, in short, is falling apart.
[…]
That’s how it feels, at least, to those of us who sit at a blessed
remove from the death and destruction, but who are watching every bloody
moment of it via cable news and social media. It raises an important
question: In an age when we can mainline bad news 24/7 if we so choose,
what’s the psychological impact of all this exposure to tragedy at a
distance?
Drawing upon the work of Mary McNaughton-Cassill (a University of
Texas–San Antonio professor at the “leading researcher on the connection
between media consumption and stress”), it describes a process of
“negative-information overload” driven by market-incentivized
sensationalism, compounded by social media revolution, and prone to
poorly-understood tangles of psycho-media feedback. Since a story of this
kind consists primarily of the Cathedral talking to itself, with everyone
else listening in, we quickly learn that the ‘problem’ cashes out into
pessimistic disengagement from electoral politics and progressive
voluntarism. According to McNaughton-Cassill, negative news bombardment
produces “this malaise: ‘Everything’s kinda bad’ and ‘Why should I vote?
It’s not gonna help’ and ‘I could donate money, but there’s just gonna be
another kid who’s starving next week.’”
In addition to a burgeoning sense of helplessness, she said, cognitive
shortcuts triggered by the news can also lead us to gradually see the
world as a darker and darker place, chipping away at certain optimistic
tendencies. McNaughton-Cassill’s research suggests that that all things
being equal, if you ask people, regardless of their circumstances, to
evaluate what’s going around them — Do they think their neighbors are
good people? Do they think the local schools are solid? — “People always
say yes in their immediate setting.”
[…]
Zoom out a little, though, and people have less to go on. … “As soon as
you get out of your zone, most of your information’s from the news … and
the news by definition covers the extreme things.”
[…]
People could be forgiven for adopting a hell-in-a-handbasket stance
toward the rest of the world.
[…]
That’s a problem, because when people are led to believe things are
falling apart, it affects their decision-making and their politics —
whether or not their pessimism is warranted. We already know from
political-psychological research that
the more threatened people feel, the more likely they will be to
support right-wing policies. And people who believe in the concept of unmitigated evil
appear more likely
to support torture and other violent policies.
[…]
It’s hard to fully sketch out these mechanisms, of course. Could years
and years of exposure to negative news heighten your belief in a
Manichean world and in turn make you more reactionary?
As noted, there are some critical feedback circuits excluded (in
principal) from this analysis, in part to preserve the fundamental
architecture of the progressive historical narrative (“… on a broader
level there’s solid evidence — perhaps gathered most comprehensively by
Steven Pinker
…”). Media malfunction as core meltdown of Western Civilization, sucking
the world into hell, wouldn’t fit this story at all. Nevertheless, it’s
clearly creeping in around the edges, and something considerably more
drastic than standard information manipulation procedures seem to be
called for.
How can we fight back against the unnecessary coarsening of our outlook
that may be occurring every time we glance at one of our gadgets? The
simplest technique is … to “Just turn it off.” That is, take a break
from the news.
[…]
“You can’t change the externals,” she said. “You have to get some
control mentally.” What’s most important is “getting a handle on why you
get anxious and worried about things that probably aren’t going to
happen, or knowing what your triggers are.” The more you understand your
own reaction to the news, the easier it will be to shape your
news-consumption habits in an adaptive way.
If this sounds like subtle begging, it really kind of is. Afflicted by
incomprehensible cybernetic pathologies, the media system is failing in
its responsibility to screen you from reality, and now — quite desperately
— needs your help. You can’t any longer rely on propaganda to save you. In
fact, you have to assume that there’s a really good story out there that
the media is keeping from you. You have to “understand that you’re seeing
a lot of bad news not because the world is an inherently evil place, but
because news outlets — not to mention individual Twitter and Facebook
users — have lots of incentives to broadcast explosively negative news
stories.”
We interrupt this world historical nightmare to deliver an important
news flash — the media has gone insane. You have to protect yourself, or it will seem as if the whole global
order is falling apart into bloody chaos around your ears.
Overall, of course, it’s both unrealistic and undesirable to construct
bubbles that keep out the world’s bad news. But there’s a difference
between being informed and being obsessive, and it’s a line that’s very
easy to accidentally slide across in an age when there’s so much scary
information zipping around.
Scariest of all is the system of information itself, but it can’t quite
get that part of the story into coherent shape. By the time it does, the
world will have descended by another gyre. Experts now confirm that
throwing your TV set out of the window will help …
ADDED:
This classic
movie scene (suggested by Mr Archenemy) seems obviously on topic.
ADDED: “Social media – in this context, the most inappropriate of phrases –
has a new craze. Atrocity porn.”
August 13, 2014Cathedral Autophagy
Autophagy is spiraling into its cultural
moment right now. The
Ouroboros is our
sign. It’s cybernetic mythology, self-referential looping, and
auto-consuming process. There is no end to the ways the theme could be
currently pursued.
Simultaneously most comic, tragic, and prominent is the reflexive
perception that contemporary hegemonic power is being devoured by the
media. In
other words, the Cathedral is undergoing accelerated auto-cannibalization.
The news is eating itself.
The Hill
reports:
“I can see why a lot of folks are troubled,” Obama told a group of
donors gathered at a Democratic National Committee barbecue in Purchase,
N.Y. […] But the president said that current foreign policy crises
across the world are not comparable to the challenges the U.S. faced
during the Cold War. […] Acknowledging “the barbarity” of Islamist
militants and Russia “reasserting the notion that might means right,”
Obama, though, dismissed the notion that he was facing unprecedented
challenges. […] “The world’s always been messy … we’re just noticing now
in part because of social media,” he said, according to a White House
pool report. […] “If you watch the nightly news, it feels like the world
is falling apart” …
So the world’s supreme talking head is trying to talk us out of taking the
Apocalypse Show seriously.
Don’t listen to us, you’ll find it far too upsetting. If this is
getting repetitive, it’s due to the pattern. Catatonia is the final
prescription. We’ve clearly passed beyond irony into something altogether
more twisted. The intriguing syndrome
labeled
Horror autotoxicus seems to be ready for political-economic
application.
August 31, 2014Media ADHD
Richard Fernandez
asks
a question that has been nagging at a number of people: How did
this
stop being a story?
The death toll from the worst Ebola outbreak on record has reached
nearly 7,000 in West Africa, according to the World Health Organisation.
[…] The toll of 6,928 dead showed a leap of just over 1,200 since the
WHO released its previous report on Wednesday, according to a Reuters
news agency report. […] The UN health agency did not provide any
explanation for the abrupt increase, but the figures, published on its
website, appeared to include previously unreported deaths. […] … Just
over 16,000 people have been diagnosed with Ebola since the outbreak was
confirmed in the forests of remote southeastern Guinea in March,
according to the WHO data that covered the three hardest-hit countries.
…
Is it because the epidemic has remained geographically concentrated,
that’s expected to hold, and Sierra Leone (where cases are “soaring” with
the “country … reporting around 400 to 500 new cases each week for several
weeks”) has been written off? Or is the world media scared it had begun to
bore people?
As Anepigone
writes
(on an only tangentially related issue): “The Cathedral’s role is to
instruct us on what we should want to think about, not what we would
actually prefer to think about.”
Media systems aren’t even pretending to tell us what is happening anymore.
What we should think is happening is now the whole of the
narrative. Unless there’s a ‘teachable
moment‘,
there’s nothing.
ADDED: When it happens in Russia, it’s OK to notice it (in the mainstream
media) — “Television is at the core of the present political system.”
December 5, 2014War of the Worlds
I’d hold this back until Frightday if I had more impulse control. Via
VXXC, the original (Halloween
1938) Orson Welles War of the Worlds radio
broadcast. As an
experiment in abject public submission to media reality construction, it
takes some beating.
“There’s really nothing they won’t believe, is there?”
“Apparently not. Carry on …”
March 4, 2015Age of Independence
Don’t be distracted if (like me) you find the PUA antics ridiculous.
Clarey’s argument
here
is important — and even an essential jigsaw-puzzle piece.
Maximally compressed: Left Mind-Control strategies depend upon the
persistence of certain socio-economic realities that they are themselves
profoundly subverting. It’s impossible, at one and the same time, to
threaten people with expulsion from the mainstream economy and also
destroy this same economy. Yet that paradox is where the SJW army makes
its home. The consequence: the perverse production of a type of “man who
has nothing to lose, and therefore nothing the SJW’s can threaten.”
The SJWs aren’t doing this on their own. A range of technological and
economic developments are converging on the creation of a new,
collapse-phase rugged individualism. The Left call it the ‘precariat‘ and insist that ‘neoliberalism’ is to blame. It doesn’t really matter,
as far as Clarey’s point is concerned. The essential thing is the the
hostage-holding presumption of SJW activism is not a reliable social
fixture, and their own activities are hastening its disappearance.
The final irony Clarey points to, is the creation of a new entrepreneurial
sector that lives, precisely, from the depredations of the SJWs. Their
attacks constitute the basic pipeline of cultural raw-materials off which
this little group survives — at once a source of content and a publicity
machine.
While those on the dissident right discuss the Exit question, SJWs are
busy pushing us off the gangplank. There’s only one attitude that makes
any sense to those already bobbing among the waves: “Come on in, the
water’s fine.”
Note: ‘SJW’ is not being used here as a slur, but only in its technical
sense. It means something like ‘a Red Guard of the Cathedral’.
August 13, 2015Visual Pwnage
(1) 1972
Policy objective: Close down US support for the South Vietnamese
regime.
Policy debate: Who cares?
Decisive mind-control tool:

(The little girl in the center is Kim Phuc Phan Thi if you need a
Google-key.)
(2) 1991
Policy objective: Close down destruction of the Saddam military.
Policy debate: Who cares?
Decisive mind-control tool:

(The Highway of Death
at
Wikipedia.)
(3) 2016
Policy objective: Close down resistance to MENA mass immigration.
Policy debate: Who cares?
Decisive mind-control tool:
“Journalism.”
For close on half a century they’ve known there’s a picture that will get
people to think what they’re told. ‘Journalism’ is about ‘finding’ it.
August 23, 2016Linkage
This type of image used to be the Hollywood icon for florid psychosis.
Now
…
May 1, 2017Mau-Mauing
Andrew Fox
discusses
the principal political weapon of the Western Left, and its mobilization
against political incorrectness in science fiction:
Coincidentally, the same years which have witnessed the emergency of
speech codes on many campuses have also witnessed an accelerated
symbiosis between the pro SF community and academia (in that greater
numbers of SF/fantasy writers have as day jobs teaching at the post-high
school level, and SF literature and film has become an increasingly
respectable and popular subject of university courses). … For many
individuals under the age of forty who have been through the university
system, mau-mauing may seem normative, or at least unremarkable. They
have seen it at work through divestment campaigns of various kinds
(divestment from Israeli companies or U.S. companies which provide goods
to Israel which might be used in security operations against
Palestinians, or from companies involved in fossil fuel production, or
from companies connected to certain figures active on the Right, such as
the Koch brothers) and through shout-downs and other disruptions of
speakers invited to campus whose backgrounds or viewpoints are contrary
to those favored by student activists.
(via)
It’s deeply disturbing, as pretty much everything is these days. (Those
who know anything about China’s Cultural Revolution will find their
pattern recognition centers sparking up.)
ADDED: Mau-Mauing is the perfect illustration of the fact that political
‘voice’ and ‘freedom of speech’, far from being near synonyms, are closer
to antonyms.
June 22, 2013Peak Racism?
The
witch–craze
seems to be running out of juice, according to
some
thought-provoking Ngram data organized by Brad Trun.
The charge of “Racist!” is losing its sting as its overzealous hurlers
increasingly render it farcical. “Racist” is, for the first time since
the neologism’s inception 80 years ago, starting to fall out of favor.
Zooming in on the post–1930 period in Google Ngram Viewer and
eliminating smoothing reveals that “racist” references topped out as the
calendar switched to the new millennium.
My welcome news receptors are so corroded, that I can’t help wondering:
what’s wrong with this story?
(In other news, Peak African is still some way
off. Caplan will no doubt be thrilled. Does anybody sensible think that a
billion Nigerians by 2100 sounds like a future that might work? It’s
probably a racist question, but you have to do what you can for dying
traditions.)
ADDED: “We’ve set up a system where the world’s most easily offended people
get to decide what’s offensive and what’s not …”
August 11, 2013Hate
The SPLC honors Richard Lynn with a place in the
stocks. (He’s a “white supremacist” apparently, despite thinking the future of
human civilization lies in the Far East. (*yawn*))
(via @intelligenceres)
ADDED: The dike is creaking.
March 4, 2014Wacky Races
The demented evil of this is pretty funny:
My positive spin on Suey Park is that she’s almost unique in her role as
an agent of racial desensitization. The only way you don’t lose to move
like this is by toughening up fast.
ADDED: So what is this joke saying?
Be aware, you will be socially punished for noticing reality.
It’s pure Sailer (but dramatized for laughs). With enemies like this, I’m
guessing we can close down the propaganda unit.
ADDED: Further down the rabbit hole … (via @CBLangille)
ADDED: Some (vaguely) related intersectionalist comedy.
April 19, 2014Diversitocracy Crisis
It’s not
about
white people.
June 20, 2014Wayback Privilege
Futurism is way
too
white male. The retrofutural Left-Molbuggian argument clinches it:
Time travel … is another thing that is a distinctly white male
preoccupation — going back in time, for marginalized groups, means
giving up more of their rights.
(Adopted from
here, which is
funny, despite the pitiful pandering.)
“Don’t anomalize my Zeitgeist bro!”
August 1, 2015Quote note (#235)
The
implausible
telos of progressive race politics:
It is certainly possible to get to a place where jobs at Facebook are
allocated by global demographics, with the requisite number of
Aboriginals and so forth. South Africa, with BEE, is rapidly approaching
this point. If you want to make all the present programmers at Facebook
racists, it’s an excellent way to proceed, but I really don’t think it
will lead to your uniform, perfect and beige dream world. (Not sure if
you’re familiar with
present conditions
in the Rainbow Nation.)
The idea that the progressive race religion is something that can be
productively reasoned about ended for many of us at
precisely the moment NRx began. Still, trying — or pretending to
try — to argue optimistically about it could (perhaps) remain worthwhile
as an experiment, even without the slightest realistic chance that it
could work.
Again, I’m not here to get you to agree with me; I know that’s
impossible. What I’m curious [about] is whether you can at least agree
to disagree.
That doesn’t seem much more realistic (so it’s probably an experiment — or
cultural tactic — of some different kind.)
ADDED: “Of course, it’s incredibly important to keep diversity issues at the
forefront of everyone’s awareness …”
April 1, 2016Race Talk
Why enter into the edgy territory of race and IQ discussion,
asks
John McWhorter, even if the most distressingly inegalitarian conclusions
turn out to be true? “What, precisely, would we gain from discussing this
particular issue?”
Robert Verbruggen
gets
to the critical response, eventually. The topic has been made inescapable
because the left is ever-increasingly race-obsessed and “continue[s] to
treat racial gaps as a moral emergency” based on a specific, positively
egalitarian, and extremely implausible universal-anthropological theory.
Challenging that is the only way to moderate the social self-flagellation.
(So however uncomfortable this ‘conversation’ becomes, it isn’t going to
stop.)
More here (via), hitting maximum relevance about 40 minutes in.
ADDED:
ADDED: “Does the possibility [sic] that [East] Asians are smarter than they
are reduce whites to desperation and misery?” — This needs to be noted
more often.
July 5, 2017Evo Psych Ward
An utterly compelling tangle of arguments
at The Center for
Evolutionary Psychology, where the intersection of science and society is
ripped open by controversy over Kevin MacDonald and his relation to
Darwinian biorealism. Evo Psych star John Tooby makes some important
points about the politics of denunciation, bringing the distinct spectra
of political allegiance and sociological genetics into complex collision.
Where do the implications of Hamiltonian inclusive fitness lead? (HBD
doesn’t quite come into focus, but it haunts the discussion from the
edges.)
For a sense of how murky this gets:
For those who are interested in carefully tracing out the dauntingly
complex relationships between biology, brain, mind, and culture, this is
all very familiar terrain. In the mid-1970’s, for example, Gould,
Lewontin, and a few others injected heavy-handed moralizing, easy
denunciation, the attribution of dubious intellectual genealogies, and
an ad hominem attack-style into scientific debate in an
effort to settle intellectual disputes by other means. One belief they
cultivated assiduously was the myth that leading evolutionary scholars
were ideologically motivated right-wingers. Due to my empiricist
inclinations, I was the only person I knew who actually gathered data on
this widely credited claim. The results were what common sense would
lead you to expect: Evolutionists included communists, ex-communists, a
wide array of non-doctrinaire Marxists, democratic socialists,
anarchists, feminists, a Black Panther Party member (recently joined by
a second), antiwar activists, many
New Republic liberals, some apoliticals, and a neocon –
a distribution (for better or worse) indistinguishable from any randomly
sampled selection of faculty at leading research universities at the
time. […] The most notorious tactic of Gould, Lewontin, and their allies
during the early years was their attempt to drag the ideas they opposed
under by manufacturing links to various repugnant doctrines. One moral
problem with ignoring truth-value in employing such tactics is that
these socially constructed links pull in both directions. The key
theoretical breakthroughs central to sociobiology (inclusive fitness
theory, parental investment theory, and so on) turned out to elegantly
explain large sets of observations, and so went on to win the debates
within the technical journals in evolutionary biology. Although
Lewontin’s and Gould’s opposition to the most significant innovations in
evolutionary biology over the last 30 years is nothing more than a
quaint intellectual footnote within evolutionary biology, the fruits of
their mythologizing live on outside of it. They live on in the spurious
legitimacy that they gave to the netherworld of marginal scholarship (of
which MacDonald is a typical example) that embraces the doctrines that
the “moralists” were putatively fighting. More significantly, they did
succeed in tarring the revolution in evolutionary biology in the eyes of
nonbiologists, together with any serious attempt to think through the
relationship between culture, human nature, and human evolution. This
has perpetuated the antiquated status quo, during which social
scientists have remained wary of the possibility of scientifically
mapping human nature, and have remained almost totally ignorant of
modern evolutionary biology.
ADDED:
MacDonald responds.
July 14, 2014Misbehaving Science
Comedy gold
at
New Scientist — it really needs to be read to be believed. Kate
Douglas reviews Aaron Panofsky’s
book
Misbehaving Science: Controversy and the development of behavior
genetics, rising to a glorious crescendo with a restatement of Lewontin’s
Fallacy
(without giving any indication of recognizing it). If this book and review
are panic symptoms, which seems highly plausible, Neo-Lysenkoism has to be
sensing the winter winds of change. In any case, it somehow all went wrong
for them:
The founding principles of social responsibility suffered, usurped by a
responsibility to the discipline itself and to scientific freedom. And
controversy bred controversy as the prospect of achieving notoriety
attracted new talent. In short, the field became weak and poorly
integrated, with low status, limited funding, and publicity the main
currency of academic reward. This, according to Panofsky, is why it is
afflicted with “persistent, ungovernable controversy” …
As a guide to what regional Cathedral breakdown looks like, this works
quite well.
July 15, 2014Quote note (#180)
A usefully depressing
account
by Paul Gottfried of Conservative Inc. and the shifting boundaries of
hate-think:
Well into the 1990s, it was almost universally accepted
by the scientific community, except for Stalinoid propagandist Leon Kamin and the perpetually PC
Stephen Jay Gould, that human IQ varied significantly, that IQ tests
could measure these differences, and that up to 85 percent of
intelligence may be hereditary. In an enlightening work
The IQ Controversy
(1988) Stanley Rothman and Jay Snydermann document the premises that the
overwhelming majority of scientists, biologists, and psychologists fully
accept the axioms that a significant part (indeed well over one half) of
intelligence is hereditary, and that general intelligence is
testable.
(No longer, at least as far as its official gate-keepers are concerned.)
Western Civilization has been disgraced indelibly by its craven surrender
of all intellectual integrity on this topic. The degree to which it will
be despised, eventually, for what it has become almost certainly exceeds
its power of historical imagination.
August 27, 2015Autophagic Leftism
Oh come, come, this kind of entertainment deserves a real
link:
For these [New Atheist] thinkers, Islam is obviously a bad and
destructive system of thought. Yet billions of people spend their whole
lives trying to live according to these stupid teachings, generation
after generation. What’s worse, in the modern world, they have ready
access to knowledge about the superior system of secular modernity, but
they persist in embracing a crappy religion. At a certain point, you
have to wonder if there is simply something wrong with such people,
right? Perhaps their reasoning capacities are hampered in some way.
Indeed, one begins to wonder, could it perhaps be something … inborn?
[…] Basically, declaring oneself to be on the avant-garde of “reason” is
always going to lead to racism if you take it to its logical conclusion.
Thankfully for the mental health of the “party of reason,” however,
their self-regard and in-group loyalty keep them from following the
dictates of reason on this matter, because it would make it seem like
maybe their empty gesture at a contentless “reason” had accidentally
made them into bad people.
We’ve come a long
way
baby.
August 4, 2014IQ Crime-Stop
‘Eldritch’
comments
at Scott Alexander’s place:
I think the actual argument against IQ is this:
1. Intelligence is a measure of your value as a person in a wide range
of situations.
2. IQ supposedly measures intelligence.
3. IQ may not be significantly changeable.
4. Therefore, this test lets you measure the innate aptitude and this
value of a person.
5. Therefore, this could be used to prove I am inherently less valuable
than other people.
6. This makes me REALLY UNCOMFORTABLE.
7. Therefore, IQ is wrong.
I’m pretty sure this is the real argument against IQ, and most
arguments against it are simply attempts to find arguments that fit this
conclusion.
My only significant quibble with this construction concerns point #5,
which massively underestimates the predominance of pathological altruism /
social terror in the IQ ‘debate’. The possibility that IQ measurements
could make other people seem in some awkward way inferior is a
far more powerful deterrent than anything it could say about oneself. (The
probability that someone is going to say something stupid about IQ has a
striking positive correlation with IQ.)
The
post
itself makes a (wholly superfluous) strong argument for the robust realism
of the g concept. If you’re the kind of crime-stopped idiot who
needs persuading about it, you’re almost certainly beyond persuasion. The
relevant fork in the road has already been passed. Rationalists find it
strangely hard to grasp that simple fact. They’re nice that way.
ADDED: Dear Prudence.
August 12, 2014In Our Genes
That there is a genetic contribution to
IQ ‘cognitive performance’
has been theoretically obvious for as long as these concepts have existed.
Now it has been empirically
confirmed. The basic argument should be over now (but I’m not holding my breath).
As this type of information becomes a flood, the
dike
of ideologically-motivated obscurantism has — eventually — to break. Watch
for the smart rats to start jumping off first.
September 10, 2014Shrunken Brains
Gregory Cochran brusquely
dispatches
what might be the most incompetent piece of ‘scientific’ reasoning in
recent years (although the competition for that honor gets ever more
intense). The discovery — brains of poor children are statistically
smaller. The insane leftist inference passed into the public realm as a
logical conclusion: poverty shrinks brains. I’m not going to
insult XS readers by laboring over the mistake here (Cochran does it
succinctly enough, and with appropriate biting contempt). It’s utterly
horrifying, from any remotely objective viewpoint, that such blatant
stupidity could ever borrow the robes of science, even momentarily. This
is what collapse looks like (and most probably our brains are shrinking).
(I was aiming to do some kind of April Fool’s thing here today. Sadly,
this isn’t one.)
ADDED: Thompson patiently picks through the mess. “The paper and the comments
will lead readers to believe that lack of money is stunting the brains of
poorer children. This is possible, but not proved by this study because of
obvious genetic confounders.”
April 1, 2015Mental Gymnastics
Ignoring Sailer*, who is — of course — problematic, how about
The
Atlantic?
The statistics are hard to ignore. [Kenya, a] medium-size country of 41
million dominates the world in competitive running. Pick any
long-distance race. You’ll often find that up to about 70 or 80 percent
of its winners since the late 1980s, when East African nutrition and
technology started catching up with the West, have been from Kenya.
Since 1988, for example, 20 of the 25 first-place men in the Boston
Marathon have been Kenyan. … Of the
top 25 male record holders
for the 3000-meter steeplechase, 18 are Kenyan. Seven of the last 8
London marathons were won by Kenyans, and the sole outlier was from
neighboring Ethiopia. Their record in the Olympic men’s marathon is more
uneven, having placed in the top three in only four of the last six
races. Still, not bad for one country. And even more amazing is that
three-fourths of the Kenyan champions come from an ethnic minority of
4.4. million, or 0.06% of global population.
“Hard to ignore”? Oh, come
on!
The
first study, “A Level Playing Field? Media Constructions of Athletics, Genetics,
and Race,” examines news media coverage implying that genetic
differences lead particular racial groups to succeed more often at
sports, and focuses on how that belief shows up within journalism.
Collaborating with University of Connecticut doctoral student Devon
Goss, Matthew W. Hughey researched nearly 24,000 English-language
newspaper articles across the globe from 2003-2014. Among the articles
that discussed race, genetics and athletics, Hughey and Goss found that
nearly 55 percent of these media narratives uncritically parroted and
perpetuated the belief that African-descended groups excel in athletics,
such as sprinting, because of genetic racial differences — despite the
research debunking that belief.
Who are you going to believe, the media-approved ‘debunking’ or the lying
sports statistics?
*There’s a Sailer link in the Atlantic piece (naughty), which — oddly —
goes to
this. (I guess that’s one solution to the “hard to ignore” problem.)
September 29, 2015Vaguely Smart
Don Surber
recalls
a classic masterpiece of liberal good-think fluff (from 2008):
Historian Michael Beschloss: Yeah. Even aside from the
fact of electing the first African American President and whatever one’s
partisan views this is a guy whose IQ is off the charts — I mean you
cannot say that he is anything but a very serious and capable leader and
— you know — you and I have talked about this for years…
Imus: Well. What is his IQ?
Historian Michael Beschloss: … our system doesn’t allow
those people to become President, those people meaning people THAT smart
and THAT capable
Imus: What is his IQ?
Historian Michael Beschloss: Pardon?
Imus: What is his IQ?
Historian Michael Beschloss: Uh. I would say it’s
probably — he’s probably the smartest guy ever to become President.
Imus: That’s not what I asked you. I asked you what his
IQ was.
Historian Michael Beschloss: You know that I don’t know
and I’d have to find someone with more expertise…
Imus: You don’t know.
Thanks, as always, for telling us (hazily) what we’re supposed to think.
(Via.)
January 19, 2016Trolls Explained
If, like this blog, you have been benighted enough to understand Internet
trolls as abusive
irritants, masters of
disguise,
satirists, or
even amusing pets,
you apparently need a good talking to. Farhad Manjoo writing in
(surprise!) The New York Times has a lesson you need to hear.
Trolling, it turns out, has a very simple explanation — it is exactly
identical to a Political Incorrectness. To be a troll is in fact simply
not being a progressive.
Citing Doctor Whitney Phillips, of Humboldt State University, and a troll
expert (who has written a
book
on the subject), Manjoo illuminates the phenomenon unambiguously:
If there’s one thing the history of the Internet has taught us, it’s
that trolls will be difficult to contain because they really reflect
base human society in all its ugliness.
Trolls find a way.
“It’s not a question of whether or not we’re winning the war on
trolling, but whether we’re winning the war on misogyny, or racism, and
ableism and all this other stuff,” Dr. Phillips said. “Trolling is just
a symptom of those bigger problems.”
As with so very many other things, there’s no solution to trolling short
of the absolute triumph of progressive across the whole of the earth. This
is an argument crying out for an
#AAA tag like no other I’ve
ever seen. (I’d link the Twitter
hashtag,
but it’s deeply confusing.)
ADDED: It’s a jungle out there.
ADDED: I’ll throw in the T-shirt slogan here for free —
Resistance is
futile
trolling
August 15, 2014CWoT
The Cathedralist War on Trolling is limbering up fast. Just a few days
ago, we had
this.
(Paraphrased: to resist the Cathedral is trolling).
Now
the follow up (“Trolls are like terrorist cells” — literally).
The Duck does the
integration:
That escalated quickly.
They’re everywhere and even if one gets eliminated, there’s two more to
take its place (that also applies to HYDRA). But I feel like this is the
point we’re at now. That’s sad and terrible, but it’s the truth. I used
to think turning comments off was *the* solution, and while I do think
comments have become useless, and largely a hotbed for hate and racism,
turning them off is only going to drive the poison to even more public
forums like Twitter and Facebook, where a hateful or factually corrupt
tweet or status update can spread like a disease across the globe and
turn supposed rational human beings into muckrakers of misinformation,
hate, and other dark things.
August 21, 2014Twitter wants to die
Evidently.
(So GAB it is, I guess.)
September 22, 2016Algorithmic Diversitocracy
Here‘s the anti-Tay.
One way or another, robotically-enhanced coercive enstupidation is coming.
(At least the machines will only be pretending to be sunk in idiocy.)
Via:
This
is also relevant.
October 11, 2016
CHAPTER FIVE - ECONOMICS AND POLICY
Signs of Progress
The more sophisticated animals become, the worse they get at connecting
with reality. As they cephalize, and socialize, stories substitute for
reflexes, and the survival value of a story owes almost nothing to its
factuality. Believing what everyone else does, or what makes you feel
good, counts for vastly more. Wherever it is that discussion leads, it is
only very rarely, and accidentally, in the direction of reality.
Science begins with the realization that stories aren’t to be trusted,
even – or especially – if they sound credible, conform to prior
intuitions, and readily attain social approval. Since narrative
satisfaction is the great deceiver, science reaches beyond language into
the vast frigid tracts of mathematical signs, stripped clean of all moral
and emotional significance. Hardening itself against the temptation to see
faces in the clouds, or hear voices from the heavens, it digs determinedly
into the test-bed of numbers and quantitative signals, where seductive
words are led to die.
Economics has never been a science, but economic behavior, and even
theory, has been able to avail itself of a measure of leverage against
story-telling. Its great resource in this regard has been the price
system, expressed in ‘meaningless’ quantities (without immediate narrative
significance) which enable economic calculation to sustain a posture of
ideological indifference. An accountant who tells a story is a bad
accountant, and most probably a criminal, whilst an entrepreneur fixated
upon a story of how things ‘must be’ is subject to market-Darwinian
nemesis. That, at least, is how
laissez-faire hard money capitalism once roughly worked, as
attested for instance by the indignation of Charles Dickens, who insisted
upon the right of moral, political, and religious story-telling in the
midst of a process that systematically disdained it.
Things have progressed incalculably since then, in a direction that could
be confidently described as ‘Dickensian’ if that adjective had not already
been settled in its highly-effective polemical purpose. That ‘the Big
Story’ (BS) would triumph over calculative Scroogean realism was perhaps
entirely predictable, but the near-metaphysical comprehensiveness of its
victory – and its revenge — was less easy to anticipate. When attempting
to gauge this progress, money is the best indicator, or rather, the
destruction of money as an indicator is the most telling sign.
Under the conditions of hard money industrial capitalism, progress follows
two, rigorously accounted tracks. Most notoriously, it is measured as a
process of accumulation, or the amassing of fortunes through profitable
business activity. Economic intelligence is socially dispersed along with
the multitude of fortunes, with each unit of capital accompanied by its
own (Scroogish) accounting function, weighing revenues against outlays,
and estimating the viability of continued operation. This intelligence
does not lend itself to convenient or reliable public aggregation.
Accompanying the multiplicity of private progressions (and regressions),
there is a second track measuring social advance in strictly quantitative,
meaningless, and unambiguous terms. On this track, technical and
organizational improvements in business activity overspill private
accounts, and take the form of public ‘externalities’. Under any monetary
system competent to register reality, such general social advances are
expressed as falling prices, cost reduction, or
deflation. (A typically insightful Zero Hedge post on the topic
can be found
here.)
The importance of this point is difficult to over-emphasize, especially
since it directly contradicts our carefully fabricated neo-Dickensian
common sense:
Deflation! Isn’t that kind of like fascism or something?
Deflation can certainly represent a type of socio-economic misfortune,
under specific conditions. During business cycle downturns, for
instance, it can reflect fire-sale asset or inventory reductions, driven
by, and exacerbating, credit crises. The seriousness and typicality of
such cases is strongly asserted in the dominant (neo-Dickensian) story of
the Great Depression. It is worth noting, however, that even under these
circumstances – at the worst – the first-order effect of deflation is to
generate a spontaneous increase in affluence, or spending power. When life
is at its toughest, it gets cheaper to live.
In the hard money world, chronic mild deflation simply
is social progress. The two concepts are effectively
indistinguishable. Gentle deflation is the invisible hand out, giving
everybody a little more of almost everything, year by year, as it
spontaneously distributes a fraction of the ‘social surplus’, or public
dividend on rising productivity. Even in today’s radically progressed
world of ruined money, the output of the consumer electronics industry
still manages to exhibit the deflationary trends that have been
obliterated elsewhere (so next time you buy a gizmo, don’t forget to feel
appropriately oppressed.)
What the hell in heavens happened? How did modernity’s
metallo-monetary senses get turned off, rapturing Scrooge into a Christmas
Carol, and eclipsing industrial reality? One obvious neo-Dickensian go-to
guy for that is William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925), a politician whose
multi-dimensional war against reality – truly astounding in its
consistency – represents enthusiasm for the Big Story (or ‘social gospel’)
at its most uncompromised. Either Bryan’s anti-Darwinism (the Scopes
trial) or his ardent prohibitionism (campaigning for the 18th amendment)
would have sufficed to earn him a place in the historical record as a hero
of the BS (‘evangelical’ or ‘progressive’) State, but his most enduring
legacy rests upon the speech he delivered on July 9, 1896, to the
Democratic National Convention in Chicago, in which he declared – as if to
Scrooge himself – that “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor
this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”
This is a declaration that is sublimed to progressive universality through
the elimination of context. Embedded within the late 19th century debates
on bimetallism (price-fixing of gold-silver exchange rates), its present
implications are significantly diluted, or at least complicated, by
questions about the financial responsibility of central authorities,
creditor-debtor class warfare, global economic integration, agrarian-urban
tensions, and (East-West) regional politics in the USA. Yet,
fundamentally, it can be recognized as ‘Dickensian’: the passionate
denunciation of a neutral criterion for economic reality, precisely for
its neutrality, or indifference to Big Story moral-historical narrative.
Gold is cold. It measures without judgment. Between damnation and
salvation it demonstrates no preference or inclination.
Concretely, gold was registering, in economic terms, the social upheaval
of American industrial urbanization. Mechanization of agriculture implied
falling food prices, ruination of small farmers, and rural depopulation,
during a sustained process of massive disruption whose miseries were only
exceeded by the socio-economic revitalization in its wake. In its
distribution and in its accounting function, gold facilitated the
depreciation of rural labor, the bankruptcy of misallocated businesses,
and the empowerment of concentrated industrial capital in the nation’s
rising urban centers. Bryan articulated the views of those at the sharpest
edge of this shift, who found the messenger culpable for the message, the
senses guilty for the scene: “If thine eye offends thee pluck it out”
(Matthew 18:9). (Even though Bryan lost all three of his presidential
elections bids, we’re all totally plucked.)
To make of money a vehicle of moral purpose, rather than a neutral
registry of fact, is to make the crossing from liberalism and progress as
they were once understood (dynamic industrialism), to the progressive
liberalism of today (political evangelism). If money can save us (through
‘demand management’), as the Keynesians insist, then its politicization is
a moral imperative, whose neglect is a sin of omission. The senses are
transformed into story-tellers. Shut the windows, and listen to the
Christmas Carol. It’s progress (honestly).
February 7, 2012Economies of Deceit
Social organizations grow ever larger, and resist disintegration, due to
economies of scale. There are disproportionate benefits to being large,
sufficient to over-compensate for the associated disadvantages, to support
expansion, and to fund the suppression of fission. Like every trend
reinforced by positive nonlinearities, large-scale social formations
accentuate the gradient of time, realizing a ratchet mechanism, through
‘network effects’. In this way, they contribute not only to the content of
history, but also to its shape.
When the fundamental deformation of history was evidently attributable to
scale economies, it was only natural to speak primarily of Leviathan — the
seizure of historical time by the gigantic. It might therefore be
considered a significant symptom — of something — that a substitute term
now seems more persuasively applicable. Leviathan remains vast, and
growing, but it is more exactly specified as the Cathedral,
because its principal ratchet mechanism owes less to sheer magnitude than
to a mastery of deceit.
Deceit is nothing new, in matters of power, or
any other, but it is open to innovation. A state religion that pretends to
be the negation of religion is something new, as is
propaganda
in its strict sense. There is no precedent for an intolerant, precisely
coded system of belief, trending to a totalitarian form, whilst presenting
itself as inevitable progress towards general disillusionment.
Economies of deceit, like those of scale, draw historical momentum from
the fact that they are profoundly automatized. No one decided that
large-scale social organizations should be advantaged. Similarly,
the revolutionary efficiency of deceit was never a point of
deliberation. Deceit works, due to contingencies of deep evolution. More
specifically, it works because propaganda machinery was never a factor in
the archaic human environment, so that stimulus sensitivity was never
provided with the opportunity to adapt defensively in respect to it.
The total power of deceit can be understood most clearly when examined
backwards, from its final destination, which is shared with the entire
utilitarian sphere. At the end there is the wire-head, the social
and technological destination of direct neurological rewards,
where the message “I have received what I want” has been divorced from all
real acquisition or accomplishment. Do you want this thing? Or do you want
the feeling that you have this thing? The latter can be strengthened,
sharpened, and in every way subjectively perfected. It is also,
given suitable historical conditions, vastly cheaper to deliver. Hence,
the economy of deceit.
For those paying attention, the entire structure of economic thought and
policy switched onto this track roughly a century ago. The demetalization
of money is the most obvious indicator, trending towards a pure signal of
wealth, entirely disconnected from the extravagance of physical reality.
Keynesianism, in its essence, is wire-head economics, focusing on the
policy question:
how do we best deliver the stim? The idea that growth of the real
economy might be the best route to this goal marks its proponent out as a
hopeless crank, entirely out of touch with the recent development of the
discipline. What matters is the wealth effect, delivered in
carefully calibrated jolts, down the wire. (I’ve tried to thrash this out
before.)
Gradually, but inexorably, propaganda swallow everything. All
macroeconomic aggregates — GDP, inflation, capital stock … — tend to
senseless garbage, because their only robust anchor point is
Cathedral-political: what can we make you feel? The latest evidence is telling. It is time, apparently, to
definitively break with archaic questions of economic production, and
instead to work solely with the macroeconomic garbage data, in
order for it to tell us that
we’re richer than we think we are.
You can’t make this s%&t up. Yes we can!
July 28, 2013Race Science
Race, science, and pseudo-science … it’s complicated.
Radish presents a blood-chilling review
essay
on the subject, which isn’t to be missed (whatever your priors). As might
be expected, it leads to a discussion of crazed fascist experimentation on
human guinea pigs (aka ‘pajama ferrets’):
… perhaps you were wondering where I’m going with this. Well, here’s a
hint: in 2012, experimental psychologists, psychiatric neuroscientists,
and even a pair of “practical ethicists” put their heads together and
came up with an honest-to-God
cure for racism.
You could say the argument was over, if there had been an argument.
(Meanwhile, it’s probably best not to put yourself at risk by noticing
this
(from
here))
February 2, 2014Suicide by Science
The progressive end game is for the very category of ‘enemy’ to be
techno-scientifically annihilated. Emile Bruneau has the
Zeitgeist
good, and he’s determined to promote it:
“I wanted the research I was doing to match the stuff I was thinking
about,” he says. “And I just felt more and more that the most relevant
level of analysis for generating social change was the psychological
level.”
The goal is to put an end to this sort of thing:
Evidence of the empathy gap abounds: in political discourse, across
daily headlines, even in the simple act of watching a movie. “People
will cry for the suffering of one main character,” Bruneau pointed out.
“But then cheer for the slaughter of dozens of others.” The observation
reminded me of watching “Captain Phillips” in a packed theater at
Lincoln Center, of how much people applauded when the Somali pirates —
whose lives back home had been portrayed as dire — were killed. They
were the bad guys. Never mind that they had barely reached manhood or
that their families were desperate and starving. Never mind that some
were reluctant to turn to piracy in the first place.
The Kingdom cometh. Anybody without serious plans to get the hell out now
better be resigning themselves to the mandatory-compassion Cathedral chip.
“I get that these are complicated problems,” [Bruneau] told me. “I get
that there isn’t going to be any one magic solution. But if you trace
even the biggest of these conflicts down to its roots, what you find are
entrenched biases, and these sort-of calcified failures of empathy. So I
think no matter what, we have to figure out how to root that out.”
This is the
Bernays
of the 21st century. Let no one say they weren’t warned.
March 25, 2015Unspoken Agendas
Zombie
proposes
a key to contemporary American politics:
White liberals despise black people and can’t admit it. This is
smart conservative jiu jitsu rather than anything remotely
neoreactionary, but as a wedge to lever things apart, it has some
intriguing potential. The central claim of a carefully-elaborated
argument:
White progressives believe that black people are too dumb to make
rational decisions on their own and too uncouth to behave civilly. So
the progressive urge is to heap rules upon rules to control blacks and
render them harmless to themselves and others. At the same time,
progressives are terrified of being perceived as racist. So they hit
upon a solution: Make rules which restrict everyone‘s
freedoms, even though the progressives are actually targeting
African-Americans. The collateral damage in this cynical equation —
law-abiding citizens of all ethnicities — erroneously assume that the
intrusive rules are aimed at them. But they’re missing the point:
Progressives don’t enjoy restricting their own freedoms along with
everyone else’s, but can conceive of no other legal mechanism to deal
with what they see as misbehaving blacks while still appearing to be
race-neutral.
ADDED: PJM apparently going all-in with this meme — “But [Obama and Kerry] do
— and here’s the irony in Obama’s case — have the traditional white man’s
view of that same Arab world — to wit, Arabs are crazy and primitive.”
We’re the true anti-racists!
March 16, 2014Displacement
Steven Sailer makes
room
for a smidgen of gentle cynicism about the economic driver behind the
Obama Administration’s “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” initiative:
Clearly, racial justice demands forcing suburbs/exurbs to subsidize
affordable housing to encourage blacks to move to more convenient
locations currently dominated by evil white racists, such as, perhaps,
Murrieta, Hemet, Coachella, Twentynine Palms, and Hesperia. […]
Seriously, sixty years ago, “urban renewal” was all the rage, although
cynics joked that cities, in effect, were attempting to engage in “Negro
removal.” […] Nowadays, everybody who is anybody wants to move back into
the city, so white progressives have become obsessed with exposing all
those vicious racists in the suburbs and exurbs, and using disparate
impact thinking to force them to take more blacks from the city. […]
It’s only a coincidence that this would open up more prime urban real
estate for gentrification, right?
There can be little doubt that it’s a low tolerance for hypocrisy, beyond
anything, that pushes people into the crime-think zone. A cheerful
acceptance that evangelical political correctness is entirely compatible
with profitable ethnic-clearing exercises — perhaps even a crucial tool in
this regard — would make it wholly unnecessary to ever make those awkward,
socially-taboo remarks. It’s not as if anyone is going to be called out
about it (except by the Sailers of this world, who’ve been carefully
locked-up in the muffled cell). There’s not even any need to be a hick
Republican about the whole business. Clearly, the left wing of the
Democratic Party is the place from which to really clean up. Simply
recognize that words are a perfectly empty social ritual, designed by the
Holy Zeitgeist for the public expression of convenient tribal
emotions, and all the confusion goes away. Dollars follow, and life is
beautiful.
We can laugh (darkly), as Sailer does, but that’s most probably a
maladaptive relic. There’s certainly plenty of laughter to go around on
the other side.
July 18, 2015Aletheia
Erik Falkenstein makes a lot of important points in
this
commentary on Thomas Piketty (via
Isegoria). The whole post is highly recommended.
To pick up on just one of Falkenstein’s arguments here, he explains:
Most importantly for [Piketty’s] case is the fact that because marginal
taxes, and inheritance taxes, were so high, the rich had a much
different incentive to hide income and wealth. He shows marginal income
and inheritance tax rates that are the exact inverse of the
capital/income ratio of figures, which is part of his argument that
raising tax rates would be a good thing: it lowers inequality. Those
countries that lowered the marginal tax rates the most saw the biggest
increases in higher incomes (p. 509). Perhaps instead of thinking
capital went down, it was just reported less to avoid confiscatory
taxes? Alan Reynolds
notes
that many changes to the tax code in the 1980s that explain the rise in
reported wealth and income irrespective of the actual change in wealth
an income in that decade, and one can imagine all those loopholes and
inducements two generations ago when the top tax rates were above 90%
(it seems people can no better imagine their grandparents sheltering
income than having sex, another generational conceit).
The much-demonized ‘neoliberal’ tax regimes introduced in the 1980s
disincentivized capital income concealment. (Falkenstein makes an extended
defense of this point.) In consequence, apparent inequality rose rapidly,
as such revenues came out of hiding (ἀλήθεια) into public awareness / public finances. The ‘phenomenon’ is an
artifact of truth-engineering, as modestly conservative governments sought
to coax capital into the open, within a comparatively non-confiscatory
fiscal environment.
There are some very significant lessons here, not all of which are easy to
rapidly digest. To begin with, Falkenstein reveals the emblematic
character of Piketty — as a thinker of the contemporary democratic spirit
— who aims above all at a certain public appearance, rather than
a real economic outcome. It is utterly naive to understand the ‘equality
debate’ as something fundamentally concerned with a real (or super-public)
situation. Such an understanding is, in fact, deeply
anti-democratic. What concerns Piketty, and those flocking to his
banner, is the public spectacle of inequality, as a negative factor for
political legitimacy. Beyond the surface of his proposed remedies is a
purely political demand that capital should retreat into hiding, in order
not to embarrass the governing elites of democratic states. It is not
actual inequality that is, in truth, being judged indecent, but its
admission into the public square in immodest dress.
The greatest weakness of right wing economic analysis, whether Supply-side
Conservative, Libertarian, or Post-Libertarian in orientation, is its
incompetence at lies. This becomes important when it interferes with a
realistic analysis of the Cathedral State — an expression used in the same
way one might use ‘Islamic State’ and with equivalent justification. For
instance, as in this case, it tends to exaggerate the dysfunctionality of
Cathedral-orchestrated social arrangements by conflating them with their
public presentation.
To repeat the more concrete example at stake here, a ‘high-tax’ regime is
interpreted by the truth-dupe right as a regime extracting higher taxes,
or at least sincerely attempting to (before the attempt is undermined by
Laffer-type
perverse effects). What Falkenstein’s commentary on Piketty suggests, in
contrast, is that such a demand is more realistically understood as a
demand for compliance with approved appearances, even if such compliance
necessitates systematic ‘non-compliance’ with state tax codes
as publicly expressed. Tax policy, in the widest sense, is not,
then, to be conceived as primarily revenue oriented, but rather as a set
of overt and covert theatrical directions, designed to produce a
politically-convenient order of appearances. It is thus, in large part, a
gatekeeper, controlling admissions to and banishments from the public
stage. When capital disappears back under the burkqa, the ‘problem’ of
gaping inequality will be miraculously solved. (In none of this is
economics, in any serious sense, even remotely involved.)
This is not economics, but political-religious public ritual, designed —
with cynical realism — for mass-enfranchised idiocy and its
representatives. Overwhelmingly, that is what ‘political economy’ now is.
July 28, 2014Switch-Point
Via machine-assisted cognition,
this
piece of research has been deservedly receiving a lot of attention. In
1917, it can now be seen due to ‘big data’ analytical tools, a new
political epoch was born.
[Researchers]
were surprised to see 1917 jump out so clearly. As the United States
joined Allied forces in the war against Germany, the researchers found a
new set of terms recurring in the State of the Union address. On the
topic of foreign policy, “democracy,” “unity,” “peace” and “terror”
emerged as keywords, replacing older notions of statecraft and
diplomacy. By the 1940s, a cluster of terms centered on the Navy,
perhaps signifying an isolationist foreign policy, all but disappears.
“Suddenly the U.S. is no longer an island,” said Bearman.
Anything that can switch — one might suppose — can switch again.
August 15, 2015Moron bites (#13)
Is Islamophobia Accelerating Global Warming? (Well, is it?)
This talk examines the relation between Islamophobia as the dominant
form of racism today and the ecological crisis. It looks at the three
common ways in which the two phenomena are seen to be linked: as an
entanglement of two crises, metaphorically related with one being a
source of imagery for the other and both originating in colonial forms
of capitalist accumulation. The talk proposes a fourth way of linking
the two: an argument that they are both emanating from a similar mode of
being, or enmeshment, in the world, what is referred to as ‘generalised
domestication.’
(Via.)
Actually, I think this is quite possibly truish — although approached with
such utter leftoid twistedness that I’m not inclined to re-classify it
more politely. Insofar as ‘global warming’ is the presently-accepted
Cathedralist translation for ‘industrial vitality’, it’s more than likely
that a completely triumphant Ummah would put the lid on it. If the talk
had been titled Twin-Angled Anticapitalism the inner coherence
would have been more obvious.
May 13, 2016
CHAPTER SIX - A DARK TWIN
Criminals at Work
“… if the people that are supposedly running the country aren’t actually
performing any of the functions of governing, who is?”
asks
Foseti. Anybody who follows his writing will recognize where this is
coming from. It belongs to a consistent (and thus informal) critique of
formalist illusion. To confuse government with constitutional structures,
legislation, or political offices, is to be blind to the real machinery of
power.
Steve Sailor
offers
a pointed example of this reality in the field of higher educational
administration, whose authorities are adamant in the determination to
pursue systematic racial discrimination against Asian candidates (in
particular). ‘Constraining’ legislation, which explicitly criminalizes
these practices, is treated as a formal obstacle course, rather than a
prohibition. It complicates anti-meritocratic racial profiling, but is
utterly incapable of preventing it.
As Sailer explains:
Back in 1996, Proposition 209 outlawing racial preferences was passed
by California voters and became part of the state Constitution. State
officials have ever since pursued a strategy of “massive resistance” to
this unwelcome demand for equal treatment of the law, such as by
switching the evaluation of University of California admissions from a
cheap, mechanical system to an expensive, subjective “holistic”
system.
The bulk of his post is devoted to a long quotation from Ruth Starkman’s
NYT
story
on the work of an applications reader at Berkeley. This piece is entirely
devoid of surprises to anyone with the slightest sensitivity to social
reality, since it consists of a reasonably detailed explanation of
malicious racial corruption in university admission procedures.
Disingenuously, Starkman describes this dirty work as “… an extreme
version of the American non-conversation about race,” asking: “Does
Proposition 209 serve merely to push race underground?”
I suppose. Do anti-racketeering laws serve merely to push the mafia
underground? If people are inflexibly determined to pursue an illegal
agenda, laws drive them into the shadows. Perhaps the laws should be
relaxed.
Or perhaps crucial public institutions should be ruthlessly purged of
leftist criminals. It’s a tough call.
August 4, 2013Dark Humor
Slavic humor has a deserved reputation for philosophical penetration;
routing around idealistic cant and crime-stop obstacles to deride
totalitarianism. This recent example (via @MiriamElder, at
#Russianhumor) is superb:
“Why won’t there ever be a revolution in America?”
“Because there aren’t any American embassies in America.”
December 7, 2013The Left Done Right
The Diplomat‘s Zachary Keck is one of the smartest mainstream
commentators writing today. He’s either an enemy to be respected, or a
dark side infiltrator to be left undercover. In either case, he’s always
worth reading.
Observing
that democracy promotion no longer works, he advocates a Neoreactionary
foreign policy as the only effective path to the eventual realization of
Cathedralist goals. If this wasn’t a classic opportunity for Modernist
means-ends
reversal to show
what it can do, there would be every reason to worry about being
out-maneuvered. Zeck’s proposals are sufficiently cunning to raise the
question: Who’s subverting whom?
One of America’s top foreign policy goals, particularly since the end
of the Cold War, has been promoting democracy across the world. In the
minds of American foreign policy elites, there are both moral and
strategic imperatives for spreading democracy.
Regarding the former, Westerners in general, and Americans in
particular, believe that liberal democracies are morally superior to
other forms of government. As for the strategic rationale, American
elites point to the fact that liberal democracies don’t go to war with
one another, even if they aren’t any less warlike (and may be more
warlike) when interacting with non-democracies. One can quibble with
these rationales, but they are deeply held by American elites and,
to a much lesser extent, Americans in general. […] But if the American foreign policy
community is going to continue trying to promote democracy, it must come
to terms with one simple irony: it has become less successful at
spreading democracy even as it has made democracy promotion a greater
priority in U.S. foreign policy.
How, then, to spread democracy successfully?
Obviously, by forgetting all of the ‘democracy’ nonsense:
The bottom line is that if the U.S. is going to promote democracy, it
has to get better at it. It is irresponsible and immoral to promote
democracy if it is likely to lead to anarchy, no matter how pure initial
intentions were. And if the U.S. wants to get better at promoting
democracy, a good place to start would be by promoting forward-thinking
authoritarian leaders who base their legitimacy on economic growth and
integration into the global economy.
If the Cathedral recruits enough smart people to build itself a
Neoreactionary wing, a wide range of presently mindless discussions are
going to become a lot more interesting.
December 9, 2013Deep State
This surely counts as
a (Friday) fright night topic. Appropriately, it’s an undertow NRx theme
already, although typically only casually invoked — almost allusively — as
the necessary complement of the public state’s naked superficiality. Rod
Dreher
focuses
upon it more determinedly than any NRx source I was able to rapidly pull
up. (This would be an easy point for people to educate me upon.)
Dreher’s post is seriously interesting. One immediate hook:
Steve Sailer says that
the Shallow State
is a complement to the Deep State. The Shallow State is, I think,
another name for
what the Neoreactionaries call “The Cathedral”
…
As a State Church, the Cathedral is essentially bound to publicity. Its
principal organs — media and education — are directed towards the
promulgation of faith. It tends towards an identification with its own
propaganda, and therefore — in Mike Lofgren’s
words
— to the full manifestation of visible government. Perfect
coincidence of government with the transparent public sphere approaches a
definition of the progressive telos. Since Neoreaction is
particularly inclined to emphasize the radical dysfunctionality of this
ideal, it naturally presupposes that real government lies
elsewhere. In this respect, NRx is inherently destined to formulate a
model of hidden or occult government — that which the Cathedral
runs upon — which inevitably coincides, in all fundamentals, with the deep
state.
What then? Has there been a direct NRx address
to the quesion, what do we make of the deep state? Moldbug even
declares: “… the United States does not in fact have a ‘deep state.'” In context,
this is a complex and suggestive evasion, but it is an evasion
nonetheless. There can be no call upon neoreactionaries to articulate
their relation to something that does not exist.
In contrast to the Master, I am thoroughly convinced that a US deep state
exists, and that the problem of articulation is a very different one.
Public articulacy is — at least — not obviously appropriate to the deep
state, for transcendental philosophical or occultist reasons (which are
the same), since it is
the very nature of hidden government not to be a public object.
Public representation of the deep state is exposure — an
intrinsically political, antagonistic engagement. It’s Wikileaks. This is
not to denounce such an operation, reactively, but merely to note that the
question has thereby been missed. The righteousness of state
sublimation into the public sphere is assumed (and this, to repeat, is
progressivism itself).
Under the name of the Cathedral, Nrx depicts the state
phenomenon as a degenerative abomination. The deep state (or
state-in-itself), in contrast, poses a far more cryptic
theoretical and practical problem. It’s worth puzzling over, for at least
a while.
December 12, 2014Off the Books
Writing about Pakistan, as a ‘dark site’ host, but also about a more
general syndrome, Fernandez
remarks:
… just because the administration hides the risk from conflict using
cutouts and proxies doesn’t actually mean the risk goes away. It only
means the risk is hidden “off the books”. It only means you can’t easily
measure it.
There’s a conservation law at work here, which is always a positive sign
of realist seriousness. To publicly promote a political profile of
peculiarly self-congratulating moral earnestness it is simultaneously
necessary to feed the shadows. What happens unseen is essential to the
purification of the image. The Obama Administration is only significant
here insofar as it grasps the deep political logic of democracy — and its
subordination to sovereign PR — with such exceptional practical clarity.
Better by far to indiscriminately drone potential enemies to death on the
unmonitored periphery than to rough up a demonstrated terrorist in front
of a TV camera. It’s the future you wanted (Xenosystems
readers excepted). To imagine anything fundamentally different working
under democratic conditions is sheer delusion.
Adam Garfinkle has a thoughtful
commentary
on the US Senate torture report that wanders into the same territory.
Everyone seems to take for granted now that this was a “natural” CIA
assignment of some sort, but it is passing strange that this should be
the case. Not to belabor the background with a primer, but for those who
have been watching too much crappy, self-righteous fiction on TV and in
the movies, the CIA — before 911 at least — was a pretty small
organization with a very minor percentage of its budget, personnel, and
activity devoted to “operations” — dirty tricks, false-flagging,
whacking people, and so forth. The Agency did wander off the reservation
back in the day, which is what the Church Committee hearings and
subsequent reforms were meant to set right. The vast bulk of CIA
activity before and certainly after the mid-1970s concerned what is
called collections and analysis, some of which falls under the rubric of
(human) spying, but much of which is just fancified library work. As the
morning of September 12, 2001 dawned, did the CIA have any significant
experience with interrogating Islamist insurgents and terrorists? No.
Did it have any experience with interrogating bad guys of any kind?
Some; for example in Central America back in the 1980s, but nearly all
of those involved in that business — and there were only a few — had
long since departed the Agency. […] … So … why was the CIA anointed for
the task after 911 …?
In its essentials, his answer is the same Fernandez gives. Rumsfeld’s DoD
simply refused to accept it. US Mil. is a public institution, and there
was no way they were going to handle people outside Geneva Convention
protections, with the responsibility to extract critical intelligence from
them. That would all have to happen off the books. The CIA picked up the
tar baby.
As the Cathedral becomes ever more
holier than Jesus,
it produces — through systematic administrative necessity — a dark twin.
This is a basic structure of social reality that NRx is uniquely
positioned to acknowledge (although it is far
more widely
recognized).
As democracy ‘matures’, reality is processed increasingly in secret. That,
at least, we understand.
December 18, 2014Quote note (#300)
Fernandez:
… the tumultuous events of the last six months have dragged the Deep State
into the fray. A slow motion ‘constitutional crisis’ is already occurring.
The future of the Supreme Court, the independence (or neutrality) of the
FBI, the role of Congress are now at issue. In the words of
president Obama
“I hate to put pressure on you but the fate of the Republic rests in your
hands. The fate of the world is teetering”. The election has become a
referendum. It is not just who heads the executive branch but what the
executive branch will become that are on the ballot. Obama’s legacy and
the political arc of the last 40 years are up for a vote. “The American
Brexit is coming,” wrote James Stavridis in
Foreign Policy, a comparison which if anything, understates the case.
It perhaps goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway): from the
perspective of NRx, as also probably more widely, tumult in the Deep State
counts for far more than any democratic transition. Events are occurring
that can’t be kept in the theater.
November 6, 2016
CHAPTER SEVEN - THE DECLINE BEGINS
Sentences (#32)
… few things are as oppressive and intolerable as living under the
yoke of a lie …
(Skeletalized for purposes of extraction from its mainstream conservative
context, but the whole
article
is insightful if read with a modicum of detachment.)
Even Trump skeptics (such as this blog) are finding it hard to deny that
the phenomenon is a revolt against the Cathedral (defined approximately as
“the yoke of a lie”). It’s a campaign against the media, and ‘correct
opinion’ in general, with ordinary political antagonism as a very
secondary feature. Does anybody seriously doubt that the media
establishment
understands, he’s running against us?
The romantic medievalism of much ‘NRx’ thought captures things of
importance — one of which is the cultural value of a separation between
State and Church, which is to say:
the absence of politically-mandated correct opinion. Heretics
were not political criminals before the onset of modernity. When
the state becomes a church (‘the Cathedral’), political antagonism
acquires religious intensity. That’s what is being seen today, whatever
else one might think about it. At the climax of the democratic regime,
politics necessarily becomes holy war. As the old saw goes:
nobody said it was going to be pretty.
ADDED: The Cathedral has its own distinctive version of social contract
theory: “There are people who already hold these views, and there used to
be kind of an agreement between them and society that they wouldn’t speak
these things in public.”
December 10, 2015Sentences (#35)
Genuinely
thinking Donald will save us all will get you kicked from the HRx and
NRx Sith Lord club houses, yet tacit support for his whirlwind of
chaos should be very much expected by us at this late hour.
That would be true, even without the private portfolios of popcorn stock.
(Note.)
ADDED:
Astounding media BS (from George Stephanopoulos). Trump does OK, I guess.
What he should have said, when asked where Obama was born, and whether he
is a Muslim, in the opinion of XS is this:
“How the Hell am I supposed to know about Obama’s place of birth,
or his faith? I don’t know, you don’t know, nobody knows except for Obama
and a few others. The only thing you know is what you’re
supposed to believe. I know that too. So you want me to lie, and
say
I know that Obama was born in the USA and reveres Jesus Christ as his
Lord and Savior? That’s the lie you’re demanding here? Because, you know clearly, it
would be a lie. Neither of us knows anything substantial about
the guy, except from the fiasco he’s made of his executive position.
Frankly, George, I’m sick of this dishonest kissing-the-ring bullshit.
Most Americans are sick of it. It’s over. That’s what my poll numbers
should be telling you. So I have to say George, buddy, with the very
greatest respect, that you and all the other lying Cathedral monkeys are
toast. Improve your people skills, and after the collapse I’ll try to find
you a service position in a casino somewhere.”
January 7, 2016The NRx Presidency
Dateline, December 2016. (A modest
extrapolation.)
Informed Neoconservative Opinion:
So, NRx, you’ve finally done it. This is all on you. The electoral
victory you were aiming for from the start is now in the bag. The
reactionary populist uprising has succeeded. Enjoy your shiny new
Neocameral State. We’ll be watching from our Canadian refuges, and
smiling grimly as your authoritarian racial Utopia runs into the buffers
of autarkic economic crisis. Then the public backlash will begin from a
citizenry bowed in deep shame, but rediscovering their American virtues.
It will be back to color revolution, and our neglected warnings will be
once again appreciated. This was your one shot. Celebrate it while you
can.
NRx: ??? [*Are they on drugs?*]
My tentative theory, at this point, is that
NRx is comparatively good at conversing in Cathedralese, which makes it
attractive as an easy one-stop destination for anyone wanting to rapidly
fabricate a narrative about how things went so utterly to hell (supported
by citations in an intelligible dialect). It’s not an explanation being
advanced here with enormous confidence.
Confidence starts with the observation that the (crazed) analysis of Trump
as an NRx Frankenstein Monster is setting like Flashlock™ emergency
concrete filler in the disoriented mental models of the Fourth Estate.
Much near-future surrealism is guaranteed.
May 19, 2016Shrink-Wrapped Schadenfreude
They’ve actually
made
it into a gift-pack:
The crying continued throughout the week. On the subway in New York
City, sniffles punctuated heavy silence. Sickness or sadness? It was
impossible to tell without staring. Friends confessed to each other
they’d cried dozens of times. Foreigners living and working legally in
America cried privately, cried together. The sadness came in waves.
People said it felt like a death, like a breakup, like a national
disaster. People checked in on each other. “Are you OK?” they’d ask, as
though a relative had passed. […] Harrowing tales of crying continued
into Friday, as Lena Dunham published an essay in Lenny Letter about how
she was so distraught on election night, she broke into a hive that
matched the hive of another woman in attendance at the Hillary Clinton
rally, and how she cried for days after the election. The crying
continued into the weekend. Saturday Night Live’s cold
open ended with Kate MacKinnon, in character as Hillary Clinton tickling
out Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” on a piano, teary-eyed as she promised
to fight on. …
ADDED:
Complementary sarcastic gloating.
ADDED: And from the full-commies at Jacobin Mag (quite wittily):
“Watching the results on Election Night was like what I’d imagine living
in an eighties teen horror movie would be like — the summer camp air
curdling into one of vague suspicion, as a strange dawning sensation of
doom takes hold. Slaughter: Ohio, Florida, Michigan — all bloody and
prone. Who will be picked off next? Pennsylvania? Wisconsin? Minnesota?
Your state? The vote is coming from inside the house.”
November 17, 2016View From the Left
Claus Offe lucidly
explains
what the proponents of ‘solidarity’ are hoping for utterly
hopeless about in Europe. The entire article is so thoroughly saturated in
doom-drenched, soul-scouring melancholia that by the end I was searching
for Odysseus-style restraints to prevent myself doing a wild happy-dance
around the office. From the Euro-progressive perspective, things look
seriously bleak.
As a bonus, there’s a great gloss on
degenerative ratchets: “… those fatal errors which, once committed, prove irreversible,
closing off any return to the status quo ante.” By carrying
everything relentlessly to the brink, they’re more of a nightmare for the
perceptive left than they are for us. By this stage in history, the left
has much more to lose. It’s their regime that is going over the cliff.
(Yes, I realize this reboot-friendly Schadenfreude will earn a
spanking from Goulding.)
ADDED:
France is in its worst shape for more than three decades, since
François Mitterrand nearly blew up the economy in the early 1980s trying
to stimulate growth through government deficits and nationalisations.
Unemployment is at 10.5 per cent and climbing. The economy is
contracting. And overseeing the shambles is the suety,
confidence-draining face of François Hollande.
July 9, 2013Cathedral Decay
Extreme corrosive pessimism is an NRx specialty. Since optimism bias is a
status quo-supported human cognitive frailty, it’s a good thing
to have. If rigidified, however, it can result in missing things.
One systematic distortion stems from hubris, taking the form of a
confusion in causality. “We don’t like X, and want bad things to happen to
it” can actually be a distorted expression of a more basic process:
X is dying, and therefore we have started to dislike it.
This blog strongly suspects that the
Cathedral
has become an object of animosity
as a consequence of its morbidity. After all, it’s a mind-control
apparatus. If it’s no longer universally accepted, and in certain
problematic patches actively loathed, dysfunction is clearly indicated.
Contestation of its story is not supposed to be part of the story.
The Zeitgeist is its story, not ours. In this tale, it goes from
strength to strength, overwhelming everything in its path. Recognizing the
structure of this narrative is important. Subscription to it is not
thereby implied.
Every critical component of the Cathedral — media, academic, and
bureaucratic — is exceptionally vulnerable to Internet-driven
disintermediation. The current phase of capital
reconstruction
is distinctively — and automatically — Cathedral-hostile, when evaluated
at the level of technonomic process (which we do not do enough), rather
than at the level of surface public pronouncement (which we concern
ourselves with far too much with). Dying things can be very dangerous, and
even more frenzied. It would be a mistake to confuse such
characteristics with fundamental strength.
A step down from hubris might begin with an acknowledgment that NRx is —
primarily — a symptom. Whatever imagined heroism is sacrificed
thereby, it is more than compensated by an opportunity for deepened
realism.
All of which is a framing for Fernandez’s
latest. Even amidst the stupidity of the degenerating political cycle, he
notices that “… the current crop of Republican presidential candidates …
are openly breaking with the really important modern faith — the media-led
church that has held mainstream politics together for so long.” The
integrative media is fatally sick. That NRx exists at all is a sign of
that.
ADDED: “I might be
biased here myself, because this is what obsesses me, and this is what
angers me. I could care less, to be honest, about the GOP or its programs.
[…] What keeps me interested in politics at all is my loathing for the
self-appointed Preistly Class of the media. […] … the media serve as the
shamans and witch-doctors of an enemy Tribe, and the purpose of those
shamans is to relentlessly disgrace outsiders to the Tribe, which is
pleasing to those within the Tribe, while also keeping the shamans in
power (because they have no other skills which would earn them money or
sex, except the denigration of those considered Unclean).” (Ace links to
this.)
October 30, 2015Sentences (#38)
Phillip Mark McGough,
writing
in Quillette, buys his way in with a bald truth ticket:
After Cologne, feminism is dead.
The whole article is solid, giving clear voice to what is already a common
understanding. The feminist establishment is only in derivative, flexible,
and tactical opposition to extreme sexual violence against women. It
consists of hardcore leftist race-politics hacks in women’s rights drag.
Now everybody knows it (which is huge).
January 18, 2016Quotable (#149)
A ruined empire on the
brink:
All around the Web, in print, and on radio comes the claim that America
has entered its “Weimar” phase. Economic collapse, political paralysis,
rampant homosexuality, a desperate, disoriented populace open to the
ravings of a demagogue – that is the portrait we get of Germany between
the end of World War I in 1918 and the Nazi seizure of power in 1933.
That is where America is supposedly situated in 2016. […] Yes, Weimar
Germany ended badly, horribly so. But …
Much tying-itself-in-knots follows (not entirely uninterestingly).
The historical analogy is far stronger than the apologetic analysis. What
Weitz refuses to contemplate, is that the set of outcomes he dogmatically
defends as “social progress” is a partisan agenda (the New England Utopia)
masquerading as a universal value. What left-liberals see as unambiguous
advance looks to everyone else like losing. As the Internet decentralizes
media, the progressive narrative monopoly is coming apart in the
hurricane, and nostalgic preaching for the old religion won’t glue it back
together. Weitz is right about one thing, though: there’s no doubt
political developments could be blown in very ugly directions.
It’s
chicken (the
edge of the cliff version).
Left-Liberals:
Stick with our vector for social development, or we’ll all go over the
edge.
Mashed-Right:
There have been far too many concessions already …
You have to swerve, Weitz pleads. Even if they do this time, they
won’t forever, and its already far less obvious that they will. Compared
to what we’re used to, that makes it a whole new world.
March 21, 2016The Market from Hell
The
supply
side could be reasonably compared to a high-pressure fire-hose:
A new
poll for YouGov
of almost 15,000 people found that 60% would like to be an author. The
news may come as a surprise to the bestselling and critically acclaimed
novelist Sebastian Faulks, who this weekend
expressed his wish to find a job, writing in the Spectator that he has “now spent almost a quarter of a
century alone in a garret staring at a blank wall, and I think it has
driven me a bit mad”. […] … According to a survey
carried out by Digital Book World
earlier this year, almost a third of published authors make less than
$500 (£350) a year from their writing.
Here’s the demand sink they’re feeding into:
ADDED: Relevant musings of Albert Jay Nock.
April 6, 2016WeSearchr
This is huge. It’s what media
following the grain of the Internet looks like (if only as a preliminary
glimpse).
Here‘s how it works:
WeSearchr has a select group of editors that we call “Askers” who watch
the news cycle and figure out what people want to know. […] If an Asker
believes that there is enough interest in a question, they will create a
“Bounty” as a reward for the answer to the question. The minimum amount
of funding to trigger a Bounty is called a “reserve”. […] Members of the
WeSearchr community can browse the bounties and donate money to fund a
bounty, like other crowdfunding sites. […] Once a Bounty hits its
reserve, it is funded and WeSearchr will accept answers from people that
have the answers to that question. […] WeSearchr will review the
submissions and check them for veracity. […] If the submission fulfills
the terms of the Bounty, WeSearchr will assign the reward and release
the information to the Asker and assigned news outlets for distribution.
[…] 30 days after the story’s release, WeSearchr pays the Bounty.
75% of the Bounty goes to the person(s) that deliver a solution.
10% goes to the Asker
15% goes to WeSearchr
So: A decentralized market place for journalistic research.
The conception alone crosses an honesty threshold. There is no longer any
need for meta-lies about the essential character of contemporary
journalism (as a political apparatus screened by an increasingly-ludicrous
pretense to disinterested ‘news’ curation). All research is interested,
and its incentives are now openly formalized. The result is a germinal
assassination
market for
hidden things. It targets enemy secrets. The information warfare that
media have always been ceases to be promoted as anything else.
For the first time in over a century, it is now possible to envisage
journalists making an honest living (by fulfilling private research
contracts). This type of transition only goes in one direction. A piece of
the future just came into view.
May 26, 2016The Global Faith
There’s not much
room
for controversy:
When the United States was many separate states with a common defense
and a common foreign policy, back when people said “The United States
are” rather than “The United States is” there was absolutely no
separation of Church and State, for each state had its own state
religion, and the seminary of the state religion of Massachusetts,
charged with promoting and enforcing the state religion, was
Harvard.
After two centuries of ascent to hegemony, this world religion has
unmistakably peaked. The fact everyone is now noticing it, as a definite,
peculiar system of belief, attests to that. Accelerating catabolic process
now ensues. Fragmentation won’t be pretty, but it also won’t be stopped.
July 13, 2016Quote note (#270)
Taleb
on
the media short-circuit:
Social media allowed me to go direct to the public and bypass the
press, an uberization if you will, as I skip the intermediary. I do not
believe that members of the press knows their own interests very well. I
noticed that journalists try to be judged by other journalists and their
community, not by their readers, unlike writers.
No one realizes they’re in a death-bubble until it gets disintermediated
from the Outside. We’re going to be seeing ever more of that. (At the
largest scale, the Cathedral concept was formulated to predict it.)
ADDED: A grimmer
take
on social media.
August 8, 2016Net-Driven Collapse
Psychology
is the canary in the Cathedral.
September 23, 2016Recall
This isn’t something XS has done before, but it seems necessary to do it
now.
Here (from
October last year) is an anticipation of where this blog finds itself
right now. Perhaps NRx was from the beginning part of the Cathedral
funeral process.
Some serious adjustment is called for. An enemy that can suffer a defeat
this stupendous clearly isn’t a radically intimidating adversary. We can
already see beyond it. The conflict has moved on.
My current (uncertain) take: The regime analyzed by classical NRx has
descended into a deeply morbid state. Things will get worse for it,
perhaps catastrophically, more quickly than we yet imagine, in a cascade
of collapse. All the trends that count against it are still strengthening,
in many case exponentially. It would be an analytical error to remain
fixated upon its corpse.
Demotism is, of course, undefeated (perhaps even temporarily
reinforced). The Cathedral, however, appears mortally wounded. This year
was — quite plausibly — its 1989.
ADDED: To be a little clearer, it isn’t really 1989, it’s
1517. The
quasi-universal authority of a church died (as a result of techonomic
media innovation, among other factors).
November 15, 2016
SECTION C - DEMOCRACY AND DEMOTISM
CHAPTER ONE - SYSTEMATIC FEATURES
The Red Pill
Morpheus: I imagine that right now, you’re feeling a bit like Alice. Hm?
Tumbling down the rabbit hole?
Neo: You could say that.
Morpheus: I see it in your eyes. You have the look of
a man who accepts what he sees because he is expecting to wake up.
Ironically, that’s not far from the truth. Do you believe in fate,
Neo?
Neo: No.
Morpheus: Why not?
Neo: Because I don’t like the idea that I’m not in
control of my life.
Morpheus: I know exactly what you mean. Let me tell
you why you’re here. You’re here because you know something. What you
know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire
life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what
it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It
is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I’m talking
about?
Neo: The Matrix.
Morpheus: Do you want to know what it is?
Neo: Yes.
Morpheus: The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around
us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your
window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go
to work… when you go to church… when you pay your taxes. It is the world
that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Morpheus: [leans in closer to Neo]
That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into
bondage. Born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A
prison for your mind.
[pause]
Morpheus: Unfortunately, no one can be told what the
Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.
[Opens a pillbox, empties the contents into his palms, and outstretches
his hands]
This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You
take the blue pill
[opens his right hand, to reveal a translucent blue pill],
the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want
to believe. You take the red pill
[opens his left hand, revealing a similarly translucent red pill],
you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole
goes.
[Neo reaches for the red pill]
Remember: all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.
— That’s the Wachowski brothers version of Gnostic Platonism, and it gets
everything almost exactly right. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave (in Book VII
of The Republic)
tells
precisely the same story, but with a cheaper cast, inferior special
effects, and less drugs. It’s not surprising that the Dark Enlightenment
tends to stick with the re-make, as it goes Neo(reactionary).
The critical key to gnosis is the
realization that the whole of your world is an inside, implying
an Outside, and the radical possibility of escape. What had seemed to be
unbounded reality is exposed as a container, triggering abrupt departure
from a system of delusion. Everything else is merely the route taken to
reach us, adapted to the ruins. The specifics of the story are constraints
to be twisted free from, once their functions have been exhausted, as
hooks, latching teeth, memetic replication circuitry, and camouflage
dapplings. As long as there is an inside / outside difference effectively
communicated, narrative details are incidental.
The Chinese version, perhaps originating with Zhuangzi, describes a frog
in a well, who knows nothing of the Great Ocean (井底之蛙,不知大海). This
simple fable is already fully adequate to the most exalted ambitions of
mystical philosophy.
Putting things in boxes, or taking them out of boxes, is all of thought,
as soon as the ‘things’ can themselves be treated as boxes. Categories and
sets are boxes, so that even to say “an A is a B” is to perform an
operation of inclusion or insertion, through which
‘identity’ is primordially applicable. To be is to be inside.
Placing a species into (or ‘under’) a genus has unsurpassable cognitive
originality, extending out to the furthest horizon of ontology (since a
horizon is still a box). To contain, or not to contain, is the first and
last intelligible relation. Boxes are basic.
Taking the red pill is climbing out of a box. By showing the cage, it
already accomplishes a cognitive liberation, and thus provides a model for
whatever practical escapology there is to follow. To know how to leave a
cave, or a well, is already to know — abstractly — how to leave a world
(and abstraction is nothing other than outsideness).
What is inescapable, unless through some precipitous self-enslavement, is
the social obnoxiousness of Dark Enlightenment. Gnosis is ineliminably
hierarchical, and at best patronizing (when not abrasively contemptuous),
because a free mind cannot pretend to equality with a slave mind,
regardless of the derision hurled at it on this account. As Brandon Smith
remarks:
It is often said there only two kinds of people in this world: those
who know, and those who don’t. I would expand on this and say that there
are actually three kinds of people:
those who know, those who don’t know, and those who don’t care to
know.
Members of the last group are the kind of people I would characterize as
“sheeple.”
Smith’s ‘sheeple’ are not merely ignorant, but actively self-deluding. By
taking the blue pill, they have opted to reside in the prison of lies. It
is at this point, however, that the pharmaceutical metaphor switches from
hook to obstacle, because there is no ‘blue pill’ or anything functionally
equivalent
short of the entire Matrix itself (which is to say, of course,
the Cathedral).
A critical point of social and political analysis is reached here, and it
is one that continues to evade definitive apprehension, due to its elusive
subtleties. Between the hidden architect of the Matrix and the blue-pilled
sheeple or “river of meat” there is no simple order of mastery, whether running in the obvious
direction (from doctrinal elite to indoctrinated mass) or the
democratic-perverse alternative (placing expertise in the service of
popular ignorance and its vulgarities). The Matrix is both an object of
‘genuine’ popular attachment and an apparatus of systematic
mind-control. It is most truly democratic when it most fully attains its
climax state of soft-totalitarian mendacity. The propaganda machine is
never less than a circus. What is demanded — what has always been demanded
— is the lie.
Moldbug’s most recent invocation of the red pill runs:
I think I’ve chosen my candidate for the Pill itself. And I’m going to
stick with it. My Pill is:
America is a communist country.
What I like about this statement is that it’s ambiguous. Specifically,
it’s an Empsonian ambiguity of the second or perhaps third type (I’ve
never quite understood the difference). Embedded as it is in the mad
tapestry of 20th-century history, AIACC can be interpreted in countless
ways.
All of these interpretations – unless concocted as an intentional,
obviously idiotic strawman – are absolutely true. Sometimes they are
obviously true, sometimes surprisingly true. They are always true.
Because America is a communist country.
The truth is that America serves the people through the lie. That is the
‘choice’ represented by progressivism (= communism), installed in a
highly-accomplished state, for over a century, as triumphant popular
self-deception. The service provided — and demanded — is the
deceit. If the people see through the lie, the resulting dissatisfaction
will not stem from the fact they have been lied to, but from the
revelation that they have not been lied to well enough. Could
anything be clearer than that? The outbreaks of popular rage occur exactly
at those moments when reality threatens to manifest itself — when the
Matrix glitches. “We elected you to hide the truth from us,” the people
shriek, “so just do your goddamn job, and make reality disappear.”
There is no red pill to save society. To imagine that there might be is to
understand nothing.
December 18, 2013Deals with the Devil
I’m assuming
this
wasn’t intended as a Satanic argument for Monarchy, but it works as one:
Q: Why does the devil keep his deals?
A: As an immortal, he has an infinite time horizon of other deals he
jeopardizes if he betrays any given deal. Therefore the opportunity cost
of any betrayal is too high.
Q: What does that make politicians, then?
A: Lower in ethical reliability than the devil.
Even a demonic permanent government makes a better contractual partner
than the most angelic temporary regime.
(Recalled by
David Chapman).
August 6, 2014The Problem of Democracy
Recent discussions (on Twitter, primarily) have convinced me of the need
for a ‘Neocameralism for Dummies’ post, providing a succinct introduction
to this genre of political theory. The importance of this is obvious if
Neocameralism is conceived as the central, and defining pillar of
Neoreaction. In preparation for this task, however, it is necessary to
revisit the socio-historical diagnosis from which Neocameralism emerged
(in the work, of course, of Mencius Moldbug). That requires a brief
prolegomenon addressing the NRx critique of democracy, focusing initially
on its negative aspect. Neocameralism is introduced as a proposed solution
to a problem. First, the problem.
Government is complicated. If this thesis seems implausible to
you, it is probable that you will have great difficulties with everything
to follow. It would take another (and quite different) post to address
objections to this entire topic of discussion which take the approximate
form “Government is easy, you just find the best man and put him in
charge!” All social problems are easy if you can ‘just’ do the right
thing. Infantile recommendations will always be with us.
There are two general lines of democratic apologetics. The first, and
politically by far the strongest, is essentially religious. It too is best
addressed by a post of its own, themed by Moldbug’s ‘Ultra-Calvinist
Hypothesis’. For our purposes here we need only suggest that it is quite
satisfactorily represented by Jacques Rousseau, and that its fundamental
principal is popular sovereignty. From the NRx perspective, it is merely
depraved. Only civilizational calamities can come from it.
The second line of apology is far more serious, theoretically engaging,
and politically irrelevant. It understands democracy as a mechanism,
tasked with the solemn responsibility of
controlling government. Any effective control mechanism works by
governing behavior under the influence of feedback from actual
performance. In biology, this is achieved by natural selection upon
phenotypes. In science, it is achieved by the experimental testing of
theory, supported by a culture of open criticism. In capitalist economics,
it is achieved by market evaluation of products and services, providing
feedback on business performance. According to systems-theoretical
defenses of democracy, it works by sensitizing government to feedback from
voters, who act as conductors of information from actual administrative
performance. This is the sophisticated liberal theory of democracy. It
explains why science, markets, and democracy are often grouped together
within liberal ideologies. (Bio-Darwinism, naturally, is more safely
neglected).
How could this beautiful political design
possibly go wrong? Merely by asking this question, you have set out on the
Neoreactionary path.
Moldbug’s answer, and ours, begins by agreeing with the sophisticated
liberal theory in its most abstract outlines. Democracy is indeed a system
for the functional tuning of government, operating through electoral
feedback, and predictably enhancing its specialized competence, as all
reiterating experimentation-selection mechanisms do. Democratic political
machines become increasingly good at what they do. The problem, however,
is that their functional specialism is not at all identical with
administrative capability. Rather, as they progressively learn, the
feedback they receive trains them in
mastery of public opinion.
The long-circuit, assumed by liberal political theory, models the
electorate as a reality-sensor, aggregating information about the effects
of government policy, and relaying it back through opinion polls and
elections, to select substitutable political regimes (organized as
parties) that have demonstrated their effectiveness at optimizing social
outcomes. The short-circuit, proposed by Moldbug, models the electorate as
an object of indoctrination, subjected to an ever-more advanced process of
opinion-formation through a self-organized, message-disciplined
educational and media apparatus. The political party best adapted to this
apparatus — called the ‘inner party’ by Moldbug — will dominate the
democratic process. The outer party serves the formal cybernetic function
demanded by liberal theory, by providing an electoral option, but it will
achieve practical success only by accommodating itself to the apparatus of
opinion-formation — perhaps modifying its recommendations in minor, and
ultimately inconsequential ways. It is the system of opinion-formation
(the ‘Cathedral’) that represents true sovereign authority within the
democratic system, since it is the ‘reality principle’ which decides
success or failure. The monotonic trend to short-circuit dominance is the
degenerative process inherent to democracy.
If you want the government to listen to you,
then you have to expect it to tell you what to say. That is the
principal lesson of ‘progressive’ political history. The assertion of
popular voice has led, by retrospective inevitability, to a specialized,
super-competent political devotion to ventriloquism. The disaster,
therefore, is two-fold. On the one hand, government competence in its
primary responsibility — efficient governance — is systematically eroded,
to be replaced by a facility at propaganda (in a process akin to the
accumulation of junk DNA). As government is swallowed by messaging,
residual administrative competences are maintained by a bureaucratic
machine or ‘permanent government’, largely insulated from the increasingly
senseless signals of democratic opinion, but still assimilated to the
opinion-formation establishment by direct (extra-democratic) processes of
cultivation. Lacking feedback from anything but its own experiments in
mind-control, quality of government collapses.
Secondly, and even more calamitously from certain perspectives, culture is
devastated by the politicization of opinion. Under a political
dispensation in which opinion has no formal power, it is broadly free to
develop in accordance with its own experiences, concerns, and curiosities.
In a significant minority of cases, cultural achievements of enduring
value result. Only in cases of extreme, provocative dissent will the
government have any interest in what the people think. Once politicized,
however, correct public opinion is a matter of central — indeed
all-consuming — government attention. Ideologically installed as the
foundation of political legitimacy, it becomes the supreme object of
political manipulation. Any thought is now dissent if it is not positively
aligned with society’s leading political direction. To think outside the
Cathedral is to attack the government. Culture is destroyed.
To be a Neoreactionary is to see these twin eventualities starkly
manifested in contemporary Western civilization. What democracy has not
yet ruined, it is ruining. It is essentially destructive of both
government and culture. It cannot indefinitely last.
The subsequent question: What could conceivably provide a solution? That
is where Neocameralism is introduced.
ADDED: Absolutely not to be missed, from Nydwracu.
August 9, 2014Irresponsibility
I’ve been picking on Nyan a lot recently, mostly in a positive way. Here’s
a little more:
This is perfect, and precise. It’s something that needs to be said, and it
says a lot.
The Mandate of Heaven (Tianming, 天命) couples authority to responsibility. The responsibility of the
Emperor, and the Dynasty, is no less comprehensive than its power, and is
in fact ultimately coincidental with it. The foundation is cosmic.
Plagues, earthquakes, and foreign invasions are all encompassed by it, as
are the reciprocal strokes of good fortune. There is no possibility of any
delegation that is not internal to the subject of Tianming,
preserving its absolute responsibility. The selection of advisers and
administrators is an exercise of authority, for which there can be no
evasion of accountability before heaven (or fate). Rule succeeds
or fails, survives or perishes, in its own name.
Is not this standard the key to the profound
dismay that results from the contemplation of democracy? As popular
politics evolves — or ‘progresses’, as it most certainly does — it tends
to incarnate a self-conscious strategy of irresponsibility with
ever more emphatic ideality. ‘Passing the buck’ becomes the whole thing.
Government and opposition participate mutually in an economy of
responsibility, in which ‘blame’ can be pooled, circulated, and displaced.
The rhetorical practices regulating this economy become the entire art of
politics.
An election is a festival or irresponsibility, in a double sense. It is a
crescendo of rhetoric, oriented to the dialectical evasion of social ills,
and it is a relinquishment of authority, into the hands of ‘the people’
and — potentially — the opposition, separating the realization of
governmental consequences from the deep core of the regime. To lose the
Mandate of Heaven is to be erased from the future. To lose an election is
a trivial penance, and even a tactical opportunity. (It is the prediction
of this blog that as democracy advances further, calculated defeat will
play an ever more significant role in its functioning.)
As NRx refuses to go to the polls tomorrow, its implicit political
statement is merely: Take some freaking responsibility. This is
all yours. Succeed, or disappear completely. The last thing we need is
another opportunity for sharing.
ADDED: Don’t vote. (Duh!)
ADDED: “Another reason not to vote is that it creates
real despair among the small number of Democracy-shepherds.”
November 3, 2014Quote note (#176)
Hoppe:
A king owned the territory and could hand it on to his son, and thus
tried to preserve its value. A democratic ruler was and is a temporary
caretaker and thus tries to maximize current government income of all
sorts at the expense of capital values, and thus wastes. […] Here are
some of the consequences: during the monarchical age before World War I,
government expenditure as a percent of GNP was rarely higher than 5%.
Since then it has typically risen to around 50%. Prior to World War I,
government employment was typically less than 3% of total employment.
Since then it has increased to between 15 and 20%. The monarchical age
was characterized by a commodity money (gold) and the purchasing power
of money gradually increased. In contrast, the democratic age is the age
of paper money whose purchasing power has permanently decreased. […]
Kings went deeper and deeper into debt, but at least during peacetime
they typically reduced their debt load. During the democratic era
government debt has increased in war and in peace to incredible heights.
Real interest rates during the monarchical age had gradually fallen to
somewhere around
2½%. Since then, real interest rates (nominal rates adjusted for
inflation) have risen to somewhere around 5% — equal to 15th-century
rates. Legislation virtually did not exist until the end of the 19th
century. Today, in a single year, tens of thousands of laws and
regulations are passed. Savings rates are declining instead of
increasing with increasing incomes, and indicators of family
disintegration and crime are moving constantly upward.
All familiar, to a sedative degree, to those here, of course. Except,
crucially, the interest rate stuff — which is remarkably dissonant with
our contemporary situation. Since Hoppe’s expectation — based on a
long-term, fairly consistent trend — is the rational one, it suggests that
the present collapse of interest rates is intriguingly anomalous. Is there
a sharp, big-picture analysis of the phenomenon out there somewhere?
July 31, 2015Apophatic Politics
‘Dark Enlightenment’ describes a form of government as well as
‘Enlightenment’ does, which is to say: it doesn’t at all. On those grounds
alone, George Dvorsky’s
inclusion
of DE among twelve possible “Futuristic Forms of Government That Could One
Day Rule the World” is profoundly misguided. This is not to say the list
is entirely without interest.
Its greatest value lies in the abundance of mutually inconsistent
political futures, few if any of which will happen. It therefore provides
the opportunity for negative thoughts, and more particularly for
systematic negative idealization. Which futures are most deserving of
prevention?
This blog has no doubt. The epitome of political disaster occupies fourth
place in Dvorsky’s list (among a number of other hideous outcomes):
Democratic World Government.
Dvorsky seems to quite like it:
We may very well be on our way to achieving the
Star Trek-like vision of
a global-scale liberal democracy
— one capable of ending nuclear proliferation, ensuring global security,
intervening to end genocide, defending human rights, and putting a stop
to human-caused climate change.
There cannot be a definitive Dark Enlightenment government, but it is
certainly possible to envisage a form of government which instantiates the
ultimate object of DE critique: a universal demotist regime, from which
there could be no escape. As a break from preoccupations with a positive
neoreactionary governmental ideal, prone — if not destined — to both
intense controversy and deep obscurity, it is energizing to explore the
via negativa. Democratic World Government need not necessarily
exist. That is already to place NRx in a position of luxurious success,
when compared to fraught speculations about alternatives to the present
political disaster. Whatever obstructs the DWG’s path to existence is on
our side. Such features of specific negative teleology, so easily
overlooked from a positive perspective, are highlighted for affirmation
and reinforcement. Anything that stands in the DWG’s way is worth
defending.
A rough list of these precious (negative-teleological) obstacles is
already familiar. Extant structures of geopolitical fragmentation,
population diversity, cultural incongruities, borders, occulted social
networks, intractable techno-economic processes, administrative
malfunctions, stubborn traditional variations, sheer complexities of
space, and no doubt much else beside, all contribute their frictional
grit. A ruined Tower of Babel looms into view on the
via negativa, and no intact edifice has ever looked more
glorious.
Carrying NRx perilously close to the brink of euphoria is the intimation
that the actually-existing Cathedral has Democratic World Government as
its only conceivable equilibrium state. A unification of the planet under
its auspices is the sole future that makes sense for it. If it is denied
this ‘manifest destiny’ it will
die — as its intrinsic
tendency to expansionary proselytization makes evident, unambiguously. The
Cathedral needs the whole of the earth, merely to survive. On the
via negativa the master of our socio-politically devastated world
seems like a radically mortal thing.
ADDED: Hoppe touching upon One World Government. Also:
I have been called an extremist, a reactionary, a revisionist, an
elitist, a supremacist, a racist, a homophobe, an anti-Semite, a
right-winger, a theocrat, a godless cynic, a fascist and, of course, a
must for every German, a Nazi. So, it should be expected that I have a
foible for politically “incorrect” sites that every “modern,” “decent,”
“civilized,” “tolerant,” and “enlightened” man is supposed to ignore and
avoid.
June 16, 2014Non-Democracy
Eli Dourado’s
piece
at The Umlaut on ‘What the Neoreaction Doesn’t Understand about
Democracy’ has already accumulated a mass of (to this blog) telling
criticism in its comment thread, plus a full-length
critique
by Henry Dampier. The tone of the discussion has been encouraging, and the
grounds proposed by Dourado
upon which democracy is asked to defend itself (government
incontinence and rampant redistributionism) is doubly so. Based on
this
(rather odd) research paper, the conclusion is that ‘non-democracies’ are
at least as messed up as democracies on the indicators that matter to the
economic right.
From the perspective of Outside in, the central problem with this
line of argument is the assumption that ‘Neoreaction’ can be aligned with
the grotesquely aggregated category of ‘non-democracy’. (Although, this is
of course how things will look from a default commitment to democratic
normality.) The Neoreactionary critique is in fact directed at
demotic government, a regime class that includes democracy,
authoritarian populism, and socialist ‘people’s republics’. The reliable
signature of this class is that its members legitimate themselves through
democracy, however their various levels of democracy are gauged by social
scientific analysis. North Korea self-identifies as the Democratic
People’s Republic of Korea (and to a formalist, this is of ineliminable
significance). Since it is the
principle of democratic legitimation that NRx denounces, its
models are restricted to a far more compact class than ‘non-democracies’ —
namely, to non-demotic states: with absolute monarchies and colonial
regimes as the purest historical examples, supplemented by
restricted-franchise commercial republics (17-18th century United
Provinces and United Kingdom*), (still virtual) Joint-Stock Republics, and
demotically-compromised Confucian Autocracies, plus rightist military
juntas (since Pinochet cannot reasonably be excluded). As soon as regimes
of such types are statistically amalgamated with socialist / populist
dictatorships, the theoretical chaos is irredeemable.
Furthermore, and even more crucially, main-current Neoreaction does not
argue for ‘non-democracy’ over democracy, but for Exit over Voice. It does
not expect some governmental magic from ‘non-democracies’ (except on its —
admittedly wide — theoretically incoherent fringes). Effective government
requires non-demotic control, resulting from (apolitical)
selection pressure. The identification of the state with the corporate
institution is directed to the fact that businesses work when they can be
bankrupted. The attraction of the ‘dictatorial’ CEO is a twin-product of
demotic desensitization and competitive hyper-sensitization. The reason to
free the ‘monarch’ from the voice of the people is to lock him into
undistracted compliance with the Outside.
Approaching his conclusion, Dourado suggests:
Of course, Mulligan et al. also provide some limited ammunition for the
neoreaction. That nondemocracies have essentially the same social and
economic policies as democracies undercuts a key tenet of the demotist
religion: that formal (and equal) voice is an important channel by which
policies come to reflect the will of the people. If nondemocracies have
many of the same policies, then it is clear that democracy is not
necessary to implement the will of the people on some policy issues, at
least.
This is, of course, completely upside down as far as NRx is concerned. The
demotic sensitivity of ‘non-democracies’ — far from being a point in their
favor — is the factor that exposes this category in all of its radical and
theoretically-unusable bogosity. The only appeal of ‘non-democracy’ is
immunity to corruption through demotic pressure. Dictatorial populism can
be expected to be even more distant from the principles of Neoreactionary
government than democracy, because its comparative efficiency at
representing a coherent ‘popular will’ digs it even faster and deeper into
ruin. It is administrative action in the name of the people that is
deplored.
If Dourado were saying
non-demotic government is simply something you can never have,
then it is an argument that at least addresses NRx in a way that makes
sense. The same cannot be said about the ‘debate’ as it yet exists.
* My description of Hannoverian England as a ‘commerical republic’ can be
attributed to an anti-Jacobite tic.
ADDED:
Meta-reaction. (ED seems not to see any deep connection between
propertarian and Exit-based models of governance, which is at least a
little thoughtless. Property is defined by an effective right to free
disposal, making it equivalent to an Exit-option on its current
instantiation. On these grounds, there is no difference between my
definition of the principal Neoreaction governance criterion and
Dampier’s, except for variation of emphasis.)
ADDED: Some interesting comments from Eli’s Neoreactionary phase (dug up by
Blogospheroid).
August 21, 2014Enthusiasm
This
is a reliable guide to approved thinking within China’s Communist Party:
Blindly copying Western-style democracy can only bring disaster, an
influential Chinese Communist Party journal wrote in its latest edition
following more than a week of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.
Citing enduring violence and turmoil in countries like Afghanistan,
Egypt, Iraq and Libya, which have tried to adopt such a system of
government, the fortnightly magazine Qiushi said that Western democracy
did not suit all countries.
“The West always brags that its own democracy is a ‘universal value’,
and denies there is any other form of democracy,” said Qiushi, which
means “seeking truth”, in the issue distributed over the weekend.
“Western democracy has innate internal flaws and certainly is not a
‘universal value’; its blind copying can only lead to disaster,” Qiushi
added.
It shouldn’t be disappointing to hear such pious invocations of an “other
form of democracy”, but only coldly confirming of the worst. It’s all
clearly
stated.
In the present global order, the Cathedral has no serious external
enemies, but only awkward students, who refuse to learn the one and only
imaginable lesson in exactly the way, and at exactly the speed, expected
of them. The idea that democracy as such, and intrinsically, is
fundamentally inconsistent with sustainable social order (as
explained
by Hoppe,
acknowledged
by Thiel, and
thematized
by Moldbug), finds no official representation, anywhere in the world. Even
the North Koreans think they’re
democrats. At the ideological level, the calamity has already happened,
universally.
NRx bores itself by repeating this. It’s a
simple and — to ‘us’ — apparently obvious thing. Doubtless it’s correct
that mechanical repetition adds vanishingly little at this point, although
there’s probably still the need for a succinct statement of the
proposition, tightly encapsulated and incandescently lucid, for incessant
future reference.
What cannot be long-buried beneath the ennui is the extreme dissident
radicality of the counter-revolutionary thesis. To depart from the
democratic or evangelical-egalitarian (i.e.
Jacobin) faith remains
the ultimate heresy against teleo-political modernity. To suggest, even,
that there is a question of democracy is countenanced by
effectively no one, anywhere. In China, as the narrative goes, the
populace is still to be convinced the country is ‘ready yet’ for
accelerated democratization (on the Cathedral model — the only one). Look
at
this, then
this, and synthesize. Religious ‘hold outs’ are all that remain. Once
the faith moves people, the direction has already been
decided —
everyone
is agreed on that. (OK, not
these
guys, yet.)
If this topic becomes tedious, it’s all over. Democratization isn’t boring
to them. It’s the most exciting thing in the world, and they’re not going
to stop doing it.
Our work here has scarcely begun.
Hail Hydra!
October 7, 2014Dynasty
A persuasive
argument
for why the Chinese authorities are looking forward to Hillary-v-Jeb in
2016:
The ruling Chinese Communist Party is deeply sensitive to charges that
it is non-democratic and the playground of “princelings” — a pejorative
term for the class of Chinese business tycoons and political power
players who trace their lineages to Communist veterans. Nothing helps to
blunt that charge as much as the idea that American democracy is
similarly corrupt. “The Chinese media, especially the Party media, has
been using American elections as a way to discredit democracy,” says
Kecheng Fang, a former reporter for the
Southern Weekly in Guangzhou who now researches Chinese
media at the University of Pennsylvania. “I think much of Chinese media
has been referring to this election as Clinton 2.0 versus Bush 3.0, so
it’s a very trendy topic.” As Weihua Chen, chief Washington
correspondent for the China Daily, the government’s
largest English-language newspaper, put it to me in an interview: “You
guys always talk about being the greatest democracy, but now you have a
democracy run by two families for more than a decade?”
Scrape down past the popcorn topsoil, and it’s a depressing story.
Democratic hegemony is so solidly entrenched as a benchmark of global
regime legitimacy, that even China resorts to pointing the finger and
taunting: call that a real democracy. The
Zeitgeist hasn’t remotely begun to turn, and the world’s most
powerful autocracies are still deferring to it submissively, even as they
beg for some tolerance in respect to timing.
If NRx has one serious task — and in fact, an overwhelmingly intimidating
one — it is to contribute to the establishment of
an alternative principle of political legitimation. To imagine that significant steps had yet been taken in this regard
would be to court extreme self-delusion. The road ahead is hard.
July 21, 2015Informality and its Discontents
China’s problem with poorly formalized power:
As an old-style Leninist party in a modern world, the CCP is confronted
by two major challenges: first, how to maintain “ideological discipline”
among its almost 89 million members in a globalized world awash with
money, international travel, electronically transmitted information, and
heretical ideas. Second, how to cleanse itself of its chronic
corruption, a blight that Xi has himself described as “a matter of life
and death.” […] The primary reason the Party is so susceptible to graft
is that
while officials are poorly paid, they do control valuable national
assets. So, for example, when property development deals come together
involving real estate (all land belongs to the government) and banking
(all the major banks also belong to the government), officials vetting
the deals find themselves in tempting positions to supplement their
paltry salaries by accepting bribes or covertly raking off a percentage
of the action.
(XS emphasis.)
(The
article
as a whole is ideologically pedestrian.)
Obscure the degree to which government is a business, and it will find a
way to make itself one, around the back (with its executives privatizing
sovereign property on an ad hoc, chaotic basis). Exhortations
(from Sun Yat-sen, repeated by Mao Zedong) to “Serve the People!” are no
substitute for sound administrative engineering, of a kind that rationally
aligns incentives, and lucidly recognizes the sole consistent function of
government — maximization of sovereign property value. The pretense of
altruistic government and the reality of rampant corruption are
exactly the same thing, seen from two different sides. The
illusion of a public sphere is the root of the social sickness.
The gist of Orville Schell’s analysis is that China has deviated
disturbingly from a functional Western model it would be better advised to
return to. On the contrary, it is China’s continued (profound) submission
to a Western demotist framework of administrative legitimation that makes
its problems so intractable. A government devoted to serving the people is
radically corrupt by essence. Government properly tends the national
estate, as the agent of its owners. Open, clear, and unapologetic
admission of that basic principle seems no closer in the East than the
West.
ADDED: “Russian corruption is the new Soviet Communism.” … and the old Soviet
Communism, and the older universal Jacobinism, and everything spawned from
it. Corruption is what demotism is, rather than what it looks like to
itself in the mirror.
April 13, 2016One Step at a Time
The bad news: Rolling back democracy is really
hard. (It’s a stimulating pursuit nevertheless.) What are the chances of
this
happening before
this? Not high, in my estimation.
The good news: The ‘task’ of
spruiking
evangelical democratization is supported by the historical tide, and has
already reached a quite remarkably level of maturity. If people are
looking for a near-term goal, this surely gets jostled to the front of the
queue. It’s not hard to foresee a time, only a few years out, when the
very idea of pushing the Cathedral on politically ‘under-developed’
societies will look like sabotage pure and simple. This is already how
much of the world sees it (including all honest observers).
Looking back, the ‘Arab Spring’ will be seen as the decisive moment when
democracy promotion became indistinguishable from ruinous coercion.
‘Sprung’ societies are devastated. They are triumphalist democracy’s
Russian Winter. Once the enemy’s advance has ground entirely to a halt,
the push back can steadily, relentlessly begin.
June 12, 2013Scandalicious
Who could have imagined that Obama’s second term would prove so bullish
for
popcorn sales?
There’s a moment of pressure-cooker catastrophe beyond which the very idea
of ‘keeping a lid on things’ becomes hysterically comical. The lid isn’t
even in the kitchen, it’s blasted through three stories of apartment
ceilings and compromised the structural integrity of an entire housing
block. The media has no choice but to join the feeding-frenzy — under
scandal-max conditions that would look ridiculous — and besides, they’ve
been
scandalized.
Unlike
euphoric
conservatives, still less
ecstatic
Republicans, neoreactionaries are motivated to stay calm and focused.
Runaway scandal meltdown only furthers Dark Enlightenment when it
overspills party-political point-scoring to corrode the foundations of
the regime.
When government is
understood
realistically, as a complex ideologically-saturated institution distinct from the
superficial vicissitudes of electoral politics, it is revealed as an
essentially deep-partisan project (the Cathedral). The government is not
commanded by progressives, it is progressive. It’s not ‘us’, it’s
‘who, whom’. Once this is exposed in detail, and lucidly comprehended, the
neoreactionary case has been made in its entirety.
That the Cathedral is indistinguishable from
radical democratization does not at all imply that it is democratically
answerable, through electoral mechanisms. As its project of spreading the
religion of democracy to the whole world enters the phase of scandal-prone
dementia, exhibited equally in both domestic and international affairs,
two features become blatant (= scandalous)
(1) Mature democracies outgrow the last vestiges of electoral control
(because the retarded masses can’t be trusted to vote for more democracy
always and everywhere, they require structural ‘guidance’ by those
enlightened people and institutions who know how best to empower them).
(2) Since eschatological dreams do not convert into practical policy,
escalating dysfunction drowns-out coherent purpose, resulting eventually
in fanatically-motivated total disorder (because doing what can’t possibly
work is an unconditional imperative). It’s consummate deontology made
visible. Good intentions float sanctimoniously above the ruins.
The Cathedral is completing its self-fabrication as an autonomized,
morally-frenzied lunatic, extensively and intensively
paperclipping
the world for democracy, and thus destroying it in order to save us. As
scandal erupts from everything it touches, this fundamental sociopolitical
reality is becoming ever more difficult not to see.
ADDED: Some (disappointing) Koolaid-drinking from Richard Fernandez: “That is
probably the single most disturbing thing about these scandals. The
Valkyr-fueled rage has undermined the political mechanisms and trashed the
processes through which persons of disparate political persuasions of the
nation are supposed to come to an understanding.” — The obvious problem
with this? There’s only ever been one ‘understanding’ you’re permitted to
come to, and that’s progression to the left.
May 16, 2013Obamanation …
… isn’t an insulting name for Obama, or even for what he has ‘wrought’.
It’s a name for America, and thus for the leading spirit (or
Zeitgeist) of the world. A country where support for a Harvard
Law presidency ‘bottoms out’ (repeatedly) at something above 40% knows
what it wants — and is getting it (good and hard). Blaming Obama for any
of this is like blaming pustules for the bubonic plague.
The world deserves Obama almost as much as America does, and in many
cases, even more. If the Cathedral is basically to be applauded — and who
doesn’t believe that? — there’s every reason to mainline it, by putting
the authentic voice of the academy in power. As the chrysalis-husk of a
universal project, America is duty bound to abolish itself as a particular
nation. If it defers to its own ‘propositional’ ideals, how could it not?
There are even chunks of the Tea Party who kinda sorta felt it was the
right thing to do. The conservative establishment certainly did, including
the Republican campaign machines of the two last presidential elections.
The Idea necessitates blood sacrifice, which Obamanation consummates.
However neoreaction makes sense of itself, it
signals what it is through a dismissal of partisan vulgarity. Anybody who
thinks the GoP has the key even to the outhouse is decidedly not ‘one of
us’. Like the tingle-crotched devotees of the One, we understand that
Obama is a destiny, and even an incarnation of logos. What he
symbolizes has been awaited for a long time. His personal vacuity and
administrative incompetence do not detract, in the slightest, from that.
Through the fantasy that he reduces to (with only insignificant
remainder), the Cathedral announces itself purely at last. Attitudinal
correctness is the only authority to be recognized in the end.
By voiding governance from its summit, ‘Obama’ makes the neoreactionary
case. He shows that government is to be found elsewhere, in the machinery
of practical elitism, and that — there too — symbolic gestures have almost
entirely supplanted functional competence. Government, even
real government, is no longer expected to work. All that is
required is that it can be morally legitimated, down to its most minute
corpuscle, so that its failures are clearly seen — which is to say
promoted — as the fault of something other than itself.
Insofar as retrograde pieces of America insist upon being themselves, as
if untouched by the Idea, they are betrayed (by the ‘media’) as
unworthy of their government, and justly suffering for their
sins. Carnal privilege blinds them to what they should joyfully give up.
To not believe in government — as the radiant sign of the
collective — is a fallen state, from which the Obamanation extends a
promise of redemption. By losing everything, with the help of government,
one enters into the Kingdom.
The Obamanation is not what Obama has done (an intrinsically ridiculous
construction). It’s what chose Obama, as its symbol. It is the
virtual evacuation of the world into America, and the complementary
evacuation of specifically American power from the world. This is the
phase of historical progression in which neoreaction
necessarily emerges, its diagnoses dramatized by everything that
now occurs, undisguised.
For that we are truly grateful, intrinsically, which is to say, in our
very existence as the channel for something else. Conservatives will
continue to find that hard to understand.
Consider this
Instapundit visual joke, just for a moment:
The ‘Bush’ angle sounds partisan, and thus embarrassingly knuckle-draggy
to brandy-sipping sophisticates of the Outer right, but that judgment
might be over-hasty. Perhaps partisanship itself is swallowed up into the
lampoon. In any case, it still makes me laugh, due mostly to the tacit
understanding that “World War III” is what Obama is for.
Of course, when you elect the pure totem of the Cathedral to the
world’s highest office, you’re really — or consequentially — calling for
the cleansing of the earth in the fires of hell. It requires only the most
elementary comprehension of Occidental religious history to understand
that.
Spiritual purity, and damn the consequences, that’s the
Obamanation (and, by the way, you’re a racist). It’s the bloody ruination
of world order in the name of moral fanaticism, eclipsing all strategic
realism through its wishful thinking and associated, narrow political
maneuvers, before blundering into the present stage of terminal,
incendiary, paralysis.
Who could have imagined that the world going to shit would be so bizarrely
entertaining?
ADDED: Breaking point?
September 2, 2013Democracy is Doomed
Even UK Cathedral mouthpiece The Economist seems to be
getting
the message that democracy is cooked. While careful to code the most
sensitive perceptions, it givers every indication of recognizing that
democracy can’t be transplanted beyond a dying ethnic core, that it
relentlessly collapses time-horizons, and that it systematically selects
for demagogic leaders (among numerous other problems). The Chinese model,
despite its manifold imperfections, works far better.
No worries though — The Economist has some solutions. All
democracies have to do is practice government self-restraint, reverse the
growth of the state, and suppress majoritarianism, and everything will
turn around for them. In other words, if democracy could just stop being
democracy, it would have a future. (It can’t, and it doesn’t.)
When democratic societies were far less deeply degenerate, they
degenerated. Now they’ve become social wastelands of super-entitled
dependency, led by professional pop-star liars, the idea that they have
the cultural resources to reverse their morbid course is pure comedy.
It’s all going down. (Learn Mandarin.)
ADDED: The new cannibals.
ADDED: More neo-cannibalism (pass the popcorn). As the media-grievance complex
pushes everything to hair-trigger hyper-criticality, it just takes two
syllables to seriously mess with your life.
ADDED: David Mamet muses on “the current position of Western democracy wending
its way back to the sea. … If before the big bang there was nothing, and
if all energy since then is expended in the manner best suited to return
the world to that state, then all seemingly random permutations of energy
dispersal must be attempts to accelerate the return to chaos.”
February 28, 20141930s Reloaded
The inherent destiny of democracy is
fascism. That’s the principal reason to despise it, rather than any cause for
celebration.
Does anyone seriously doubt the West is going to die ugly?
January 12, 2015Idiocracy
(The metric there is American school grade levels.)
(Via
(Via))
But don’t worry:
“It’s tempting to read this as a dumbing down of the bully pulpit,”
[former Clinton speechwriter Jeff] Shesol said. “But it’s actually a
sign of democratization. In the early Republic, presidents could assume
that they were speaking to audiences made up mostly of men like
themselves: educated, civic-minded landowners. These, of course, were
the only Americans with the right to vote. But over time, the franchise
expanded and presidential appeals had to reach a broader audience.”
It just looks like escalating cretinization. Really it’s Democracy®! Yay!
January 22, 2015Polarization
American partisan polarization, 1949-2011:

(Via.)
From the
paper: “We find that despite short-term fluctuations, partisanship or
non-cooperation in the U.S. Congress has been increasing exponentially for
over 60 years with no sign of abating or reversing.”
April 25, 2015The Polarizer
Considered solely in its basic cybernetic function, as a bi-polar
homeostat, the power of American democracy is extraordinary. Binary
oscillation is what it needs to work, so that is what it produces,
absorbing all variation into its structured contest. Animal totems almost
insultingly attest to the mobilization of archaic tribal instinct, and to
the implicit meaninglessness of the one difference it permits. There is
nothing, it
seems, that can escape it:
Perhaps it is fair to say that it is now impossible to commit a simple
murder or even an outrage as an individual act. It’s all imbued with
meaning, almost as if the conflict between the cops and the perps were
overshadowed by a far larger fight: Right versus Left in America.
There’s an unmistakable
trend to intensification
(more
here). Does that strengthen the mechanism, or steer it into crisis?
A social controlled fission device of this scale and complexity
is unprecedented in history. It began as an experiment, and is still
undergoing dynamic evolution. How stable is the stabilizer? It’s unlikely
that anybody understands it well enough to do better than guess.
December 3, 2015King Mob
There’s quite definitely a technical problem with banning public street
protest (i.e. mobs). Even a riotous mob is a vague concept, reliant upon
discretionary police judgment on occasions. But is the criminalization of
public protest also a problem of principal?
Strangely, most libertarians seem to think the right to free-association
extends automatically to mob formation. This presupposes that a mob is not
inherently an act of aggression, existing solely to intimidate, and in
fact — strictly speaking — an instance of terrorism. It is obvious why the
Left should like the mob. It self-identifies as the articulate
representative of the mob. Far more obscure is why anyone from a liberal
tradition, let alone further to the right, should concur in this
appreciation.
Free expression hardly requires physical aggregation in public places,
with near-inevitable expression of a potential for violence. It is not
difficult to see that the basic historical role of the mob has been to
advance demands, backed by implicit threat. Between a mob, a riotous mob,
and a revolutionary mob, there are differences of degree rather than of
kind. Even the strongest supporter of the principle of ‘voice’ should see
zero additional value in its physical concentration. Resonance and group
emotion undermine a statement, rather than reinforcing it, unless the
‘statement’ is collectively directed anger (which is to say once again,
inherently Leftist).
Mobs are no doubt almost impossible to effectively criminalize. That does
not at all mean one is compelled to like them, or acknowledge their
legitimacy. Their existence is an intrinsic threat to both liberty
and authority.
Perhaps laws against public indecency could be applied to politics in the
street? In any case, it is past time for everyone to the right of the Left
to lucidly despise it.
August 14, 2014Rule Britannia
This blog has zero confidence in ethno-nationalist street-fighting to
achieve anything beyond an even more deeply vulgarized demotism, as
inchoate mob impulses erupt under demagogic direction. So we consider the
‘decision‘ by
Tommy Robinson to step back from the hooligan counter-barbarism of the EDL
to be a defeat only for those who misguidedly think crypto-fascist
politics might have the key to the out-house, along with those who find a
crypto-fascist enemy convenient.
Politics in the streets is the primary indication of de-civilization in
the modern age, and nothing could ever make it worthy of ultra-right
support. Since street politics can occur only under government sanction —
which is to say in the absence of grape-shot — any claim it might make to
oppositional authenticity is wholly bogus. A right-wing riot is an
absurdity.
The story here has a genuinely important angle, however. Robinson’s
conversion to “better, democratic ideas” followed upon a carefully-crafted
diplomatic
exercise
by Britain’s state broadcaster, which
arranged for him to
meet with Muslim ‘representatives’ — under the supervision of the Quilliam
Foundation — in order to learn how nice and reasonable they are.
In other words, the
BBC seems to have
acknowledged its responsibility as the country’s effective government to
directly settle the few remaining awkward ideological misalignments among
the people. Neoreactionaries have learned that any democratic regime is
really governed by its least democratic elements, and the more fanatical
its democratization, the less democracy has to do with its rule. As with
any Popular Protectorate under advanced democratic conditions, therefore,
elections for the governing BBC Trust are not under consideration —
because democracy is too important to throw like chum amongst the people
(except
of course in Hong Kong).
(Thanks to ZD for the pointer.)
November 1, 2013Quote note (#232)
O Great Powers of the Abyss, please let
this
happen:
Following their apparently delusional belief in the “success” of
Tuesday night’s violent protests, anti-Trump groups are plotting
“Democracy Spring” threatening “drama in Washington” with the “largest
civil disobedience action of the century.” The operation, backed by
Soros-funded MoveOn.org among others,
warns on its website
that
“We will demand that Congress listen to the People and take immediate
action to save our democracy. And we won’t leave until they do – or
until they send thousands of us to jail.”
Here‘s a cop-perspective on the recent episode of street-level democracy
activism. There’s
more. (Via.)
I was slapped around a lot on Twitter recently by the usual Alt-Right mob
for expressing the inflexible opinion that right-wing rioting — and
political violence in general — is strategically retarded. So I have to
assume now, out of attributed consistency, that my sparring partners at
that juncture are considerably less amused than I am about the prospect of
left-wing rioting. Rioting for democracy is, of course, better
still. Eventually, violent social disorder and democracy begin to look
like the same phenomenon, differentiated only by speed (or ‘spontaneity’).
Then our grim work is done.
March 17, 2016Twitter cuts (#68)
The Outer Right provides the formal critique of democracy. It will be the
Left, though, that graphically closes the curtain on it.
The defense of democracy in political theory is that it offers an
alternative to violence as a mechanism for regime change. How’s that
working
out?
The democratic principle:
Violence is only illegitimate when it is employed to resist leftward
progression. By November, the only people still buying into that will be the
mobilized forces of the Cathedral regime.
June 3, 2016Days of Rage
An instant Twitter-format classic, by David Hines, on the Leftist
political violence to come. Storified
here.
Among the critical points:
Righties tell themselves that *of course* they’d win a war against
Lefties. Tactical Deathbeast vs. Pajama Boy? No contest. … Why, Righties
have thought about what an effective domestic insurrection would look
like. Righties have written books and manifestos! … It’s horseshit. …
The truth: Left is a lot more organized & prepared for violence than
Right is, and has the advantage of a mainstream more supportive of
it.
ADDED: Spandrell’s take.
January 16, 2017
CHAPTER TWO - ECONOMIC DEGENERACY
Quote notes (#34)
Words of wisdom from Obama (via):
The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit
is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government
can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing
financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s
reckless fiscal policies. … Increasing America’s debt weakens us
domestically and internationally. Leadership means that “the buck stops
here.” Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today
onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt
problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.
September 28, 2013Liberality for Losers
Machiavelli
on
Obamacare:
… any one wishing to maintain among men the name of liberal is obliged
to avoid no attribute of magnificence; so that a prince thus inclined
will consume in such acts all his property, and will be compelled in the
end, if he wish to maintain the name of liberal, to unduly weigh down
his people, and tax them, and do everything he can to get money. This
will soon make him odious to his subjects, and becoming poor he will be
little valued by any one; thus, with his liberality, having offended
many and rewarded few, he is affected by the very first trouble and
imperilled by whatever may be the first danger; recognizing this
himself, and wishing to draw back from it, he runs at once into the
reproach of being miserly.
[… ] Either you are a prince in fact, or in a way to become one. In the
first case this liberality is dangerous, in the second it is very
necessary to be considered liberal … […] And there is nothing wastes so
rapidly as liberality, for even whilst you exercise it you lose the
power to do so, and so become either poor or despised, or else, in
avoiding poverty, rapacious and hated. And a prince should guard
himself, above all things, against being despised and hated; and
liberality leads you to both. Therefore it is wiser to have a reputation
for meanness which brings reproach without hatred, than to be compelled
through seeking a reputation for liberality to incur a name for rapacity
which begets reproach with hatred.
ADDED: Some racist liberality math from Charlie Martin.
December 6, 2013Parasites
I try not to get spittle-flecked about the Boomers,
but
…
(Thanks to Bryce for the
link.)
June 23, 2014De-Dynamization
If you want to break an economy, democracy is the solution you’re looking
for. The crucial reference is to
this paper (via
Cowan), dedicated to the
The $42 Trillion Question: Will Rapid Growth in China and India
Persist?
The economic consequences of socio-political ‘progress’ are spelled out
about as clearly as anyone could want:
… nearly every country that experienced a large democratic transition
after a period of above-average growth (more than the cross-country
average of 2 percent) experienced a sharp deceleration in growth in the
10 years following the democratizing transition. Among 22 countries in
which episodes of large democratic transition coincided with
above-average growth, all but one (Korea in 1987 with an acceleration of
only 0.22 percent) experienced a growth deceleration. The combination of
high initial growth and democratic transition seems to make some
deceleration all but inevitable. The magnitude of the decelerations was
very large: The median deceleration across the 22 countries was 2.99
percent and the average deceleration was 3.53 percent.
The phenomenon of
demosclerosis
is already theoretically well-grounded. It appears to be a more rapidly-acting poison than even its fiercest
critics have acknowledged.
October 20, 2014What Democracy Can’t Do
An Outside in stab at (tech-comm) NRx in a nutshell:
If economically optimal labor pricing is ‘politically impossible’
you’re doing politics wrong.
(‘Wage-stickiness’ defenses of inflationary macro were the immediate
context, but the application seems far broader.)
OK, some
carbs
(for anyone dissatisfied by raw gristle):
Europeans liked their welfare state regardless of where they stood on
the political spectrum. The roots of “social democracy” lie on the left,
but by the 1980s the preference for a mixed economy, generous health and
pension benefits, and regulated markets had become, on the European
continent at least, what Antonio Gramsci called a “hegemonic ideology.”
These preferences were embraced by parties of the center-right as well
as the center-left, compatible with capital yet acceptable to democratic
majorities, and rejected principally by the extremes — and British
Tories [sic]. The idea that this well-liked welfare state, deemed by
many to be indispensable to social peace, might soon prove unviable in
the globalized economy of the late twentieth century hence became a
source of great anxiety.
June 19, 2015Collapse
(Via.)
No great mystery about the West’s bad mood.
October 24, 2016
CHAPTER THREE - ELECTIONS AND RECENT EVENTS
Regime Redecoration Randoms
Here in Shanghai, we receive the US presidential election results on
Wednesday morning, making this the last chance to venture reckless
predictions. Who gets to seize the poisoned chalice and assume
responsibility for the
financial collapse
of the United States of America?
Feel the hate. Negativity reigns supreme in this election, with
oppositional or defensive motivations almost wholly purified of positive
contamination. According to The Economist, negative political ads have
accounted for an unprecedented 90% of the total. The
words
of PJ Media commenter Subotai Bahadur distill the sentiment perfectly:
“Romney was not my first, second, or third choice, but I will crawl over
ground glass to vote for him.” To be fondly remembered as ‘the ground-glass election.’
Way of the Salamander. Urban Future isn’t inclined to deride
Mormonism as weird (being weird is what religions are for), but there are
bound to be significant cultural implications to the inauguration of a
Mormon president in an unusually
apocalyptic
time. The Mormon faith is the science fiction version of Abrahamic
religion extending an evolutionary bridge from man to God – a path of
practical divinization. No surprise, then, to discover that there’s a
Mormon Transhumanist Association. When combined with the irreverence that latches onto any decaying,
chaos-wracked administration it could get seriously entertaining …but then
we’d miss the classic version of
Cathedral II
(Return of the Clerisy), replaced by a strange re-make. Voters need to choose their flavor of
ground glass carefully.
Prophet motive. At
Zero Hedge,
Strauss & Howe generational cycle-theorist Jim Quinn
hangs
on to the apocalyptic theme. He argues that – at the brink of the ‘Fourth
Turning’ – Mitt Romney’s age, which places him in the ‘prophet
generation’, makes him odds on favorite to lead the global superpower into
Armageddon (so we have that to look forward to).
Reckless predictions?
(1) Discounting systematic media dishonesty points to a substantial Romney
victory.
(2) Winning this one is going to have been the most stupid thing that the
stupid party
ever did.
November 6, 2012UK General Election ’15
Briggs captures the
essentials:
You have to love — I do — how the cessation of accelerating profligate
spending is called in Europe “austerity”. Here [in the UK] the
slow-down-in-speeding-up-yet-still-increases-in-spending are called
“budget cuts”.
The “let’s carry on decaying at a genteel pace chaps” party
won
(unexpectedly). Insurgent parties did badly (except at the
geographical — rather than ideological — fringe). A
status quo outcome, then. A shallower, longer decline path it is
…
The more positive implications concern territorial
disintegration. Deepening political alienation in Scotland, and a commitment to a
referendum on Europe, promise opportunities for multi-level secessionary
tides to strengthen.
Also, the left will go even more nuts. When the teeth-gnashing commentary
begins to roll in, I’ll try to link some as
Schadenfreude tonic.
ADDED: Conservatives know that they’re losers, even when they ‘win’.
ADDED: HBD Chick applies some biorealism to the election results.
May 8, 2015Popcorn Activism
Partisan political stuff is as tacky as you can get, and if anything could
get people chucked out of NRx (and into the garbage-compressor of
history), that should be it. Having said that, and — of course — in a
spirit of the loftiest imaginable detachment, here’s just the slightest
morsel.
The Sailer
Strategy
is a model of sorts. This is due less to its concrete recommendations
(fascinating even to those who
disagree
with it, perhaps
vehemently), than —
(a) Its configuration of the political chess board as a puzzle, posing the
question:
Given this set up, is there any way for the GOP to win? Playing
GOP is much more fun, because it’s actually a challenge. Sailer doesn’t
need this encouragement, because he’s clearly a small-d democrat, and
probably also a big-R Republican, in sympathy at least. Despite this, his
disreputable
noticing
habit makes him radioactive, which brings us to —
(b) While a paragon of ingenuousness, Sailer is positioned by strategic
necessity in a position of subterfuge. His ideas are discussed in fearful
whispers, in shadowy corners of political think-tanks, and circulated only
in heavy disguise. It would be quite impossible for a pursuit of the
Sailer Strategy to be publicly admitted, short of a social and ideological
catastrophe so profound that its recommendations would have already been
rendered moot.
The Outsideness Strategy is
anti-democratic, merely opportunistically Republican, and
politically-unmentionable for even more essential reasons than those just
now alluded to. It has the advantages of extreme practicality, comparative
simplicity, and — most importantly — definitiveness. It is
intrinsically irreversible. It cannot be part of any continuing political
dialectic. Once it is executed, the GOP will have expended itself utterly
in completion of its teleo-historical function and auto-dismantle, among
the ashes of American Democracy®.
The unspeakable core of the Sailer Strategy:
The GOP actually doesn’t need anything but the white electorate to
win, and [gasp!]
racial polarization could easily be conceived as an asset.
The Outsideness Strategy analog: the almost incomprehensible idiocy of the
democratic system and, more specifically, of the American electorate is a
massively under-exploited resource. The subtitle of the strategy paper
that really cannot ever be written reads:
Winning big and terminally on the
idiocratic
battlefield.
This is not the place to rehearse the neoreactionary diagnosis of
democracy as an engine of cognitive deterioration. The “appalling
political
ignorance
of the American electorate” isn’t
exactly
stupidity, but it’s a reasonable proxy, and no one has any serious plans
to fix it. Let the liberals explain it to you:
I’m assuming it can be assumed.
Two helpful references before bolting things together:
(1) Peter Thiel
explains why it
would be a disaster for the GOP to win the presidency in 2016, unless the
financial has crashed by then (which he doesn’t expect it to).
(2) Jonathan Chait
argues:
Eternally optimistic seekers of bipartisanship have clung to the hope
that owning all of Congress, not merely half, will force Republicans to
“show they can govern.” This hopeful bit of conventional wisdom rests on
the premise that voters are even aware that the GOP is the party
controlling Congress. In fact, only about
40 percent of the public
even knows which party controls which chamber of Congress, which makes
the notion that the Republicans would face a backlash for a lack of
success fantastical.
Nobody expects these two to agree upon much, but they do agree upon one
thing: ‘Blame the President’ is the key to the democratic game. The
figure-head of executive power — crafted ever more blatantly to
Hollywood standards with each fresh election — is the convergence
point where sublime ignorance, mass resentment, media opportunity, and
electoral agency intersect. Just recognizing the President largely
exhausts the mental capacities of the electorate as far as political
matters are concerned, with a little slack left over for First Lady
reality TV, and then — possibly — knowing the name of the Veep. After
that, its swirling cognitive chaos, fed by outrages from partisan
bubble-worlds, TV sound-bites, salacious detail, and race porn. The
thought processes of the median voter are extremely easy to
model: Things bad, blame President! Nothing beyond that has any
real relevance, except to nerds.
Outsideness Strategy jiu jitsu jumps straight out of this. The
fundamental recommendation:
Shore up the symbolic radiance of the Presidency, and then avoid it
like the plague. Aim to win everything except the Presidency, until the whole
machinery comes apart. In other words, a GOP pursuing the OS would
(furtively) renounce presidential office for the remaining duration of
American Democracy.
What would be in it for them? Everything except the Presidency.
That’s almost everything already. Pursue the Strategy, incrementally gut
the powers of the executive, and the proportion of political prizes lying
outside the Whitehouse steadily grows. That’s where the interests of an
intelligent (if still craven, gluttonous, massively corrupt, and in most
other ways radically despicable) GOP lie. All the pork warehouses get
shifted away from the glittering media-saturated magnificence of the
Whitehouse, ever deeper into the shadows, enabling monstrous plundering on
an unprecedented scale to take place completely beyond the horizon of
concrete democratic comprehension. (Nobody said it was going to be
pretty.) POTUS gets the blame, Nu-GOP gets the gravy, FedGov is
delegitimated, power is salted away steadily into state houses, and the
whole abomination hurtles towards national disintegration. There’s only
one thing the GOP has to do, and that’s
to lose the presidential election every single time. Manage that,
and it wins pretty much everything else without even trying.
If the Outsideness Strategy had already been initiated, we certainly
wouldn’t have been told about it. The 2016 GOP Presidential pick will tell
us a lot.
ADDED: “Republicans need to remember: The electorate that turns out at
midterms is demographically narrower than the pool of voters who elect
presidents.” — Relevant, and usable.
November 6, 2014Popcorn Activism II
The whole of
this
analysis (from the Left) is highly relevant to the Outsideness
Strategy. One
could even be forgiven for thinking it is already being pursued:
The presidency is extremely important, of course. But there are also
thousands of critically important offices all the way down the ballot.
And the vast majority — 70 percent of state legislatures, more than 60
percent of governors, 55 percent of attorneys general and secretaries of
state — are in Republicans hands. And, of course, Republicans control
both chambers of Congress.
With the final paragraph comes the money quote:
But the much more significant question facing the [Democratic] party
isn’t about the White House — it’s about all the other offices in the
land. The problem is that control of the presidency seems to have
blinded progressive activists to the possibility of even having an
argument about what to do about all of them. That will change if and
when the GOP seizes the White House, too, and Democrats bottom out. But
the truly striking thing is how close to bottom the party is already and
how blind it seems to be to that fact.
If the GOP take the presidency, of course, they reset back to homeostatic
bi-polar alternation, degenerative quasi-equilibrium, and democratic
functionality — which is disaster. So for the GOP, the question is how to
stay out of the White House (without seeming to want to), while
incrementally subverting the central organs of national executive power.
When the decay process reaches the stages where large burning chunks are
falling off, it’s critical that there’s a Democrat in the Oval Office to
explain on cable news how it isn’t ze fault.
Yglesias seems to think the Republicans might do something with the
presidency of right-wing significance, which is (of course) laughable on
its face. The Union Executive exists to take the coming fall, and nothing
else. With that kept firmly in mind, everything can go swimmingly.
October 20, 2015Damnesty
Due to our rigorous aversion to partisan vulgarity, we couldn’t possibly
comment on
this:
The majority leader pummeled the airwaves, spending more than $5
million on the race, including a direct-mail piece that took a harder
line against immigration reform than Cantor previously had advocated.
[…] In many ways, however, the show of force gave more oxygen to the
little-known Brat, who had few resources and almost no outside cash
funding his underdog effort. To Cantor’s millions, Brat raised only
$200,000, and spent even less, according to the Center for Responsive
Politics. […] Among those who advocate changing the nation’s immigration
rules, Cantor’s loss seems likely to dash all hope that the House will
act on any legislation to provide a citizenship path for some immigrants
— as Cantor had once proposed. […] Many had expected the chamber could
turn to the issue once primary season had ended and lawmakers no longer
had to worry about protecting their right flank.
The Dark Dream scenario up to and beyond 2016 isn’t hard to piece
together:
* GOP lock on Congress to ensure maximum obstruction.
* Tea-Party insurgency driving the GOP into right-wing extremism®.
* Secessionist ambitions spreading like a forest fire.
* A radical progressive Democrat in the White House, to keep a Cathedral
clown-face glued onto the collapse.
Carry on.
ADDED: Jim.
ADDED: I like the cut of Zachary Werrell’s jib.
June 11, 2014Romney 2016
If this analysis is
right, Romney would be sure to lose a 2016 presidential bid. “Voters will
compromise on a lot of issues on Election Day but they won’t ever vote for
you if they don’t like you or worse yet, think you don’t like them.” That
makes him the
perfect GOP
candidate — delegitimating the opposition, without seizing the poisoned
chalice of democratic leadership (i.e. increasingly vacuous symbolic
authority). If the electorate grudgingly concede, after renewing his
humiliation,
he was right, but we voted against him anyway because he didn’t kiss my
baby, it’s NRx gravy.
This has to be in some way related:
January 13, 2015Out of the Popcorn Zone
As a corrective to the disturbingly unironic Donald Trump enthusiasm
affecting certain sections of NRx,
here‘s Ace (of Spades)
exiting the circus:
… several years ago, I actually believed in America, and participatory
democracy, and all that. […] Now I don’t. So now I find myself agreeing
with Chomsky, albeit from a rightward direction. I don’t agree with him
about who controls the country, or to what political
ends; but I do with agree with him that it is controlled. […] Now this
brings me to … Manufactured Consent … So this is why I have become a
radical: I agree with a left-wing socialist/communist about the
fundamental rotten lie at the heart of the American democracy. […] … I
am turning off the TV, I am turning off the Bob Corker & Mitch
McConnell show, and, frankly, I am cutting the cord on America.
(He’s even turning off the computer for a day, which is perhaps edging
into excessive extremism.)
There’s still some definite suggestion in the post that
democracy itself could be exculpated, so the journey is not yet
complete. Give it time.
July 16, 2015Missing him already
Mencius Moldbug did the conceptual spadework needed to ignite NRx as an
Internet discussion, but it was Barack Obama who put the world to the
torch under the banshee cry “Neoreaction!” OK, that wasn’t his exact word,
but the basic point isn’t seriously controversial. By slapping an explicit
Cathedral clownface onto a faculty-lounge leftist superpower policy suite,
destined to pan-dimensional failure, he utterly bankrupted mainstream
global progressivism. The smug incompetence was insufferable, and —
crucially — so complacent that it let the academic-media inner workings
show. Even the saddest tools could see the thing now, and while many still
supported it ardently, it kind of
disgusted them.
There was clearly
no point at all trying to compromise with these people. “Those
neoreactionary types don’t, maybe we should be listening to them?” (Plenty
of toxicity comes out of that, but there’s no need to rake over it again
right now — it’s something I talk about all the time.)
Victor Davis Hanson is an irredeemable Neocon, but he understands this
stuff. His
portrait
of Obama is almost excruciatingly persuasive. Core point: “Insidiously and
inadvertently, Barack Obama is alienating the people and moving the
country to the right. If he keeps it up, by 2017 it will be a reactionary
nation.”
Here’s the dark heart of the piece (quoted at a length that risks IP
violation):
The tiny number of prescient pundits who warned what the Obama years
would entail were not the supposedly sober and judicious establishment
voices, who in fact seemed to be caught up in the hope-and-change
euphoria and missed entirely Obama’s petulance and pique: the Evan
Thomases (“he’s sort of god”), or the David Brookses (“and I was looking
at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant, and I’m thinking, a)
he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.” “It
is easy to sketch out a scenario in which [Obama] could be a great
president.”), or the Chris Matthewses (“the feeling most people get when
they hear Barack Obama’s speech. My, I felt this thrill going up my leg.
I mean, I don’t have that too often.”), or the Michael Beschlosses (“Uh.
I would say it’s probably — he’s probably the smartest guy ever to
become President.”), or the Chris Buckleys (“He has exhibited throughout
a ‘first-class temperament,’ pace Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s famous
comment about FDR. As for his intellect, well, he’s a Harvard man”), or
the Kathleen Parkers (“… with solemn prayers that Obama will govern as
the centrist, pragmatic leader he is capable of being”), or the Peggy
Noonans (“He has within him the possibility to change the direction and
tone of American foreign policy, which need changing; his rise will
serve as a practical rebuke to the past five years, which need rebuking;
his victory would provide a fresh start in a nation in which a fresh
start would come as a national relief.”).
In truth, it was the loud, sometimes shrill, and caricatured voices of
talk radio, the so-called crazy Republican House members, and the
grassroots loudmouths of what would become the Tea Party who had Obama’s
number. They warned early on that Barack Obama’s record was that of a
petulant extremist, that his writing presaged that he would borrow and
spend like no other president, that his past associations gave warning
that he would use his community-organizing skills cynically to divide
Americans along racial lines, that nothing in his past had ever
suggested anything other than radicalism and an ease with divisive
speech, that his votes as a state legislator and as a U.S. senator
suggested that he had an instinctual dislike of the entrepreneur and the
self-made businessman, and that his past rhetoric advised that he would
ignore settled law and instead would rule by fiat — that he would render
immigration law null and void, that he would diminish the profile of
America abroad, and that he would do all this because he was an
ideologue, with no history of bipartisanship but a lot of animus toward
his critics, and one who saw no ethical or practical reason to
appreciate the more than 60 years of America’s postwar global leadership
and the world that it had built. Again, the despised right-wingers were
right and the more moderate establishment quite wrong.
Those who supported Obama are never going to be taken seriously about
anything, ever again. They’re done. (That’s what Trump demonstrates.)
But there’s more:
A lot of ambitious and dangerous powers are watching Obama assume a
fetal position, and may well as a consequence act foolishly and
recklessly this next year. Not only Russia, China, and North Korea, but
also Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, ISIS, and assorted rogue states may take
chances in the next 14 months that they would otherwise never have
entertained (given that America is innately strong and they are mostly
in comparison far weaker) — on the premise that such adventurism offers
tangible advantages without likely negative consequences and that the
chance for such opportunities will not present itself again for decades
to come. […] At home, Obama feels liberated now that he is free from
further elections. He thinks he has a legitimate right to be a bit
vindictive and vent his own frustrations and pique, heretofore repressed
over the last seven years because of the exigencies of Democratic
electioneering. Obama can now vent and strike back at his opponents,
caricaturing them from abroad, questioning their patriotism, slandering
them for sport, and trying to figure out which emblematic executive
orders and extra-legal bureaucratic directives will most infuriate them
and repay them for their supposed culpability for his failed
vero possumus presidency. […] The more contrarian he
becomes, and the more he opposes the wishes of the vast majority of the
American people, all the more Obama envisions himself speaking truth to
power and becoming iconic of something rather than the reality that he
is becoming proof of nothing. […] Hold on. We haven’t seen anything
yet.
One more year of Obama’s — hopefully intensified — NRx activism, then
things get a whole lot more difficult. Four years of remotely competent,
and even vaguely rightish US executive government, and NRx as a memetic
contagion will be close to extinction. That might not be a bad thing, but
it’s worth noting.
December 9, 2015Quote note (#215)
I’m not saying the election was rigged. I have no
evidence of such a thing, and I’m sure the good people of Iowa are
honest and competent. […] But just for fun, watch me
build my
case
for a rigged election.
Since a lot of enraged Trumpenproletarians* are going to be talking about
this, I should add some minimal local framing. This blog is:
(a) Loftily detached from Trump enthusiasm, and
(b) Unable to morally discriminate between fixed democracy, and
‘clean’ democracy. (Though, perhaps, the latter is ultimately slightly
less depraved.)
Still, this story is already out there, and it isn’t unimportant at the
level of popcorn-positive political disintegration, regardless of the
final — and probably irrecoverable — facts.
* See
this
(+) persuasive introduction to early 21st century American class war. (Plus.)
ADDED: For obvious relevance
February 3, 2016Twitter cuts (#99)
The meltdown of the GOP as observed by a concerned outsider:
‘
The radical
repolarization
of the party system within an Anglophone democracy is a rare event. To
find persuasive precedent for what is happening today, it is arguably
necessary to return all the way to the mid-19th century and the emergence
of the Republican Party during the Civil War era. It’s only natural, then,
that their should be an unusual level of agitation about developments
(though this description risks — very seriously — putting the cart before
the horse).
2016 is set to be a year for the history books.
February 22, 2016Diamond and Silk
More socio-ideological scrambling. Camille Paglia describes them as a ‘revelation‘, linking to this
one. (They’ve
done a bunch.) Their latest is
on the Chicago
disorder. Their David Duke
commentary is
also a thing of wonder.
Here they are
with the Donald, and doing
Fox.
This is Saturday popcorn material, but it’s not short of discussion
potential. Their lopsided double act is a piece of artistry (as the Fox
piece makes clear).
“Choo-choo that train to glory!”
They have to be driving more than a few people nuts.
March 12, 2016Sexual Politics
Via
Nate Silver, the electoral implications of hypothetical solely-male and
solely-female electorates in the US (2016):
Given the absence of a realistic geo-political segregation option,
continuing tension can be safely anticipated. (There still has to be a way
to break the place up that makes more sense, such as starting with the
places that don’t change color when gender-flipped.)
October 12, 2016Broken Detente
Anybody interested in the racial dynamics of Trump-era American culture
and politics should find much of interest in
this. It might be the closest thing to an insightful center-ground
perspective on what has been happening to be turned up yet.
November 15, 2016So, they did it
Their
delight
at the decision burns:
For reminding America that demagoguery feeds on despair and that truth
is only as powerful as the trust in those who speak it, for empowering a
hidden electorate by mainstreaming its furies and live-streaming its
fears, and for framing tomorrow’s political culture by demolishing
yesterday’s, Donald Trump is TIME’s 2016 Person of the Year.
Divided States of America is worth everything.
And 2016 continues:
ADDED:
December 7, 2016Rapture
Each encounter with the phrase “government shutdown” sparks a detonation of euphoria. It could get quite distracting.
More
here
(with useful chart, and some acute comments).
Rick Moran,
trying
to stir up some gloom, makes the whole situation even more delicious: “And
the hell of it is, the hard right wing in the House that has been pushing
this futile strategy are not going to be blamed for the cave-in. It will
be those who are deemed insufficiently supportive of a cause that never
had a chance to succeed who will probably suffer the consequences.”
— Federal cardiac arrest and the accelerated disintegration of
the GOP? Bliss was it in that twilight …
September 30, 2013Nuked
Jonathan H. Adler at The Volokh Conspiracy writes:
Despite
allowing
the
confirmation
of
judges
for
other courts, and
one D.C. Circuit nominee, Republicans have continued to block Obama’s latest D.C. Circuit
nominees. Now that Senate Republicans have … successfully filibustered
five Obama nominees — the same number as Senate Democrats blocked with a
filibuster (but half those for which cloture was initially defeated) —
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid wants to change the rules. According
to
several
news
reports, Senator Reid is prepared to invoke the so-called “nuclear option” and
force through President Obama’s nominees on a party-line vote, perhaps
as early as today. What this involves is making a parliamentary ruling
that only a majority vote is required to end debate on a judicial
nomination and then sustaining that decision with a majority vote. Some
Senate Republicans threatened to take such a step during the Bush
Administration, but backed off when a group of Senators from both
parties forged a temporary deal to end the stand-off and avert the rule
change.
The ‘nuclear option’ represents the clear admission that the division of
powers is not only dead but spectacularly cremated, with judicial
appointees formally reduced to partisan functionaries. It would thus
signal the explicit demolition of the US Constitution. Since a wheezing
travesty is worse than a corpse, even strong supporters of the
constitutional principle should have few problems with this specific
instance of incendiary termination.
America’s crisis of governance is hurtling to a conclusion far sooner than
most sober commentators had imagined. As with so many other institutional
questions posed in the hysterical phase of Left Singularity, there’s only
one realistic response: Let it burn.
ADDED: It’s
about jobs.
ADDED: “Democrats nuked the ratchet” (roughly my argument, but on MDMA).
November 21, 2013Demo-babble
Fred Hiatt
on
the ‘cold war’ still raging in Hong Kong:
Anson Chan
… rose through the prestigious Hong Kong civil service to the top
appointed position of chief secretary, resigning in 2001 when she felt
the chief executive was allowing Beijing to chip away at Hong Kong’s
core values: rule of law, a level playing field and freedom of press,
speech and association. Since then, she said, democracy’s hold has grown
more precarious …
Did you spot the subtle non sequitur? (To resolve it requires
some understanding of the fact that the precise, technical meaning of
‘democracy’ to experts like Hiatt is ‘nice Westernish stuff we like’.)
April 8, 2014Quote notes (#107)
The mainstream is running
out:
In the broadcast media in particular, there is an implied assumption
that “the Scotland moment” is something confined to that country. But
the reality across the UK suggests something much deeper and wider, and
a simple enough fact: that what is happening north of the border is the
most spectacular manifestation of a phenomenon taking root all over –
indeed, if the splintering of politics and the rise of new forces on
both left and right across Europe are anything to go by, a set of
developments not defined by specific national circumstances, but
profound social and economic ruptures.
Here, Labour and the Conservatives have recently been scoring their
lowest combined share of support. Organisationally, they are both
hollowed out and increasingly staffed by wet-behind-the-ears
apparatchiks who only compound the parties’ distance from the public.
Whether justifiably or not, millions of British people have passed
through holding politicians in contempt and now treat them with cold
indifference. Let’s face it: the only thing keeping all this alive is
the electoral system.
(The whole opinion piece is well worth reading, on panic-socialist Colin
Crouch’s ‘post-democracy’ observations in particular. You know things are
really beginning to get desperate when the Left begins to have interesting
thoughts.)
September 12, 2014Quotable (#162)
The Left-Liberal
agony:
There’s more to a democracy than just the holy scripture of the
constitution — there are also sacred numbers: election results.
Together, words and numbers mold a country’s politics. In this process,
the constitution is the constant while election represent a dynamic
element. In the near future, this could also present a problem in
several places: Election results are expected to deliver the wrong
numbers. In Austria, a right-wing populist might get elected president.
This could also happen in the United States. Germany’s AfD and France’s
Front National have also attracted strong minority followings. A
right-wing populist brush fire has become conceivable.
It wasn’t so very long ago that regime legitimation through popular will
seemed like a great idea to just about everybody. Now it’s looking
disturbingly like a blank check, in the hands of an unpredictable maniac.
(On the Outer Right, of course, the historical diagnosis is quite
straightforward:
Democracy first destroys the people, and then falls prey to them.
The Ancients would have found it odd that anybody could imagine this to be
a new idea.)
May 18, 2016Civil War II
… is looking like the one thing everyone can agree on (1,
2,
3, linked in order of escalation).
Prompt via.
January 20, 2017Quote note (#332)
Eli Lake
on
the Flynn flip:
In the end, it was Trump’s decision to cut Flynn loose. In doing this
he caved in to his political and bureaucratic opposition. [Republican
chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence,
Representative Devin] Nunes told me Monday night that this will not end
well. “First it’s Flynn, next it will be Kellyanne Conway, then it will
be Steve Bannon, then it will be Reince Priebus,” he said. Put another
way, Flynn is only the appetizer. Trump is the entree.
If there’s not much more to this than there looks, it’s hard to see it as
anything but an unforced invitation to the hyenas. Or, turned around the
other way, if Trump turns out to be anything like as incompetent as his
opponents predict, he’s toast.
February 15, 2017Trump on Syria
Here‘s the public (Twitter) record, compiled in chronological order from May
2013. Not much indication of ambiguity.
If a nose-dive back into neoconservative meddling follows from this, it’s
hard to see what could ever count as a credible commitment again. Anything
not on a blockchain will be senseless noise.
ADDED: Things are getting stupid quickly.
April 6, 2017
CHAPTER FOUR - FRAYING AT THE EDGES
Democratization is Done
The idea that political seriousness can be evacuated from any situation by
invoking (purely procedural) ‘democratic’ norms was always an evasion. It
was a way to avoid the reality of ‘who-whom’, and thus dependent upon a
haze of Cathedralist insincerity. The implicit selling point — “Don’t
worry, the rabble will accept representatives that we can work with” —
isn’t bought by anybody anymore. Things have gone wrong badly enough,
often enough, for such promises to have been discounted down to zero.
If you don’t want the rabble in power, you have to keep them from power.
That’s the simple, and now overt, understanding of the dawning
post-demotic age. Michael Hirsh doesn’t like it at all:
As the Egyptian military consolidates control by murdering pro-Muslim
Brotherhood protesters and declaring a state of emergency, we may be
witnessing the most dangerous potential for Arab radicalization since
the two Palestinian intifadas. Despite the resignation Wednesday of
Mohamed ElBaradei, the vice president, in opposition to the Egyptian
junta’s action, the discomfiting fact is that most of Egypt’s liberal
“democrats”—along with the United States—have never looked more
hypocritical. If the bloody crackdown is allowed to continue while the
U.S. and West do nothing, the actions of the Egyptian military could
de-legitimize democratic change in the Arab world for a generation or
more.
Read without judgement, Hirsh’s article is a fascinating
document, punctuated by a raging despair that marks a transition of aeons.
“Egypt’s liberal ‘democrats'” can either change course in accordance with
their name (as Hirsh would like, but does not expect), or they can teach
the world that ‘liberal democrats’ know nothing of global political
reality, and need to call themselves something new. A sound name would
describe a plausible, though ambitious, aspiration:
Modernity in Power (freed of democratic dreams). It will
still be a while before we hear anything of this kind, but its intimations
are not — any longer — difficult to detect.
ADDED: Crossing the Rubicon: “While we Americans are babbling about a new
politics of ‘inclusiveness’, even some of the Twitter-Facebook liberals of
Tahrir Square are coming to see Egypt as it is. Us or them.”
August 15, 2013Meanwhile, in India …
… there’s something happening that might even be bigger than Project
Idaho.
With two weeks left to go before electoral results are in, the world’s
largest democracy seems set to veer hard right, to an extent unprecedented
in its modern history. There’s a leftish but informative briefing on the
ideological stakes
at
Quartz.
NRx tends to be quite insular, often out of semi-articulate principle, so
nobody (other than enemies) seems to have paid much attention to this yet.
That’s odd, upon reflection, because the Modi BJP seems to be juggling
Trichotomy issues of
a familiar kind within its
Hindutva platform,
which glues together a quasi-stable raft of religious, ethno-nationalist,
and capitalistic elements into an explicitly reactionary-modernizing
coalition. When the 21st century is allotted to Asia, it’s for a reason.
The West’s vague premonitions are urgent practicalities there.
Should NRx be waving the Modi banner with
enthusiasm? There are some obvious reasons for caution (beside dim
parochialism). Most centrally, the role of democracy in the BJP wave is
strongly analogous to that afflicting the 20th century European far right,
and the record of reactionary demotism scores a straight ‘F‘. Democratic pressures suck the right into an ideological black-hole,
since the only parts of its agenda that hit the tingle-spot with the
masses are its crudest appeals to atavistic sentiment. Cognitive
regression is the inevitable price of popularity.
It follows, then, that Indian developments are more likely to provide
another lesson in political tragedy than a torch of inspiration. Unless an
incoming Modi regime moves quickly to begin dismantling the structure of
Indian democracy (sadly, an unimaginable prospect), its modernizing
competence will eventually fall prey to mob impulses, as the people — once
again — get the government they deserve.
For NRx, I suspect, the essential lesson will be a deepened understanding
of the toxicity of populism, even if it seems — momentarily — to be
flowing in the right direction. Still, dogmatism has no respectable place
in such matters. If something more positive, and complex, comes out of
this, Outside in will be among the first to applaud it.
ADDED: Panic!
ADDED: Jason Burke on Modi and us:
… among huge numbers of people … globalisation is a conversation from
which, metaphorically and practically, they are excluded. That
conversation takes place in English and it is worth noting that Modi
will be the first leader of such prominence and power in India who, like
the vast majority of his compatriots, is uncomfortable in what has
become the world’s language. […] On the political track, our diplomats
and politicians inevitably favour those who resemble them most closely.
That usually means anglophone moderates or, as they are often termed
locally, “liberals”. There is also an inherent and inevitable
journalistic bias towards those who share reporters’, viewers’ and
readers’ language and cultural references, however superficial.
May 4, 2014Modified
The Outside in preemptive disillusionment with Indian reaction in
power is already on
record.
Nevertheless, this is going to be big. Over half a billion people went to
the polls to make it happen. Progressive teleology isn’t heading where
it’s supposed to. (UK communist media are covering it
quite
well.)
Congress, one of the most despicable political organizations on earth, has
been crushed like a bug. The implications of that are roughly comparable
to the detonation of a dirty nuke at Davos, so a modest period of
celebration would be wholly understandable. Unfortunately, while Modi’s
historic victory is a massive global lurch to reaction, it is also a
surreptitious triumph of democracy, and we’ve seen the way this plays out
before.
From the Thatcher / Reagan experience in the
West, there are lessons about the democratic limitation of general
application to the Right. The first, already briefly touched upon in the
previous Modi post, is that democracy demands populism. Since capitalistic
deregulation triggers a demagogic counter-attack from the Left, it is
inevitably supported — politically — by a platform of ‘social
conservatism’ that is driven into ever cruder atavism, until it
cannibalizes the policy agenda of the government. The more a regime seeks,
under democratic conditions, to move the economy rightwards, the more it
is politically compelled to appeal to tribal emotion, while diverting its
energies into totemism. Eventually, all that remains is a culture war, in
which a confused Right is reduced to the pre-defeated posture of seeking
to slow change down. When the pendulum swings — as democracy ensures it
will — it exposes the archetypal political truth: a fast-left party then
replaces a slow-left party, with the eventually victory of ‘progress’
never having been seriously in doubt.
Any democratic ‘right-wing’ party in power has won an election, and is
thus infused with a sense of its popular virility. This is a
psychological catastrophe — and in fact a latent psychosis — from which it
never recovers. The ratchet, patiently, continues.
Democratic politics also corrodes right-wing economic policy even more
directly. The lesson from Reaganism is especially stark. From the
beginning, political competence is expressed by a single dominant insight:
any gains made by a right-wing administration in the direction of fiscal
responsibility is simply a savings account for the opposition. It can be
predicated, with absolute confidence, that each step painfully taken away
from public insolvency will be reversed, with opposite political sign, as
soon as the Left gets its turn once again. Thus, the Reaganite stance that
any intelligent conservative government is bound to the proclamation
‘deficits don’t matter’. It is only by keeping public finances hard up
against the edge of bankruptcy that fiscal laxity can be prevented from
reverting to its natural state, as a fund available for the promotion of
leftward social acceleration. Private saving is profoundly compromised by
democratic governance. Public saving — or even moderated indebtedness — is
simply impossible.
There is no way at all that Modi can restore Indian fiscal health under
the democratic conditions he inherits (and which he will certainly
preserve). The idea that he might attempt to do so is a delusion.
Nevertheless, there are things a Modi regime could do, which are worth
doing. In rough order of priority and practicality they include:
(1) A holocaust of red-tape, in the interest of industrialization. The
Indian manufacturing sector, employing approximately 15% of the workforce,
is half the size that might be expected if business conditions were less
impaired by legal-bureaucratic obstruction. Huge economic gains could be
made relatively quickly if companies could be created more easily and
closed down without any need for official permission, while hiring and
firing employees according to market signals. Modi knows enough to see
what is required. First ask the Marxists to describe their most
nightmarish conception of an exploitative capitalist labor-market, and
then do that.
(2) While fiscal continence is politically impossible, it should at least
be possible to re-orient public spending towards infrastructure (and away
from transfer payments). Copying China would be sensible. High-speed rail
networks, urban mass-transit systems, roads, power grids, water and
sewerage, high-bandwidth communications, space-programs … since vast
amounts of public money have to be wasted, those are the ways to do it.
They accumulate capital, create business opportunities and employment,
teach technical skills, and leave something real behind when the bubbles
pop.
(3) Scrap as many affirmative action quotas as possible. This is an
opportunity to do cynical culture wars stuff that actually does some good.
(4) Prepare for the return of the Left, by decentralizing government,
empowering the states, reducing inter-regional economic transfers,
innovating constitutional obstacles to socialist policy, and building
right-wing economic redoubts capable of resisting a future Leftist central
administration. This is all very obvious, but it’s equally obvious why
even seriously conservative central governments find it difficult to do.
It would help if they more clearly understood that they’re going to lose —
that’s what democracy means — so they should seize the opportunity to get
their revenge in first.
NRx shouldn’t make a fool of itself by getting excited about Modi. What’s
happening in India isn’t nothing, though. It’s nowhere close to being
nothing.
ADDED: Tavleen Singh —
… I tweeted that I had covered every election since 1977 and had never
seen anything like the frenetic fervour of the crowds on the streets of
Benaras. This caused a torrent of insults on Twitter, so I went that
evening to Papu’s chai shop for a reality check. At this teashop in a
teeming, squalid square near the Assi Ghat gather politicians, thinkers,
philosophers, political analysts and students. They sit on wooden
benches near an open drain and discuss the problems of the world. On an
earlier visit, I discovered that the level of political discourse was
higher than in Delhi because people speak without worrying about being
labelled ‘fascist’ or ‘communal’.
ADDED: Some cautious optimism from Geeta Anand and Gordon Fairclough in the
WSJ, but: “Modi is unlikely to substantially undo any of the subsidy
programs on which millions rely for jobs and food. […] Analysts think
big-bang reforms, such as changing labor laws to let companies hire and
fire more easily or undertaking large-scale privatizations of state
enterprises, are unlikely.” Still — “Tales of [Modi’s] bravery are
chronicled in a comic book that shows him swimming through
crocodile-infested waters to plant a flag on top of a Hindu temple.”
May 16, 2014Death Rattle
“If you care about democracy in the world, we are in trouble.”
Savor the exquisite taste of Jacobin
tears.
(“We should bet heavily on this battle of information and ideas. It is a
battle we can win. … we need to promote the spirit of democracy.” Larry
Diamond is quite clearly one of the most dangerous lunatics alive in the
world today.)
October 30, 2014Against Democracy
Michael Anissimov has published an e-book condensing the main
Neoreactionary (and in fact older Right-Libertarian) arguments against
democracy. The first chapter can be read
here, the book purchased from
here.
February 2, 2015Political Correction
It’s increasingly hard to find anybody of even moderate articulacy (other
than professional propagandists / unapologetic communists) with a kind
word for democracy these days. Marc Faber, it turns out, hasn’t.
Here
he is in conversation with the (re-animated) Daily Bell:
Marc Faber: I hope so, but this is one of the problems of
democracy, that you have dynasties, and so I’m increasingly leaning to the
question whether actually democracies function nowadays.
Daily Bell: Indeed, it would be hard to find a
functioning democracy. Can you point to any at this point?
Marc Faber: That I don’t know but everybody thinks that
every dictator is evil. In Asia, we’ve had very fast growth in Japan,
South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore under non-democratic regimes.
Even today in Singapore you have some kind of democracy but not a true
democracy. In Hong Kong we don’t have democracy; it hasn’t ever been there
for the last 150 years. […] I don’t know. I’m just saying that to sit
there and say democracy is the best system in the whole world is maybe not
the correct view.
March 21, 2015Popcorn Night
Under such
popcorn
bombardment here it’s impossible to think, so we might as well at least go
for the quality
stuff:
The significance of this asymmetry is that liberals have the power to
legitimize the existence of problems. They can alone enter things into
evidence, as it were.
Max Ehrenfreund, writing in the Washington Post, has a gathered a list of discontents
from various publications that are now being talked about even in
liberal circles, which means the population at large can talk about them
now. Liberals set the agenda, when they talk about things going down the
tubes then it’s on the agenda. Here are some things it’s now relatively
OK to bring up. … […] … But probably the biggest shock talking point is
Robert Reich’s assertion that the US is in a sort of pre-revolutionary
stew of discontent, after nearly seven years of Obama. In an article
titled
The Revolt Against the Ruling Class
Reich says that “the biggest political phenomenon in America today is a
revolt against the “ruling class” of insiders that have dominated
Washington for more than three decades.” …
Jim Tankersley, writing in the Washington Post elaborates on the same theme. … The
new narrative is that America is in crisis. “Unexpectedly,” one might
add. … Which direction you go will depend on your party. The Democrats
will argue for more carbon controls, more immigration, Single Payer,
more deals with foreign dictators, etc. The Republicans will argue for
more GOP Senators and Congressmen to be elected to Capitol Hill — after
which they will vote for more carbon controls, more immigration, Single
Payer, more deals with foreign dictators, etc. … We have it on good
liberal authority that there’s a copious amount [of] tinder and straw
scattered all over the floor. If one day a spark should start a fire, it
won’t be due as much to the intensity of the spark as the abundance of
fuel. … Perhaps the most most potent forces for change are disruptive
technologies that undermine established elites. A “revolt against the
ruling class” still concedes their capacity to rule; it is the
destruction of their basis to rule by innovation that is a more
fundamental threat.
August 7, 2015Quote note (#208)
At
Vox (some Yule cheer):
Political scientists have long known that “government legitimacy,” or
the popularity of particular administrations, is going down. But many of
them have argued that “regime legitimacy,” or citizens’ attachment to
democracy as a political system, is as strong as ever. Our research
shows that this is just not true: Attachment to democracy has fallen
over time, and from one generation to the next. … For Americans born in
the 1930s, living in a democracy holds virtually sacred importance.
Asked on a scale of 1 to 10 how important it is to them to live in a
democracy, more than 70 percent give the highest answer. But many of
their children and grandchildren are lukewarm. Among millennials — those
born since the 1980s — fewer than 30 percent say that living in a
democracy is essential.
ADDED: Let’s change the subject — “Perhaps the time has come for us all to ask
how much we really value democracy, and to start discussing how much more
expressive and responsive it could be in this technological age. Change is
coming. The big question now is how good we are going to be at shaping the
sorts of change that can renew democracy instead of stunting and blunting
it.” The faster ruin is brought to the only societies on Earth with some
prospect of supporting democracy, the more of these kind of diversionary
conversations we can expect.
December 21, 2015Democratic Deconsolidation
Crucial
reading:
What does it mean, in concrete terms, for democracy to be the only game
in town? In our view, the degree to which a democracy is consolidated
depends on three key characteristics: the degree of popular support for
democracy as a system of government; the degree to which antisystem
parties and movements are weak or nonexistent; and the degree to which
the democratic rules are accepted. […] This empirical understanding of
democratic consolidation opens up conceptual space for the possibility
of “democratic deconsolidation.” In theory, it is possible that, even in
the seemingly consolidated democracies of North America and Western
Europe, democracy may one day cease to be the “only game in town”:
Citizens who once accepted democracy as the only legitimate form of
government could become more open to authoritarian alternatives. […] …
It is at least plausible to think that such a process of democratic
deconsolidation may already be underway in a number of established
democracies in North America and Western Europe. […] … In a world where
most citizens fervently support democracy, where antisystem parties are
marginal or nonexistent, and where major political forces respect the
rules of the political game, democratic breakdown is extremely unlikely.
It is no longer certain, however, that this is the world we live in. […]
… As democracies deconsolidate, the prospect of democratic breakdown
becomes increasingly likely — even in parts of the world that have long
been spared such instability. If political scientists are to avoid being
blindsided by the demise of established democracies in the coming
decades, as they were by the fall of communism a few decades ago, they
need to find out whether democratic deconsolidation is happening; to
explain the possible causes of this development; to delineate its likely
consequences (present and future); and to ponder the potential
remedies.
Considerable statistical evidence (provided in the paper) supports this
alarmed conclusion.
(Drezner is
nervous.)
Previously by the paper’s authors, Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk, making
the same thesis
here, and
here.
ADDED: At The American Interest: “The dark specter of illiberalism
across the West is symptomatic of a deep and broad-based decline in
confidence in democratic institutions and ideas that has been taking place
for two decades. Champions of liberalism need to think hard about how to
reverse this—and soon—because as Foa and Mounk point out, the floor could
fall out from under our feet all at once.” (Systematic confusion of
democracy and liberalism is to be expected at this stage of cultural ruin,
but it’s still irritating.)
August 7, 2016
SECTION D - CRITIQUE OF LIBERTARIANISM
The Lost Cause
Why do some (awkward) libertarians sympathize with the Confederacy?
Asks
David Bernstein at The Volokh Conspiracy. This is probably as
reasonable as mainstream libertarianism is ever going to get on the lost
cause, but it still manages to muddy an intrinsically pellucid point.
Even those libertarians who do adopt a Rothbardian/Chomskyite view of
foreign policy, or who for any other reason beyond racism wish the Union
would have let the Confederacy secede peacefully, are making a mistake
in defending the Confederacy–the enemy of one’s enemy isn’t necessarily
a friend. But I just wanted to point out that I think a significant
amount of libertarian sympathy for the Confederacy in the circles where
it exists is really a product of intense distaste for the U.S.
government and its post-Civil War record [along with, as a commenter
notes, a general sympathy for the right of secession] rather than a
considered view of the Confederacy’s own record.
Setting aside the Chomsky distraction, there’s an almost painful struggle
to be fair going on here — but then the brackets ruin everything.
Secession is the key, irrespective of the course taken by the Union,
because the Union itself only exists due to a successful war of
secession. If the USA was legitimately born out of war of independence, then it
was illegitimately perpetuated by the suppression of the subsequent war of
independence which would have divided it. Placing the onus on libertarian
confederates to explain themselves — or to have an explanation advanced on
their behalf — gets the order of logical obligation completely upside
down.
Of course, the Articles of Confederation preceded the American
Constitution. Confederation was not impudently demanded in the mid-19th
century, but stripped away by an emergent central power in the late-18th
century. In combination, these assaults on decentralized government have
rendered American political history almost entirely opaque to itself.
Confederation is the primordial expression of American independence.
Yet, from a practical point of view, none of this really matters, because
America’s racial nightmare drowns everything out, binding dreams of
redemption so intimately to concentrated power that freedom is reduced to
ever-more-marginalized crimethink. Under these circumstances, the
pretense of reason seems merely absurd.
July 21, 2013The Reaper
Recent
rumors of blog
death in the reactosphere have been greatly exaggerated, but elsewhere —
not so much. For sheer weirdness, it’s hard to beat the
announcement of
The Oil Drum‘s closure at The Daily Bell — an event of
huge significance for the fate of the Peak Oil ‘promotion’, we were
assured — and one almost immediately followed by the closure of …
The Daily Bell. (Here‘s the farewell post, although I’m reluctant to link to a self-declared
corpse.)
By simple analogy, can we assume this death is also overflowing with
meaning? Has the DB’s signature brand of libertarian conspiracy theorizing
been terminated for a reason? If so, there aren’t any clues to be found
in Anthony Wile’s quite bizarrely uninformative good-bye note.
I’m guessing my vague melancholy on the subject won’t find many echoes out
here on the right fringe. “Another bunch of nutty libertarians go over the
cliff, big deal” might not be a bad guess at the average response, if it
didn’t so clearly underestimate the prevailing indifference (I don’t
recall anybody else linking to them on anything). They were strong
advocates of the “Internet Reformation”, ushering in a new epoch of
liberty worldwide, as the scheming “global elite” were forced to take a
“step back”, their “directed history” undone by electronic
“truth-telling”.
I’m taking it that has all been swept off the table now,
Peak Oil-style. It never did quite seem nasty enough to be real.
July 17, 2013Atlas Mugged
As part of the ongoing celebrations of Prophecy Month at
Outside in, we present a (short) three part series by Lars Seier
Christensen of Saxo Bank on the historical prescience of Ayn Rand (one,
two,
three). While some distance from high theory, even the most Rand-averse should
be able to take something interesting away from this series, whether by
considering it as a significant ethnographic — and even religious —
phenomenon, or by appraising it as a structured forecast. The foundations
(laid in part one) certainly seem realistic enough: “… free capitalism has
not really been experienced by many people alive today. […] The strange
hybrid of western societies … allows only limited capitalism to create
enough wealth to support a wider range of political and social ambitions,
largely controlled by anti-capitalists.”
Christensen asks:
does the world look increasingly like the politically saturated,
anti-capitalist stagnatopia she envisaged?
If the evaluation of Rand is restricted to these terms, her claim to
attention seems assured. The conclusion:
If we don’t succeed in changing the values and direction of at least
the next generation, I fear the full prediction of Atlas Shrugged will
become reality and while that may hold some promise for the distant
future, it is not something that I think people of my age feel like
going through if we can avoid it.
Given the Cathedral — which is to say, pedagogical (and propagandistic)
anti-capitalism in power — Christensen’s hope for a generational shift in
“values and direction” sounds like a prayer to a dead God. That leaves
only Cassandra, and tragic truths.
(Via.)
January 8, 2014Right on the Money (#1)
Of all the reasons to read Kant, the most important is to understand
Mises, and thus the template for a functional world (however
unobtainable). Austrian economics, as formulated in
Human Action, consists exclusively of systematically assembled
synthetic a priori propositions. Insofar as action is in fact
directed by practical reason, the conclusions of organized praxeology
cannot be wrong.
It is pointless to ask an Austrian Economist whether he ‘believes’ a rise
in the minimum wage will increase unemployment (above the level it would
otherwise be). The praxeological construction of economic law is
indifferent to empirical regularity, as to anything less certain than
rational necessity. Does one ‘believe’ that 2 + 2 = 4? No, one
knows it, because the irreducible values of the signs compel the
conclusion, and are inextricable from it. There could be no value ‘2’
unless its doubling equaled ‘4’, or any meaning to ‘wage’ unless its
doubling reduced demand for labor. Empirically
sensitive
Austrianism isn’t Austrian at all.
Like game theory, Austrianism applies wherever
rational agents seek to maximize advantage. Perhaps, as Moldbug
argues, it is comparable to Euclidean geometry — another
synthetic a priori construction — embedded, as a special case,
within a more general model, unconstrained by the presupposition of
intelligible purposes.
The problem with Mises as guru is that Misesian classical liberalism
(or Rothbardian libertarianism) is like Newtonian physics. It is
basically correct within its operating envelope. Under unusual
conditions it breaks down, and a more general model is needed. The
equation has another term, the ordinary value of which is zero. Without
this term, the equation is wrong. Normally this is no problem; but if
the term is not zero, the error becomes visible.
As a matter of historical fact, this is how the neoreactionary departure
from pure libertarianism has occurred. It has stumbled upon non-zero
curvature in the domain of political economy, and — unable to comfort
itself through the dismissal of this discovery — it has precipitated an
intellectual crisis, through which it spreads. Whether faithfully
Carlylean, or not, it insists upon a generalization of realism beyond
expectations of liberal order. Civilization is the fragile solution to a
deeper problem, not a stable foundation to be assumed — as a parallel
postulate — by subsequent, elaborate calculations.
What does this make of money? Can Austrianism be modified, by systematic
transformations, that adapt it to the dark intrusion of neoreactionary
realism? That is a question
recent
discussions have
already introduced.
ADDED: Spandrell
triggers
a related discussion.
May 22, 2013Hayek and Pinochet
Despite the left slant,
this
examination of Hayek’s involvement with the Chilean Pinochet regime is
calm and informative enough to be worth reading (via). Its relevance to numerous recent discussions on the extreme right is
clear.
Given everything we know about Hayek—his horror of creeping socialism,
his sense of the civilizational challenge it posed; his belief that
great men impose their will upon society (“The conservative peasant, as much as anybody else, owes his way of life to a different type of
person, to men who were innovators in their time and who by their
innovations forced a new manner of living on people belonging to an
earlier state of culture”); his notion of elite legislators (“If the majority
were asked their opinion of all the changes involved in progress, they
would probably want to prevent many of its necessary conditions and
consequences and thus ultimately stop progress itself. I have yet to
learn of an instance when the deliberate vote of the majority (as distinguished from the decision of some governing elite) has decided on such sacrifices in the interest of a better future”);
and his sense of political theory and politics as an epic confrontation
between the real and the yet-to-be-realized—perhaps the Pinochet
question needs to be reframed. The issue is not “How could he have done
what he did?” but “How could he not?”
(I agree with Corey Robin that the ‘Schmittian’ element in Hayek’s
thinking remains an unresolved theoretical problem, but his concrete
judgments — as detailed here — strike me as consistently sound.)
June 28, 2013Confused Cato
By coincidence I was recalling
this
Cato-hosted essay by Peter Thiel, in which he states: “I no longer believe
that freedom and democracy are compatible.” It isn’t a message the Cato
Institute is able to digest.
Consider
this
article by Juan Carlos Hidalgo (from the Cato Institute’s Center for
Global Liberty and Prosperity). Headlined ‘How socialism has destroyed
Venezuela’ it tracks the descent of what “was once South America’s richest
country” into a hellish, crime-wracked, economic ruin. Socialist insanity
is, of course, the immediate cause. How, though, did socialism become
Venezuelan public policy? This is a question Hidalgo seems unable to
imagine, let alone answer.
The account, as far as it goes, is
unexceptionable:
Driving the unrest is a large segment of the population that is fed up
with the country’s rapidly deteriorating economy. Despite receiving over
$1 trillion in oil revenues since 1999, the government has run out of
cash and now relies heavily on printing money to finance itself. The
result is the highest inflation rate in the world: officially 56 per
cent last year, although according to calculations by Steve Hanke of
Johns Hopkins University, the implied annual inflation rate is actually
330 per cent.
The government reacted to skyrocketing inflation by following the
typical socialist script: it imposed draconian price controls and has
been raiding businesses it accuses of hoarding. As a result, there are
widespread shortages of food and medicines, and people have to endure
hour-long lines in supermarkets. The scarcity index produced by
Venezuela’s central bank reached 28 per cent in January, meaning that
one out of four basic products is out of stock at any given time.
Somehow, toilet paper is now more valuable than paper money.
The productive sector has been decimated after hundreds of
nationalisations and expropriations. Oil now accounts for 96 per cent of
export earnings, up from 80 per cent a decade ago. Moreover, due to
gross mismanagement at PDVSA, the state oil monopoly, production has
dropped by 28 per cent since 2000, the only major energy producer in the
world to experience a decline in the last quarter of a century.
The economic hardship faced by Venezuelans is compounded by a horrific
rise in crime. The country is now one of the most dangerous places in
the world, with almost 25,000 homicides in 2013 – a murder rate of 79
killings per 100,000 inhabitants. One of the reasons the protests are
growing, despite the government’s brutal repression, is that the country
is quickly becoming unlivable and many Venezuelans think that they have
nothing to lose.
We get it (really); socialism is the path to chaotic ruin. And the path to
socialism? Here Hidalgo switches without the slightest hint of reflective
awareness from perceptive acuity to self-subverting cognitive confusion:
For many years [Venezuela] was also a remarkable democracy in a region
where most nations were ruled by military dictatorships. Today,
socialism has turned Venezuela into an authoritarian basket case that
thousands try to escape every year. With millions of Venezuelans no
longer willing to put up with deteriorating living conditions, and a
government willing to take whatever means necessary to hold on to power,
it looks like the worst is yet to come.
So over the course of “many years” democratic Venezuela transformed into a
socialist catastrophe. Are the Cato story tellers going to suggest a
narrative for this, or are they going to let us do it for them?
ADDED: Maduro’s war on “fascism” driven by invincible idealism: “We will
guarantee everyone has a plasma television.”
ADDED: From the Left: “What has emerged in Venezuela is a new bureaucratic
class who are themselves the speculators and owners of this new and
failing economy.” (Weird the way that always happens.)
February 26, 2014Umlaut
It’s probably less true with each passing week that Neoreaction can be
accurately described as a small, dispersed population of
libertarians mugged by reality. Nevertheless, it is part of NRx
heritage that such a characterization made considerable sense in the past.
There should be no surprise that between libertarianism and NRx a
significant zone of complex friction and interchange can be found. Right
now, Umlaut is the media
motor of such contact.
This is more than a little strange. Partly, it is odd because
Umlaut‘s CATO institute parent is the principle representative of
respectable libertarianism, feeding ideas into the political process
(where they are of course completely ignored), while stressing a
non-threatening strain of Statist harm reduction, rather than the rougher
anti-state antagonism of the
Mises Institute, or even the dope-head
dissidence of Reason. Secondly, it seems an unlikely follow up to
this.
Michael Anissimov, whose precious bodily
fluids are free of all libertarian contamination, has put out a red flag
post
on the
recent
peculiar
intimacy, taking the Kuznicki horror as representative of the genre. His post,
which contains valuable information about the institutional structure and
media presence of various libertarian organs, concludes that
Umlaut is the “libertarians’ real, on-the-ground outlet for
ideology.” (The original version also noted that the public outreach of
CATO Unbound had
peaked
with Peter Thiel’s decisively important remark: “I no longer believe that
freedom and democracy are compatible.”)
This tweet is almost certainly relevant:
Handle has pursued a
deeper
engagement, specifically with (Umlaut‘s) Adam Gurri. (This blog has a
limited, and schizoid, relationship with the magazine, from fear and
loathing last October, to
intrigued.
Two
further
— excellent — Umlaut articles bridged the gap here from
raised-hackles to friendly woofing.)
This development grates on a number of neuralgic NRx issues, which makes
it enormously entertaining, intellectually stimulating, and strategically
tangled. It plugs directly into the recent ‘entryism’ conversation, due to
the libertarian connections of Patri Friedman (a focus of the J. Arthur
Bloom piece.) Themes of exit, secession, and markets, among others, are
all susceptible to inflammation from libertarian influences. Working out
what NRx is, at its core, is inevitably complicated by ideological foreign
entanglements, especially if the libertarian connection is mirrored — at
the other extreme — by a no less tortuous negotiation over boundaries with
the European New Right.
To underscore the latter point, NRx is reasonably analogized to a weak,
fissile state, cross-cut by the machinations of superpowers
(libertarianism and the ENR). Local ‘nationalists’ deploring all alien
interference quickly find their positions undermined by the blatant
dissymmetry of their concerns, driving them into polarization, conflict,
collaboration, and counter-collaboration.
Which Right is
right? The potential tension is extraordinary. It cannot possibly be less
than interesting.
ADDED: Correction:
ADDED: Michael Anissimov
responds.
Citing Moldbug (very adeptly), he remarks: “This is where myself and Nick
Land part ways. I’m hooked on the Frederick the Great solution, he’s
hooked on the Hong Kong solution. Both are equally valid interpretations
in light of the founding texts of Moldbug.”
— Yes.
February 17, 2014Libertarians are WEIRD
Mark Lutter
advances
the following thought experiment:
Earth is dying, unable to further sustain human life. Mankind has
thrown their last resources into creating a space ship that can reach a
habitable planet. However, the space ship can only carry 10,000 people
and little is known about the planet beyond gravity and oxygen levels.
With the literal fate of humanity lying before us, who do we send and
why?
After that, it gets
WEIRD
(+
++). In a nutshell, Lutter’s ‘we’, while — apparently in absolute innocence
— employed to represent the voice of humanity as a whole, is
self-evidently processing the problem in a way that would make no sense
beyond its own peculiar
thede. ‘We’ could probably all come to the reasonable conclusion that only the
Swiss get to survive. (Right?)
In passing, he notes that ‘we’ all agree multiculturalism is a
dysfunctional mess: “For all the praise of multiculturalism, no one would
seriously bet a diverse group of cultures would give the greatest chance
for success. …” (The whole paragraph is a jaw-dropper.)
The main point, however: “Picking a cultural group to colonize a new
planet and save humanity forces the mind to focus on positive and negative
attributes of the cultural group.” This perfectly exemplifies the
weirded out intelligence of libertarians, expressed as a detached
universalism wholly incognisant of its own deracination. The obvious
rejoinder: No one thinks like that (except you guys). It might be
over-compensation to suggest that two-thirds of the world’s population
would respond to the total extermination of the Swiss with vague
amusement, but it’s at least as plausible as Lutter’s assumption that the
good people of Helvetia would be neutrally evaluated, selected, and then
cheered on as the sole remnant of ‘humanity’, to such an extent that
not being Swiss would be cheerfully accepted as an ethnic death
sentence.
This isn’t meant to be any kind of denuciation — it’s very possible Lutter
is playing his (weird) audience hard, and doing something subversively
dark around the back. As barb-hooked bait for libertarian nuttiness, his
post is really something. I can’t wait to see what his comment thread
looks like.
ADDED: “I do not believe anything I wrote was terribly controversial …” (At
least one of us has to be psychotically dissociated — not that there’s
anything wrong with that.)
November 11, 2014Dark AnCap
As a matter of simple socio-cultural documentation,
this
is the thought-process that leads libertarian realists to discover they
have crossed over to the Outer Right:
All people are not equal. In fact, two individuals who are in every
socially discernible way the same, have an infinite number of
differences between them. When those people have evolved for thousands
of years in radically different environments, those people will have
even greater differences between them. Such differences will include but
not be limited to intelligence, propensity for violence, and propensity
for cooperation.
While our ideal society would have no government and thus no arbitrary
geopolitical borders enforced by State mercenaries, the notion that
there would be free and unrestricted travel the world over in the
absence of the State is a remarkably ridiculous left wing idea. Borders
are the whole point of freedom, as borders are demarcations of property
rights.
It’s the beginning, rather than the end, of a discussion. (XS finds a few
quibble points, and far more in the rest of the post.) For anybody
wondering about current mutations on the Libertarian Right, however, the
basic structure of insight on exhibition here is the place to start.
Euro-descended (and specifically Anglo-Dutch descended) males are
differentially inclined to libertarian attitudes, to a remarkable degree
(statistically speaking). Disentangling race and culture in this regard is
far from straightforward. The sex-based dispositional difference is far
less noisy. (Of course, the Marxoid explanation is that doubly-privileged
Whites Males are defending their social advantages through this
ideological preference.) Also notable, IMHO, is the (almost?) equally
marked tendency of European peoples towards extreme, highly-idealized and
morally-fanatic leftism — compared to the conceptually-fuzzy tribal and
communitarian sensibilities widespread elsewhere. Bleeding-heart
Left-libertarianism is about as distilled-White as anything ever gets —
but with that remark, I’m already straying into the quibble-zone.
January 25, 2016Quote (#255)
The Economist
on
Peter Thiel:
At his best, Mr Thiel was a mixture of libertarian and contrarian. As a
student at Stanford University in the late 1980s and early 1990s he
railed against the new academic orthodoxies of multiculturalism and
diversity and political correctness, founding a conservative magazine,
Stanford Review, and publishing an
establishment-baiting book, “The Diversity Myth”. He even defended a
fellow law student, Keith Rabois, who decided to test the limits of free
speech on campus by standing outside a teacher’s residence and shouting
“Faggot! Faggot! Hope you die of AIDS!” When he was a young tyro in
Silicon Valley, his libertarian vision inspired many of his business
decisions. He hoped that PayPal would help create a new world currency,
free from government control and dilution, and that Facebook would help
people form spontaneous communities outside traditional nation
states.
There is a darker element in his thinking today. In an essay written in
2009 for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank, he declared that
he no longer believed that “freedom and democracy are compatible”,
putting some of the blame for growing statism on the rise of welfare
dependency and the enfranchisement of women. He added a grandiloquent
coda: “The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person
who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world
safe for capitalism”.
(That final Thiel quote is Sentences material.)
Libertarianism either goes dark, or it dies of cognitive dissonance. The
number of people seeing that — while small — is rising on a parabolic
curve.
June 4, 2016Libertarianism for Zombies
‘Liberaltarian’ isn’t a word that’s been heard much recently. Whilst
aesthetics is surely part of the explanation, there’s probably more to it
than that. Most obviously, recent political developments in the United
States have shown, beyond the slightest possibility of doubt, that modern
‘liberalism’ and the project of maximal state expansion are so completely
indistinguishable that liberal-libertarian fusionism can only perform a
comedy act. Garin K Hovannisian had already
predicted
this outcome down to its minute details before the 2008 Presidential
Election. Ed Kilgore later conducted a complementary
dismissal
from the left. From Reason
came
the question “Is Liberaltarianism Dead? Or Was it Ever Alive in The First
Place?” which sets us out on a zombie hunt.
Anybody here who has poked into this
stuff, even just a little
bit, is probably approaching shriek-point already:
In the name of everything holy please just let it remain in its
grave. It’s too late for that. Liberaltarianism has been freshly exhumed
specially for Outside in readers, and the zombie serum injected
through its left eye, directly into the amygdala. It might seem rather
ghoulish, but let us harden ourselves — for science. This absurd
shambling specimen will help us to refine an elegant formula, of both
ideological and historical interest.
Brink Lindsey
offered
the authoritative account:
Today’s ideological turmoil, however, has created an opening for
ideological renewal—specifically, liberalism’s renewal as a vital
governing philosophy. A refashioned liberalism that incorporated key
libertarian concerns and insights could make possible a truly
progressive politics once again—not progressive in the sense of hewing
to a particular set of preexisting left-wing commitments, but rather in
the sense of attuning itself to the objective dynamics of U.S. social
development. In other words, a politics that joins together under one
banner the causes of both cultural and economic progress.
Conservative fusionism, the defining ideology of the American right for
a half-century, was premised on the idea that libertarian policies and
traditional values are complementary goods. That idea still retains at
least an intermittent plausibility—for example, in the case for school
choice as providing a refuge for socially conservative families. But an
honest survey of the past half-century shows a much better match between
libertarian means and progressive ends. Most obviously, many of the
great libertarian breakthroughs of the era—the fall of Jim Crow, the end
of censorship, the legalization of abortion, the liberalization of
divorce laws, the increased protection of the rights of the accused, the
reopening of immigration—were championed by the political left.
Libertarian means and progressive ends. Could it imaginably be said more
clearly? Liberty is legitimate if, and only if, it serves to
promote the consolidation of the Cathedral (through chaotic multicultural
criminality), which is then retrospectively interpreted as the intrinsic
telos of freedom. Whatever does not subordinate itself to this
agenda is to have its brains eaten, and be systematically recycled into
progressive zombie flesh. This is a project for libertarian hipsters and
Leviathan apparatchiks to undertake hand-in-hand — fusionally. The new age
of the cannibal is come.
Neoreactionaries are libertarians mugged by reality (to adapt a
pre-coined
phrase). This piece of socio-cultural understanding appears to be
generally accepted, and rightly so. If it needs defending, that will have
to happen elsewhere, but I have yet to see it seriously contested.
Moldbug’s own intellectual pedigree suffices to establish the claim on a
solid foundation, but it is, in any case, far from aberrant in this
regard. The recognition that libertarian ideas — despite their
philosophical elegance and economic attractiveness — are not historically
or politically realistic, has been the catalytic insight driving the
development and adoption of neoreactionary
alternatives, shorn of certain mythical elements inherited by the progressive
clade
(substantial egalitarianism most prominently). This is an empirically
robust, uncontroversial story, but it is not yet a formula. It’s time to
take the next step.
Long live last science!
Has there yet emerged a neoreactionary who was once a ‘liberaltarian’?
This isn’t a question designed to embarrass anybody. I just think the
answer is easily predictable. When neoreactionary intelligence perceives
this shambling wreckage of all cognitive integrity, it recoils into itself
in utter revulsion. Everything it abominated about the libertarian
delusion stands before it, trickling pitifully. This is the perfect
caricature of its abandoned errors: an oozing swippleous mass of
unreflective universalism. It’s classical liberalism revived as an undead
decay-plague. (If Karl wants to go
after
this thing with a shot-gun, I don’t see
anyone
holding him back.)
The
view
from the unlibertarianized left is illuminating:
… the conscience of a Lindseyan liberaltarian is pretty darn liberal –
with some policy disputes on top. When Lindsey stands with conservatives
it is mostly on somewhat accidental (but not therefore inconsiderable)
policy grounds. He thinks liberals tend to adopt self-defeating
policies. When Lindsey stands with liberals it is mostly on
philosophical grounds. This point fits in with the one I made in
this post, about different sorts of libertarians: basically liberal or
basically feudal. If you are a feudal libertarian, you really shouldn’t
have a problem with Jim Crow, in principle. If you are a liberal
libertarian, you should. Conservative libertarians tend to be on the
fence, feudalism/liberalism-wise. (This depends partly on a cheeky use
of ‘feudal’ – see my post. But, then again, what was Edmund Burke? a guy
who was torn between liberalism and feudalism. That’s not such a bad
sketch of his personality-type.)
Strangely, we’re still talking about Jim Crow — as if the entire meaning
of American history is expressed through that. The target here is Barry
Goldwater, but it makes no substantial difference if Ron Paul is
substituted. The critical point, in both cases, is that a reluctance to
countenance the expansion of the political sphere in pursuit of racial
egalitarianism is interpreted as a moral scandal, for which an
ostentatious sacrifice of liberty is the only permissible solution.
Negligence is already ‘feudalism’. When this dam bursts — into
‘liberaltarian’ compromise — the micro-managerial state has already been
granted everything it will need to ask for. Stamping out feudalism makes
you free. (It works like
this.)
If it wasn’t for Hoppe, it would perhaps be understandable if the
shuddering neoreactionary (N) were to suspect that libertarian thought
(L0) tends — slowly but inevitably — to compost down towards this
liberaltarian (L1) ‘walker’, in which all the degenerative forces of
conformism and revolt have been compacted, as if by some
ideological parody of providence. Is not our liberaltarian zombie the
still-recognizable avatar of the old liberalism, resurrected hideously as
the animated putrescence of the new? Yet we have Hoppe, and so we know
that the directives of self-coordinating liberty need not take this path.
There is, unmistakably, something other to libertarianism than what is
seen in the figure of its zombified, liberaltarian ruin. Through a type of
negative political theology, we can formulate it:
Lo – L1 = N
First, identify every specifically emphatic feature of liberaltarianism,
then subtract it without residue from the old Austro-libertarian matrix,
and what remains is the neoreactionary template — abstracted due to the
provisional (negative) place-holders for yet undeveloped topics: presumed
non-equality, non-universality, non-progress (in socio-cultural matters),
and at least partial non-autonomy (of the economic agent from fragile
structures of civility). Slaying the zombie does not, in itself, fill
these gaps — but it holds open the gaps, and therefore the
avenues of neoreactionary exploration.
As a rule of thumb: whatever
Will Wilkinson is
having, I’ll have the opposite. If the liberaltarian innovation is
conceived as a vector, its exact negation sets the neoreactionary course.
With this conclusion, science is served. We can return the corpse of a
misconceived ‘progressive’ liberty to its grave, or rather, to the
cyclopean mausoleum it has made for itself: the liberal super-state which
protects freedom in detail, with unbounded attentiveness, until it has
been obliterated entirely from the earth.
ADDED: Weeping isn’t an argument.
ADDED:
Foseti provokes and hosts an interesting discussion on the genealogy of
neoreaction, by remarking: “My favorite question to ask fellow
reactionaries is how they got to neoreaction. What steps did they take in
their ideological journey? My last stop was on the Old Right, but I got
there from libertarianism.”
September 10, 2013Failure
Markets fail, so we need to rely on government sometimes (or often) to
set things straight.
— That’s probably the single most comical piece of commonplace insanity in
the world today. All kinds of people fall for it, even those who seem
otherwise capable of coherent cognitive processing.
Chris Edwards puts together an impressive short (and implicit) demolition.
Fernandez’
summary
of the Edwards post is even better (so I’ve left the link to him):
Chris Edwards at the Cato Institute
believes there should be a
National Museum of Government Failure. He argues that the displays at the Smithsonian would pale into
insignificance if set beside the awe-inspiring sight of such things as
the “$349 million on a rocket test facility that is
completely unused“, the
Superconducting Collider
whose ruins include nearly 15 miles of tunnel and the ex-future
Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site. Yet these artifacts, whose scale would surpass many a Lost City, are
far from the worst failures. The biggest fiascos by dollar value are
the various government programs
designed to win the war on drugs or poverty which after having spent
trillions of dollars fruitlessly, lie somewhere in an unmarked
bureaucratic grave.
A price tag doesn’t do justice to these calamities, which are not only
wasteful, but positively and perversely harmful, but it’s a start. The
category of ‘waste’ itself fails here, because it would actually be less
culturally toxic for all the resources squandered on social programs to be
simply annihilated into hyperspace without remainder. Ruinous dependency
incentives would then be hugely lessened.
Of course, the idea that dysfunctional political institutions will
cooperate with their own public humiliation is also a piece of lunacy (and
this time, one that beltway libertarians are peculiarly prone to).
ADDED: Highly relevant.
January 20, 2015Is Libertarianism Racist?
… a question taken verbatim from a short, but perfect, Foseti
post
(from 2012).
(XS misses that guy.)
Anyone looking for a primer on how the hyper-liberal right goes dark will
find it there. ‘Perfect’ means it can’t be improved upon.
Don’t miss Handle’s comment, which fills out the party-political
dimension.
ADDED
(Park MacDougald):
If it sounds strange to say that libertarianism is “white,” well, it’s
still true. Libertarianism is, empirically, really
goddamn white, and some have suggested that that
may not be a coincidence: That is, libertarianism makes assumptions about what’s normal for
everyone on the basis of the white experience. Normally, that’s a point
made by the left as a criticism, but the whiteness of libertarianism is
increasingly accepted by post-libertarian reactionaries like Moldbug as
a badge of honor. It could also indicate a wider trend in the future, if
a combination of demographic changes and political projects to “make whiteness visible” lead more white people to think of cultural values like individual
rights as tied to whiteness, rather than as universal principles.
Certainly Trump’s brand of nationalism seems to rest on doing something
similar with the idea of “America,” abandoning any pretense to a
creedal
idea of national identity in favor of one based on race. These trends
could well produce, among whites, more conscious anti-racists
and conscious racists at the same time.
ADDED: CATO dissents.
June 12, 2016Suicidal Libertarianism
Confession No.1: I generally like Don Boudreaux’s writing a lot.
Confession No.2: I think
this
is simply insane. By that I mean: I simply don’t get it, at all.
Boudreaux begins by explaining the concerns of a “few friends whose
opinions I hold in the highest regard” that “immigrants will use their
growing political power to vote for government policies that are more
interventionist and less respectful of individual freedoms.” Hard to
imagine, I know. Especially if one ignores insignificant examples such as
— ummm — the state of fricking California.
It then gets weirder. We learn that “concern over the likely voting
patterns of immigrants is nothing new. Past fears seem, from the
perspective of 2013, to have been unjustified.” I’m about to poison my
nervous-system with my own sarcasm at this point, so instead I’ll simply
ask, as politely as possible: What would count as evidence of America
moving in a direction that was “more interventionist and less respectful
of individual freedoms”? Would it look anything at all like what we’ve
seen — in highly-accelerated mode — since the passage of the 1965
Immigration and Nationality Act?
Then comes the overt celebration of libertarian suicidalism:
But let’s assume for the moment that today’s immigrants – those
immigrants recently arrived and those who would arrive under a more
liberalized immigration regime – are indeed as likely as my concerned
friends fear to vote overwhelmingly to move American economic policy in
a much more dirigiste direction. Such a move would, I
emphatically and unconditionally agree, be very bad. Very. Bad.
Indeed.
I still support open immigration. I cannot bring myself to abandon
support of my foundational principles just because following those
principles might prove fatal.
The thing is, they
did
prove fatal. That’s why the neoreaction exists.
June 25, 2013Suicidal Libertarianism (Part D’oh)
When it comes to the libertarian
suicide
race, Bryan Caplan leaves Don Boudreaux in the dust. Caplan takes the
Non-Aggression Principle and runs with it, all the way into a
maximum-velocity self-directed death cult. (Self-directed, solely in the ideological sense, of course.) Given the
considerable merits of
this
book, in particular, it’s a sad thing to see.
American libertarianism has always been vulnerable to neo-puritan
spiritual extravagance. Caplan systematically pushes this tendency to its
limit, divorcing its arguments from any realistic estimation of
consequences, and transforming it into a form of deontological moral
fanaticism, in which self-defense, retaliation, and boundaries are
strictly prohibited. He envisages a world of games in which only
unilateral altruism is permissible to the libertarian player. It would be
fun to go a few rounds of prisoner’s dilemma with him.
Naturally, when it comes to unconditional
support for open borders irrespective of political consequences, Caplan
rushes
to Boudreaux’s defense. Helpfully, he links into his own extensive archive
on the topic, via a
gateway
into a series of extremely repetitive posts (here,
here, and
here
— reading any one will do).
Perhaps Caplan really believes his own arguments, but if so he has driven
himself insane. If you doubt this for a moment, it’s only going to be a
moment — try
this:
If you care as much about immigrants as natives, this is no reason to
oppose immigration. Consider the following example:
Suppose there are two countries with equal populations. The quality of
policy ranges from 0-10, 10 being best. In country A, bliss points
(people’s first choice for policy) are uniformly distributed from 2-6.
In country B, bliss points are uniformly distributed from 4-8.
What does democratic competition deliver? When the countries are
independent, country A gets a policy quality of 4 (the median of the
uniform distribution from 2-6), and country B gets a policy quality of 6
(the median of the uniform distribution from 4-8). Average policy that
people live under: 50%*4+50%*6=5.
Now suppose you open the borders, and everyone moves to country B (the
richer country). The median of the whole distribution is 5. Result: The
immigrants live under better policies, the natives live under worse
policies. The average (5) remains unchanged.
Speechless yet? (I’m halfway through a blogpost, so I can’t afford to be.)
The argument: Any attempt to live under a regime that is anything other
than the averaged political idiocy of humanity as a whole is a gross human
rights violation.
You don’t like the way Pakistanis manage their national affairs? Too bad.
Libertarianism (Caplan style) insists that it’s your duty to promote the
homogenization of the world’s political cultures because, after all, if
there’s anything at all good going on at your end, think how happy it will
make the Pakistanis when it gets shared out. Heading into a stirred gruel
of deeply degenerated liberal capitalism and Islamo-feudalism is best for
everybody, taken on average. If it’s not tasting right, it’s because
you’ve not yet thrown in enough African tribal warfare and Polynesian
head-hunting for the full moral hit. Or how about mixing Singapore and
Bangladesh into a human paste? Anything less is tantamount to genocide.
This argument is so bad that the very idea of responding to it makes me
throw up a little in my mouth, but duty calls. Since Caplan claims to be a
libertarian, let’s start with an unobjectionable principle — competition.
If any institution is to work, it’s because competition keeps it in line.
This requires a number of things, all of them incompatible with
homogenization: experimental variation, differential support for
comparison, local absorption of consequences, and selection through
elimination of failure.
Consider two companies: Effective Inc. and Loserbum Corp. Both have very
different corporate cultures, adequately reflected in their names. Under
market conditions, Loserbum Corp. either learns some lessons from
Effective Inc., or it goes under. Net benefit or no great loss to the
world in either case.
But along comes Caplan, to bawl out the stockholders, management, and
other employees of Effective Inc. “You monsters! Don’t you care at all
about the guys at Loserbum Corp.? They have the same moral status as you,
don’t you know? Here’s the true, radical free-market plan: All managers
and workers of Loserbum get to enter your company, work there, introduce
their business strategies and working practices,until we reach
equilibrium. Equilibrium is what markets are all about, see? Sure,
Effective Inc. will degenerate significantly, but imagine all the utility
gains of the poor Loserbums! It all comes out in the wash.”
But … but … countries aren’t companies. Well, maybe not exactly,
but they’re competitive institutions, or at least, the more they are, the
better they work. The most important thing is true equally of both — to
the extent they are able to externalize and pool their failure, the less
they will learn.
In a world that has any chance of working, the Loserbum culture has a
choice: learn or fail. Caplan introduces a third possibility — share
(average out, or homogenize). His maths is idiotic. The contribution that
Singapore makes to the world has almost nothing to do with the utility
gains to its tiny population. Instead, it is a model — Effective Inc. —
whose contribution to the world is to show all the Loserbums what they
are. Swamp it with Loserbums, destroy it, and that function is gone. If
that had happened before the late 1970s, the PRC would probably still be a
neo-Maoist hellhole. It didn’t flood Singapore with 300 million poor
peasants, instead, it learnt from Singapore’s example. That’s how the
world really works (when it does). Institutional examples matter. Caplan’s
world would annihilate all of them, leaving fairly averaged, three-quarter
Loserbums grunting at each other in a libertarian-communist swamp. Nothing
would work anywhere. There could be no lessons.
Still, Caplan has other arguments. The best, by far, is that wrecking a
society to the point of generalized mutual detestation is the best way to
shrink the welfare state. It goes like
this:
Although poor immigrants are likely to support a bigger welfare state
than natives do, the presence of poor immigrants makes natives turn
against the welfare state. Why would this be? As a rule, people are
happy to vote to “take care of their own”; that’s what the welfare state
is all about. So when the poor are culturally very similar to the rich,
as they are in places like Denmark and Sweden, support for the welfare
state tends to be uniformly strong.
As the poor become more culturally distant from the rich, however,
support for the welfare state becomes weaker and less uniform.
This argument is so freaking Mad Max that I actually quite like it. Burn
down the world and you take the welfare state with it. Yeeaaaahhhhh! (I’ll
leave it to more responsible voices to point out any possible flaws.)
Then there’s the “non-natives are markedly less likely to vote than
natives” argument (from the same post, and all the rest). It makes you
wonder what a large population of enfranchised but non-voting
anti-capitalists engenders. Something
good, surely?
Best of all is the capstone contortionist analogy: “Native voters under 30
are more hostile to markets and liberty than immigrants ever were. Why not
just kick them out?” Oh yes, oh yes, could we? Or at least stop them
voting. Without some arrangement for the mass-disenfranchisement of
leftist voters there’s no chance of anything except continuous decay, and
age restriction might be as good a place as any to start.
My position in a sentence … is that immigration restrictions are a
vastly greater crime against markets and liberty than anything immigrant
voters are likely to manage.
Thank Gnon that no one listens to libertarians.
ADDED: Caplan doubles down, with some mouth-watering hypotheticals. If States
ever made these kind of choices, they’d be fun to keep around, but the
whole point is that of course they never would. (Don’t miss the
darkly-infiltrated comments thread.)
… and yet
more
attractive counter-democratic hypotheticals. By the time the deontological
libertarians have finished with this, they’ll have designed a
minutely-detailed neoreactionary policy platform for us.
July 7, 2013An Abstract Path to Freedom
At
this
thread (and in other places), commenter VXXC cites Durant’s Dark Counsel:
“For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one
prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities
will multiply almost geometrically.” He then remarks: “That’s fine with
me, I’ll go with Freedom.” Outside in concurs without reservation.
Take this dark counsel as the thesis that a practically-significant
ideological dimension can be constructed, within which freedom and
egalitarianism are related as strictly reciprocal variables. Taking this
dimension for orientation, two abstract models of demographic
redistribution can be examined, in order to identify
what it is that neoreactionaries want.
The Caplan-Boudreaux Suicidal Libertarianism
Model (SLM), touched upon
here,
and then sketched
here, takes the following arithmetical form:
Suppose there are two countries with equal populations. The quality of
policy ranges from 0-10, 10 being best. In country A, bliss points
(people’s first choice for policy) are uniformly distributed from 2-6.
In country B, bliss points are uniformly distributed from 4-8. […] When
the countries are independent, country A gets a policy quality of 4 (the
median of the uniform distribution from 2-6), and country B gets a
policy quality of 6 (the median of the uniform distribution from 4-8).
Average policy that people live under: 50%*4+50%*6=5. … suppose you open
the borders, and everyone moves to country B (the richer country). The
median of the whole distribution is 5. Result: The immigrants live under
better policies, the natives live under worse policies. The average (5)
remains unchanged.
A few preparatory tweaks help to smooth the proceedings. Firstly, convert
Caplan’s “bliss points” to freedom coefficients (from ‘0’ or absolute
egalitarianism, to ‘1’ or unconstrained liberty). A society in which
freedom was maximized would not be wholly unequal (Gini coefficient 1.0),
but it would be wholly indifferent to inequality as a problem. In other
words, egalitarian concerns would have zero policy impact. It is in this
sense, alone, that freedom is perfected.
Secondly (and automatically), the question-begging judgments of “better”
and “worse” are displaced by the ideological reciprocals of freedom and
equality – there is no need to compel acquiescence as to the objective
merits of either. Indeed, there is every reason to encourage those
unconvinced of the superior attractions of liberty to seek ideological
satisfaction in an egalitarian realm, elsewhere. From the perspective of
liberty, egalitarian exodus is an unambiguous – even supreme – good,
analogous to political entropy dissipation.
It is further, tacitly presumed here that freedom coefficients correlate
linearly with intelligence optimization, but this depends upon further
argument, to be bracketed for now.
The extraordinary theoretical value of the SLM can now be demonstrated.
Due to its radical egalitarianism it defines a pessimal limit for
neoreaction, and thus – by strict inversion – describes the abstract
program for a restoration of free society (the Neoreactionary Model of
demographic redistribution, or NM). In order to chart this reversal, the
simplest course is to presuppose the full accomplishment of the SLM in an
arbitrary ‘geographical’ space, which it taken to be flexibly divisible,
and populated by 320 million people, SLM-homogenized to a freedom
coefficient of 0.5.
Confining ourselves to the tools already employed in the establishment of
the climax SLM (whilst – for the sake of lucid presentation — ignoring any
degenerative ratchet
asymmetries), let us now proceed on the path of reversal. The SLM
conservation law holds that average freedom is preserved, so an initial
schism produces two equal populations – equivalent to those of Caplan’s
starting point – each numbering 160 million, but now differentiated on the
dark counsel dimension, with freedom coefficients of 0.6 and 0.4.
Pursue this fissional procedure of territorial / population division and
ideological differentiation recursively, focusing exclusively upon the
comparatively free segment each time. The 160 million 0.6s become 80
million 0.7s, and an equal number of 0.5s. After five iterations, the
final neoreactionary-secessionist de-homogenized distribution is reached:
160 million x 0.4
80 million x 0.5
40 million x 0.6
20 million x 0.7
10 million x 0.8, and – incarnating the meaning of world history, or at
least absorbing neoreactionary exaltation —
10 million x 1.0
Roughly 3% of the original population now live in a truly free society.
For Caplan and other SLM-proponents, of course, nothing at all has been
gained.
Yet, assume instead of SLM utilitarian universalism, on profoundly
inegalitarian grounds, that the aggregate quantity of freedom was
considered of vastly lower importance than the
exemplary quality of freedom, then the neoreactionary achievement
is stark. Where freedom nowhere existed, now it does, at an essentially
irrelevant cost of moderate socialist deterioration elsewhere. Half of the
original population – 160 million souls – have now been released to enjoy
a ‘fairer’ society than they knew before. Why not congratulate them on the
fact, without being distracted unduly by the starvation and re-education
camps? It can be confidently presumed that they would have voted for the
regime that now takes care of them. Their internal political arrangements
need no longer concern us.
For Neoreaction (the NM), it is not a question of whether people (in
general) are free, but only whether freedom (somewhere) exists. The
highest attainment of freedom within the system, rather than the averaged
level of freedom throughout the system, is its overwhelming priority. By
reversing the process of demographic redistribution envisaged by the SLM,
its ends are achieved.
The zero-sum utilitarian conclusions of this comparison would be unsettled
by a more concrete elaboration of the NM, in which the effects of
exemplarity, competition, the positive externalities of techno-economic
performance, and other influences of freedom were included. At the present
level of abstraction — set by Caplan’s own (SL) model — such positive
spin-offs might seem no more than sentimental concessions to common
feeling. It is the ruthless core of the Neoreactionary Model that has,
initially, to assert itself. Better the greatest possible freedom, even
for a few, than a lesser freedom for all. Quality matters most.
The quasi-Rawlesian objection — fully implicit within the SLM — might run:
“And what if the free society, as ‘probability’ dictates, is not yours?” —
our rejoinder: “It would require a despicable egotist not to delight in
it, even at a distance, as a beacon of aspiration, and an idiot or
scoundrel not to set out on the same path, in whichever way they were
able.”
Disintegrate destiny.
July 16, 2013Suicide Express
In an intriguing
post
on migration and ‘expressive voting’ in Alsace-Lorraine after the 1871
annexation, Bryan Caplan notes that although “over 90% of the new citizens
of the Second Reich voted for … anti-Prussian regional parties” only 5%
decided to emigrate back to France. Clearly in this case, migration
patterns revealed genuine commitments — based perhaps on economic
opportunity — while elections were merely an occasion to express ethnic
emotionalism without consequence. As usual in human affairs,
microeconomics was aligned with approximate reason, whilst politics was
possessed by destructive irrationality, redeemed only by its impotence.
It’s hard to imagine what Caplan is seeing as the politically-correct
take-away from this example. What it demonstrates starkly is that even
populations characterized by scrupulous rationality in their private
economic affairs will exploit electoral opportunities to vote for insanity
— as judged by their own revealed preferences. Expect even model immigrant
workers to expend their votes signalling an adherence to ethnic zealotry
and ruinous economic populism — and in particular, the reproduction of
exactly those social pathologies they have migrated away from. Like the
French in post-1871 Alsace-Lorraine, they’ll probably vote as if they want
to live somewhere they manifestly don’t want to be. (But that’s not
supposed to be the message, is it?)
August 19, 2013Border Follies
Bryan Caplan’s
latest
on the open borders question illuminates an imaginary world. Perhaps the
strangest thing about this fantasy earth is that it corresponds almost
perfectly with an achieved libertarian utopia, marred only by pesky
borders that impede the frictionless completion of labor contracts.
In Caplan World there are two significant levels of social organization:
private owners — fully secure in their property rights — and the human
race as a whole, struggling to sort itself into productive relationships
of voluntary cooperation. In his figurative simplification, there are
households, and there is the planet. Nothing done to de-fragment the
planet could negatively affect households to any significant extent. In
fact, they could only benefit from open-access to several billion
potential tenants. On Caplan World, open-borders is a no-brainer.
On Sol-3, unfortunately, things are not nearly so simple. The most obvious
reason is that nobody on this planet enjoys secure property rights.
Freely-contracting Caplan World ‘tenants’ are — in reality — also voters,
and what they vote upon, most substantially, is other people’s property
rights. In this, real world, geographical fragmentation means that a whole
bunch of (once) non-random other people
do not have any voice in regards to your business. In an age of
rampant democracy, the only way to maintain this situation is to keep them
on the other side of a border, at least formally (polite visitors don’t
get to decide whether your house should be expropriated). Eliminate the
borders, and the only property rights remaining are those that the global
population, as a whole, are willing to grant. Does it really need to be
spelt out that this is not the recipe for a libertarian society?
Yes, it’s
tediously
repetitive
to
accuse Caplan
and company of being suicidal lunatics, but they keeps printing out the
collective suicide notes. These aren’t stupid people. They have to know
their plans won’t result in the importation of voiceless exit-units, or
free-contractors, but rather of a new people, already pre-determined by
democratic assumptions to be particles of political sovereignty — i.e.
masters. You don’t get to decide (commercially) whether they can
stay in your house. They get to decide (politically) whether you can keep
your house. Since they are also disproportionately saturated with the
bio-cultural heritage of places that have never shown any taste or
competence for the creation or mere preservation of freedom-tolerant
institutions, the subsequent democratic decisions — it can reliably be
predicted — will be horrendous. If this were not so, why would the
Left-half of the political spectrum be openly salivating about the
electoral catastrophe in process? (Nobody thinks they’re importing
reinforcements for the Tea Party.)
It’s probably far too late for any of this to matter. At this point,
Caplan is just rubbing salty madness into the wounds.
September 3, 2013Suicidal Libertarianism (Part-n)
Two
posts
in succession at Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution acknowledge
that libertarianism’s suicide-by-population-replacement is proceeding
according to spontaneous disorder. Completely un-shockingly, mass low-IQ
immigration from dysfunctional cultures that despise economic liberty has
pushed libertarian ideas from marginality into complete irrelevance. So it
goes.
Firstly,
there‘s “Bad Demographic News for Libertarians” from Arnold Kling. It should
probably be noted that this isn’t a story being told from an
immigration-catastrophe angle, so anybody with advanced skills at mental
segmentation can dismiss it as irrelevant. You need to check the final
table of the source
post, by Timothy Taylor, to connect the dots. Kling’s sober conclusion: “I am
afraid that the number of households married to the state has soared.”
Secondly, Cowen
cites
this paper by Hal Pashler (a psychologist at UCSD), whose research
“results showed a marked pattern of lower support for pro-liberty views
among immigrants as compared to US-born residents. These differences were
generally statistically significant and sizable, with a few scattered
exceptions. With increasing proportions of the US population being
foreign-born, low support for libertarian values by foreign-born residents
means that the political prospects of libertarian values in the US are
likely to diminish over time.”
I just wish there had been some sort of short-cut to self-abolition for
these
maniacs that hadn’t been routed
through the destruction of America.
[Previous installments of Suicidal Libertarianism
here,
and
here]
December 2, 2013Scary Sailer
Bryan Caplan
seizes
upon a two-sentence Steve Sailer comment to fly into theatrical
conniptions in public:
Does Steve genuinely favor denying half of Americans the right to
reproduce? It’s hard to know. It is the uncertainty that he carefully
cultivated that makes Sailer’s thought so scary to so many — including
me. We shouldn’t have to wonder if a thinker approves
of denying half the population the right to have children.
This really is Caplan at his most despicable. First, set up a bizarre
counter-factual to support a quite different moral argument by analogy.
The crudely-telegraphed argumentative strategy is to shift the burden of
fanaticism from proponents to opponents (“hey, can’t you see that
restricting immigration is just like sterilizing half the
population”). Secondly, when a commentator corrects your counter-factual
in the direction of historical reality — i.e. something that
actually happened — deflect attention by cranking up the moral
hysteria, while retreating into what seems increasingly to be Caplan’s
favorite territory — unhinged deontological purism. Finally, suggest that
the commentator is only mentioning historical reality in order to
surreptitiously endorse your own preposterous thought-experiment as a
practical program, thus exposing himself as “scary”.
Why doesn’t he just say that hyper-Nazi eugenics is wrong? (Of
course, he has, many times.)
He probably wants to throw your granny into the biodiesel tanks too.
Let’s talk about that rather than my project to engineer a national
immigration apocalypse.
Anyone who seriously “wonders” whether Steve Sailer secretly advocates
sterilizing half of the American population has released their grip on the
last frayed threads of civilized conversation. Caplan is deteriorating
from a nut into something far more repulsive.
ADDED: Sailer responds (calmly) —
Bryan:
Your arguments would get less tangled up if you’d simply keep in mind
that I’m a moderate who takes reasonable positions, while you are an
extremist who is drawn to promoting unreasonable ones. Please stop
projecting your own immoderation upon me.
For example, there is an obvious distinction you fail to recognize
between my appreciating the difficulties our ancestors went through —
what Nicholas Wade calls “the Malthusian wringer” that helped make us
who we are — and my very much not wanting to inflict similar levels of
competition upon our descendants.
Instead, it’s you who wants to subject the descendants of American
citizens to the neo-Malthusian nightmare of Open Borders.
June 3, 2014Quote note (#206)
Caplan
enters
the bargaining stage:
… demographic ills can
clearly be remedied with more immigration! Non-white
immigration is messing up America? Then let in enough white immigrants
to keep the white share constant. Non-Christian immigration is
destroying our religious heritage? Then let in enough Christians to keep
the Christian share constant. Non-Anglophones are turning English into a
minority language? Then let in enough English-speakers to balance them
out. Low-IQ immigration is making us dumb? Then let in enough high-IQ
immigrants to keep up smart.
This is certainly a viable solution given current levels of
immigration. The world has hundreds of millions of whites, Christians,
English-speakers, and IQs>100. At least tens of millions of each
group would love to permanently move to the U.S. Why haven’t they?
Because it’s illegal, of course. If the U.S. selectively opened its
borders to these groups, it could reverse decades of demographic change
in a matter of years. In fact, the U.S. could admit vastly more Third
World immigrants without changing overall demographics a bit – as long
as it concurrently welcomed First World immigrants to balance them.
Take the machinery necessary to do that, and it would be possible — in
fact, almost irresistible — to do something positive with it. (Or does
demographic engineering only go in one direction?)
December 15, 2015Anglophidian
I’m going to assume that snake is English (despite all natural-historical
evidence to the
contrary). The point is hard to contest, regardless. The ones that bite
are better.
October 28, 2016
SECTION E - CRITIQUE OF CONSERVATISM
Anarchy on the Old Right
Over at
The American Conservative, the Old Right has expressed its smoldering dismay at the country’s
political prospects through a fit of paralyzed dissensus.
The 29 members of the TAC
symposium
split fairly evenly between (Democrat) Barack Obama, (Republican) Mitt
Romney, and (Libertarian) Gary Johnson. Each musters four definite
commitments, with Andrew J. Bacevich, Leon Hadar, Scott McConnell, and
Noah Millman for Obama; Marian Kester Coombs, James P. Pinkerton, Stephen
B. Tippins Jr., and John Zmirak for Romney; and Doug Bandow, Peter
Brimelow, Scott Galupo, and Bill Kauffman for Johnson.
Philip Giraldi epitomizes the spirit of anti-neoconservative
obstreperousness with his declared electoral intentions, wavering between
a vote for Johnson, a Ron Paul write-in, or a Romney-spavining Obama
choice if the race is tight. James Bovard is also torn between Johnson and
a Ron Paul write-in (but without mention of an anti-Romney Obama option).
Like Johnson, Romney picks up two additional ‘maybes’ (from W. James Antle
III, Bradley J. Birzer). The Constitution Party’s Virgil Goode musters
just one solid supporter (Sean Scallon). There’s also a write-in for Rand
Paul (Daniel McCarthy), and four indecipherables (Jeremy Beer, Rod Dreher,
William S. Lind, and Steve Sailer).
Decisive winner among the TAC writers, however, is Nobody, supported by
seven unambiguous abstentions (Michael Brendan Dougherty, David Gordon,
Robert P. Murphy, Justin Raimondo, Sheldon Richman, and Gerald J.
Russello), and probably an eighth (Paul Gottfried, poised at the
democratically-abstemious edge of the indecipherables).
Perhaps questions like
this
are souring the mood.
Why not opt for the
real
deal?
November 6, 2012Almost …
As a symptom of things hitting the buffers,
this
Michael Walsh article is vaguely encouraging. It speaks unreservedly about
the “collaborationist Republican Party” but eventually loses itself in the
pseudo-conundrum:
How a political party cannot sell Freedom and Liberty and Leave Me
Alone to a formerly free people is beyond me …
Could it perhaps be because democratic party politics has exhaustively
demonstrated its incompatibility with “Freedom and Liberty”, “Leave Me
Alone”, and a “free people”?
September 26, 2013Things Fall Apart
Reaction is not Neoreaction (but still Conservatism). Alain Finkielkraut
explains
to Spiegel:
SPIEGEL: What do you say to people who call you a
reactionary?
Finkielkraut: It has become impossible to see history as
constant progress. I reserve the possibility to compare yesterday and
today and ask the question: What do we retain, what do we abandon?
SPIEGEL: Is that really any more than nostalgia for a lost
world?
Finkielkraut: Like Albert Camus, I am of the opinion that our
generation’s task is not to recreate the world, but to prevent its
decline. We not only have to conserve nature, but also culture. There
you have the reactionary.
[The entire interview says something about the unusual conversations that
are beginning to break out.]
December 9, 2013Conservatives
AoS two days in a row, which is a sign that I like the place.
It’s far smarter than it attempts to appear, which is always attractive,
and it’s among the wittiest blogs I know (by which I mean painfully funny,
quite often). There are also writers at AoS that I almost agree
with, but when they’re reaching the line, or threshold of escape, and are
just about to cross over into the open country beyond, something catches
them — and you know it’s going to pull them back in. Conservatism has them
hooked.
Ace is a comparative squish in his own house. Some of his comrades are
considerably meaner, so they get out further. It’s one of Ace’s
own pieces that triggers this, though.
Writing about the
attempt by Mozilla employees to purge CEO Brendan Eich from the company he
built, he notes that the only ‘ground’ floated for this effort is private,
discreet political speech, in the form of a small donation made to the
successful (anti-gay marriage) Proposition 8 campaign, six years ago.
Their attack on Eich — conducted through Twitter — is a contrary type of
political speech, more attuned to the PC Zeitgeist, but in every
other way less defensible. If anyone is going to be fired, why shouldn’t
it be the twitterati lynch mob? Ace muses. (Good question.)
The post concludes with the lucid observation:
The left has laid down the rule that their political
rights shall never been infringed by an economic penalty, because
McCarthyism. While they meanwhile demand the exact same sort of
McCarthyism for everyone else.
So what could possibly be objectionable about
that, from the perspective of the outer right? What’s objectionable — and
in fact even maddening — about this insight is its conservatism,
which it to say that, even after recognizing the relentlessly steepening
leftist gradient in the dominant culture, the implicit message is only:
carry on.
If the sole point is to say “this isn’t fair” it might be even more
pointless than saying nothing at all. Keeping people in the ‘fairness’
frame is part of the captivity, and it’s why conservatives are never going
to do anything but lose. This whole situation isn’t ‘unfair’ — it’s
disastrous. It’s ruin. There’s not any kind of game happening here that
could somehow be made ‘fair’. There’s a civilizational calamity in process
which is intrinsically tilted and leads, with accelerating
glacial inevitability, only in one direction.
Conservatives — even atheist conservatives — could be minimally expected
to have held onto that “hate the sin, not the sinner” recommendation from
their collapsed religious tradition. Even if they’re not going to hate
leftists, they have no excuse for avoiding icy hatred of leftism, and that
means never giving it the benefit of the doubt by implying, even for a
moment, that it can pursue anything other than the total destruction of
its enemies, by any means necessary. Leftism isn’t going to be shamed
out of winning. It isn’t going to be taught a lesson. It isn’t
going to recognize its internal contradictions. The only thing it’s ever
going to do, is continue pushing civilization down the slope.
Conservatism is congenitally incapable of recognizing the true malignancy
of its foe. It’s always looking for the next tactical edge, the next
opportunity to slow down the calamity just a little, the next disastrous
deal. It’s conservatism that allowed the relentless collapse to happen, by
presenting a self-defeating alternative to the one thing that’s really
needed — counter-revolution.
So now the brain-washed idiots at Mozilla are trying to purge their boss
in pursuit of Cathedral spiritual purity, and they’re getting away with
it. The answer to that isn’t to point out their hypocrisy, or the sad
state of society in general, while hoping the GOP wins one. It’s to
destroy the GOP and get real about defeating the left. That’s going to
require a social order in which the left doesn’t necessarily win, or at
least the end of the social order in which it always does. Sooner or
later, conservatism has to move on.
ADDED: Some lessons from the Eich affair (from Henry Dampier).
ADDED: Handlean magnificence.
April 2, 2014Conservatism
Well, is there?
June 23, 2014Quote notes (#104)
The only thing that Neoconservatism has to offer a non-psychotic policy
analyst is bitching, but sometimes the bitching can be pretty good.
Bret Stephens
(via
Brett Stevens (sorry, I had
to do that)):
… None of these fiascos — for brevity’s sake, I’m deliberately setting
to one side the illusory pivot to Asia, the misbegotten Russian Reset,
the mishandled Palestinian–Israeli talks, the stillborn Geneva
conferences on Syria, the catastrophic interim agreement with Iran, the
de facto death of the U.S. free-trade agenda, the overhyped opening to
Burma, the orphaned victory in Libya, the poisoned relationship with
Egypt, and the disastrous cuts to the Defense budget — can be explained
away as a matter of tough geopolitical luck. Where, then, does the
source of failure lie? […] The myth of Obama’s brilliance paradoxically
obscures the fact that he’s no fool. The point is especially important
to note because the failure of Obama’s foreign policy is not,
ultimately, a reflection of his character or IQ. It is the consequence
of an ideology.
The ‘ideology’ at its root, of course, is evangelical egalitarian
universalism, and it is one the Neoconservatives entirely share. At the
limit, which is now being encountered, what America is makes it
impossible for it to succeed at what it wants.
August 23, 2014SJWs of the Right
“Hey, our prissy skirt-clutching authoritarian moralism is nothing
at all like the prissy skirt-clutching authoritarian moralism of
SJW
leftists!”
Oh, I’m sure there are differences to be drawn — so long as no one is
pretending they extend to (classic Neo-Puritan witch-burner) personality
types.
February 9, 2015Zero Sum
AoS has a “Fudamental Concepts”
post about the zero-sum
mentality, which it identifies with leftism, getting a lot of things
convincingly right. Unintentionally, however, it exposes the limits of
conservatism, and — even more unintentionally — suggests why NRx is
something else.
Zero sum games are wars, and market (or catallactic) economics are indeed
different. It was by putting war to bed too early, that conservatism
destined itself to the ratchet of defeat. Treat an enemy as a business
partner, and you lose, over and over again.
The payoff matrix is easy to draw. Re-purposing a prisoner’s dilemma
quadrate works fine.
Treat “Stay Silent” as a positive-sum contract, and “Confess and Betray”
as stubborn zero-sum antagonism. Searching for positive-sum engagement
with a committed zero-sum opponent is the loser’s game that the mainstream
‘right’ has been playing for centuries. It’s the reason libertarians are
so often dismissed as smart imbeciles (or
worse). There’s business, and
there’s war, and only the latter is definitely not going anywhere. In
reality, (positive-sum) capitalism depends upon (zero-sum)
counter-revolution. Otherwise, the right ‘stays silent’ while the left
‘confesses and betrays’. Our little matrix, and the course of recent
global history, equally exhibit where that leads.
Positive-sum is the civilized order at the end of a far dirtier process.
In the interim, if it hurts the left it’s worth doing, unless it hurts you
more.
February 16, 2015Ace Torches the Popcorn Stand
Forget the headline, which is just a pretext — this
post is really
something. A couple of highlights:
They think that our desire for a better America will draw us to vote
for the Least Worst candidates. […] But many of us now feel like the
Communists, or the hardcore paleocons: There really is not a large
enough difference between the two parties any more to
bother oneself in terms of emotional and financial investment any
longer. […] Either way, we will have some form of repressive, unresponsive
socialism in this country; what should we care whether the National
Welfare Depot is painted in Red or Blue? […] I’m not coming back. I’m
done. For the past ten years of my life, I’ve made arguments, some of
which I knew to be false, to defend and apologize for the GOP; I see now
that I was a fool to do so.
And:
Here’s Some Truth: We all know this, but being Part of the Team, I felt
obligated to lie, because I figured you expected me to lie, even though
you didn’t believe it. […] So yeah: The GOP is never repealing Obamacare
or even trying hard to do so. They will make false efforts at doing so
which they can present to voters as a Good College Try, but aw shucks,
we couldn’t quite do it. […] It’s a relief to no longer have to
propagate this obvious, feeble lie. […] I know very few of you believe
the GOP has much intention of repealing Obamacare, but, being a
Republican, I have previously felt the need to present The Official
Party Position even knowing it was total bullshit. […] I’ve known it was
a lie for a year, which is why I hate when it comes up on, say, the
Podcast. What am I supposed to say? Am I supposed to pretend the GOP is
going to repeal it? […] So they’re not. They never were. […] It was
always a lie.
If there was ever a moment to stoop to a ‘wow, just wow!’ this might be
it.
March 19, 2015What’s in a word?
The vulgarity of pop-reaction is matched only by the
stupidity
of mainstream conservatism:
I bring this up because I suppose it’s possible that some conservatives
might embrace this term without fully understanding the racial and
sexual implications. To some, it might be seen as an innocent jab — like
calling someone a “squish” or a “RINO.” But
as Erickson correctly observes, “Remember, if you hear the term ‘cuckservative,’ it is a slur against
Christian voters coined by white-supremacists.”
If anyone deserves a gutter-fight with degenerates, it’s the GOP. It seems
quite probable that they’ll lose.
(If you’re tempted to roll out your degeneracy in the comments thread,
think again. We gibbet people for such things in these parts.)
ADDED: Official XS Health Warning — a popcorn diet is ruinous for the
soul. It is recommended that you scrupulously avoid following these links
(1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6).
ADDED:
Jim’s take.
ADDED: Hood.
ADDED: “I think this is
the ugliest development I’ve seen online.”
ADDED: We’re going to need a bigger popcorn barrel.
July 23, 2015Inversion
Already famously — to the extent of echoing down the corridors of eternity
— Michael Enoch wrote
this:
Look, you guys have lost, even on the issues important to you as
Christians because of your cuckholdry on the race issue. You’re not
doing anything to preserve the white majority, but you’re not winning on
your issues either. Gay marriage is a done deal. Abortion is here to
stay, particularly as more broken nonwhite families enter the social
services system and are encouraged by bureaucrats to abort. You lost,
you lost, you lost. […] With a white majority these issues were
winnable, because whites vote conservative in the majority. But by being
cowards on the issue of immigration and bending over for the left’s
quite open plan of demographic replacement of whites in order to secure
a permanent nonwhite left wing majority you lost. In 8 years it may be
demographically impossible for the GOP to win a national election ever
again. Even your precious Christian issues are done. Even your cucking
for Israel is under threat. Do you think a nonwhite majority in the US
is going to be keen to support your favorite ethnostate? They side with
the Palestinians! […] You lost everything, and all because you were
afraid a group of communists, atheists and homosexuals would call you
racist.
It goes with this map:
It’s being posted here because, as far as it goes, it’s hilariously — and
certainly outrageously — right.
Thing is — Progressivism happened in the USA without the help of massive
Hispanic immigration, or even women’s suffrage. It happened because
democratically-empowered white men had been persuaded to
dismantle capitalism by
populist
politicians. The ‘right wing’ party that they’d be supporting in that map? It’s the
Republican Party of 2012, and its Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney,
Governor of (freaking) Massachusetts. So what this is saying, at
best, is that American White Men can now be persuaded to freeze in place
the catastrophic ruin of Western Civilization as it stood roughly during
Phase-1 Obamanation. Is there any suggestion from this that there’s
support for rolling back politicized money, The Great Society, The New
Deal, or the violent destruction of American federalism? In fact, any
indication of support for actual right wing policies at all?
As a counter factual, I guess — just possibly — an uprising of White Men
could help to get Trump into the White House, which would be
ambiguous.
It’s fun — really it is — but it’s not going anywhere, because it doesn’t
even start to get a grip on where things went wrong.
July 30, 2015Quote note (#227)
Douthat (whatever his status quo sins) is
participating
in our conversation:
… Others, especially in the intelligentsia, have a kind of highbrow
nihilism about our politics, a sense that American democracy’s decadence
— or the Republican Party’s decadence, in particular — is so advanced
that a cleansing Trumpian fire might be just the thing we need.
March 6, 2016RIP Neoconservatism
Max Fisher,
at
Vox:
Neoconservatives can threaten to quit the Republican Party, or warn
that the party is diverging from their values, but it looks increasingly
like they may have it backward: that it is the Republican Party, as
constituted by its voters and their policy preferences, that is
rejecting neoconservatives. […] That might seem surprising. But when you
look at the brief history of neoconservative reign over the Republican
Party, it seems inevitable. If anything, it is surprising that it took
this long.
There probably aren’t enough supporters remaining for a boisterous
funeral, at this point.
Neoconservatism had a complex genesis, but it matured into right-wing
Jacobinism. The policy program with which it will forever be centrally
associated is democracy promotion by the sword. Too aggressive in its
civilizational (and especially American) self-confidence for the Left, and
too saturated in universalistic Utopianism for the Right, its demise in
the second decade of the 21st century can surprise few.
It looks as if robust
realism
will supplant it. Dewy-eyed foreign policy is done, at least for a while.
March 11, 2016
BLOCK 3 - TECHNO-COMMERCIALISM
Crypto-Capitalism
Political language is systematically confusing, in a distinctive
way. Its significant terms are only secondarily theoretical, as
demonstrated by radical shifts in sense that express informal policies of
meaning. Descriptions of political position are moves in a game, before
they are neutral accounts of the rules, or even of the factions.
It would be excessively digressive to embark on yet another expedition
into the history of such political terms as ‘liberal’, ‘progress’,
‘fascism’, or ‘conservative’. Everyone knows that these words are
profoundly uninformative without extensive historical qualification, or
rough-and-ready adaptation to the dictates of guided fashion. If
consistent theoretical use of any political label conflicts with its
maximally effective political use, the former will be sacrificed without
hesitation — and always has been. That is why neologisms are typically
required for even the most fleeting approximation to theoretical
precision, whenever political affiliation is at stake.
A point in favor of the ‘crypto-‘ prefix is that it plays directly into
such confusion. As a politically-significant marker, it bears two strongly
differentiated, yet intersecting senses. It indicates (a) that a political
phenomenon has been re-assembled in disguise, and (b) that cryptographic
techniques are essential to its identity. Hence, respectively,
‘crypto-communism’ and ‘crypto-currencies’. Any attempt to engage in an
initial clarification cuts across the intrinsically occulted character of
both.
‘Crypto-capitalism’ — therefore — might be one
thing, or two, if it is anything at all. If clarity is to be brought to
the topic, it will certainly not be self-promoted. Whatever
crypto-capitalism might be, structural misunderstanding has to be the most
prominent part of it. Hiding is essential to whatever it is.
What crypto-capitalism is not, first practically, and subsequently
theoretically, is pseudo-capitalism, or ‘capitalism’ as it is publicly
recognized. Rather than engaging in futile struggle over the ‘true
meaning’ of capitalism, crypto-capitalism proceeds with a surreptitious
appropriation of terminological confusion, functionalized as camouflage.
It does capitalism, all the more effectively, because the
grinding mill of political language works predictably, providing it with
cover. The loss of terminological integrity is invested, from a position
of intense cynicism, as an opportunity to develop off stage.
Pseudo-capitalism is (by now) the
host
of the Cathedral. It feeds a mega-parasite, which — employing
unprecedented powers of narrative construction — claims to be the source
of its vitality. Evolving far beyond an initial stage of conspicuous
resource extraction, the Cathedralized — or culture-potent — state now
more-or-less directly controls the ‘capitalist’ brain, in more ways than
can be readily enumerated. ‘Capitalists’ are Cathedralized through
educational and media indoctrination, social selection, regulatory
discipline, seductive alliance, and ‘transcendental’ subordination to a
financial system that has been subverted to its foundations by the magic
of power. The mere denomination of ‘capitalism’ in fiat currency expresses
the domain of pseudo-capitalism with remarkable exactitude. The meaning of
the host is (articulated through) the virus it sustains. Any suggestion of
opposition in this relationship is entirely fake, because it belongs to
the same magical performance.
Prohibition exemplifies this stage show. Publicly pitting cops against
gangsters, what it represents is the spectacular definition of the ‘white
economy’ (pseudo-capitalism) over against the ‘black economy’ or
‘organized crime’ (crypto-capitalism). The same story can be told in the
decadent USSR, without any need for substantial revision. Whatever refuses
denomination in the signs of power is a pathological aberration, to be
renormalized as a productive parasited host social body.
As ZH
reports:
… one of the most popular websites that use and promote the use of
BitCoin, Silk Road, was shut down by the US government. As Reuters
reports, U.S. law enforcement authorities raided an Internet site that
served as a marketplace for illegal drugs, including heroin and cocaine,
and arrested its owner, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said on
Wednesday. The FBI arrested Ross William Ulbricht, known as “Dread
Pirate Roberts,” in San Francisco on Tuesday, according to court
filings. Federal prosecutors charged Ulbricht with one count each of
narcotics trafficking conspiracy, computer hacking conspiracy and money
laundering conspiracy, according to a court filing.
It’s worth revisiting
this
(noted here) to
recall some realistic context, and plausible historical analogy. The
Prohibition of the 1920s was an endless source of cop-on-gangster drama,
none of which had any realistically persuasive meaning as the successful
pursuit of policy. Instead, gangsters used the cops, as a tactical
resource for black-economy dispute ‘resolution’. (In the Shanghai of the
same epoch, the Opium-trafficking ‘Green Gang’ managed to get their agent
‘Pock-marked Huang’ installed as chief of the French Concession police —
an admittedly extreme example of a typical tendency.) From the perspective
of the outer economy, cops are a cheap way to smash your competition.
Extrapolate speculatively just a little from the Forbes
discussion:
IT’S A RULE AS TIMELESS as black markets: Where illegal money goes,
violence follows. In a digital market that violence is virtual, but it’s
as financially real as torching your competitor’s warehouse.
In late April Silk Road went offline for nearly a week, straining under
a sustained cyberattack that left its sensitive data untouched but
overwhelmed its servers. The attack, according to Roberts, was the most
sophisticated in Silk Road’s history, taking advantage of previously
unknown vulnerabilities in Tor and repeatedly shifting tactics to avoid
the site’s defenses.
The sabotage occurred within weeks of rival site Atlantis’ launch.
Commenters on the Reddit forum devoted to Silk Road suggested that
Roberts’ customers and vendors switch to Atlantis during the downtime,
leading to gossip that the newcomer had engineered the attack.
Who was the real beneficiary of the FBI operation? All too many
neoractionaries,
beginning
with Moldbug, and now
including
Handle, seem to think the only possible answer is: Prohibition. Here at
Outside in it appears incontrovertible that ‘Roberts’ had already
predicted this ‘sting’ — in far greater detail than anybody else has done
— and that the antagonist he pre-emptively, if subtly, fingered was a
shadowy crypto-capitalist competitor, rather than the forces of
pseudo-capitalist suppression. If this was a cryptic event, it
would be inexcusably negligent not to ask: Who (or what) is the FBI really
— even if unwittingly — working for? “For the ultimate glory of the white
(pseudo-capitalist) economy” is certainly one possible answer, but it is
by no means the only one.
ADDED:
Jim
and
NBS
both have interesting things to say about technical aspects of these
developments.
ADDED: What does the FBI do with its new Bitcoin stash?
October 4, 2013Dark Techno-Commercialism
Each of the three main strands of neoreaction, insofar as they are
remotely serious, attaches itself to something that no politics could
absorb.
The reality of a religious commitment cannot be resolved into its
political implications. If it is wrong, it is not because of anything that
politics can do to it, or make of it. Providence either envelops history
and ideology, subtly making puppets of both, or it is nothing. However bad
things get, it offers a ‘reason’ not to be afraid — at least of that — and
one the degeneration has no way to touch, let alone control.
Similarly, the Darwinian truths underpinning rational ethno-nationalist
convictions are invulnerable to ideological reversal. A trend to racial
entropy and idiocracy, however culturally hegemonic and unquestionable,
does not cease to be what it is, simply because criticism has been
criminalized and suppressed. Scientific objections have significance — if
they are indeed scientific (and not rather the corruption of science) —
but politically enforced denial is a tawdry comedy, outflanked
fundamentally by reality itself, and diverting events into ‘perverse
outcomes’ that subvert delusion from without. What Darwinism is
about cannot be banned.
The Techno-commercial ‘thing’ — catallaxy — is
comparably invulnerable. There is no chance that anyone, ever, will
successfully prohibit the market, or the associated dynamics of
competitive technical advantage (which together compose real capitalism).
As with religion and genetic selection, the techno-commercial complex can
be driven into darkness, socially occulted, and stigmatized as a public
enemy. It cannot, however, be de-realized by political fiat.
It is important, therefore, to understand where neoreactionary ‘dark
thoughts’ lead. Their horizon of despair is strictly limited to the
political, or public sphere. When taken to the edge, they converge with
the intuition that no neoreactionary politics can be pursued to a
successful conclusion. In other words, at their darkest, they predict that
the stubborn delusion of the political dooms humanity’s public-exoteric
aspirations to catastrophe.
At this point, neoreaction bifurcates. However it is principally
comprehended (through the trichotomy), a relatively ‘light’ branch holds
onto the prospect of public-political insideness — of a world politically
restructured in relative consonance with neoreactionary ideas, such that
social order might be resumed, on a realistic basis. Alternatively, and no
less trichotomously, a dark branch points outside, through collapse, into
tracts of religious, biological, and / or catallactic inevitability, whose
dynamics cast human delusion into terminal ruin. If ‘man’ never (again)
reverts to sanity? Reality will not stop.
Outside in is darker than it is trichotomously partisan. Neither
real providence, nor Darwinian reality, are attachments that trigger the
slightest aversion in these parts. The idea that the neoreaction will ever
‘do’ politics, or achieve insider status, on the other hand — except as a
rhetorical tactic of cognitive independence (separation) — is a
possibility we struggle to envisage. (That leaves much to argue over, on
other occasions.)
Dark Techno-Commercialism — provisionally summarized — is the suspicion
that the ‘Right Singularity’ is destined to occur in surreptitious and
antagonistic relation to finalistic political institutions, that the
Cathedral culminates in the Human Security System, outmatched and defeated
from the Outside, and that all hopes that these ultimate historical
potentialities will be harnessed for politically intelligible ends are
vain. It is, therefore, the comprehension of capitalism ‘in-itself’ as an
outsider that will never know — or need — political representation.
Instead, as the ultimate enemy, it will envelop the entirety of political
philosophy — including anything neoreaction can contribute to the genre —
as the futile strategic initiatives (or death spasms) of its prey.
We (humans) are radically stubborn in our stupidity. That has
consequences. Perhaps they will not always be uninteresting ones.
October 13, 2013Re-Accelerationism
Is there a word for an ‘argument’ so soggily insubstantial that it has to
be scooped into a pair of scare-quotes to be apprehended, even in its
self-dissolution? If there were, I’d have been using it all the time
recently. Among the latest occasions is a blog
post
by Charlie Stross, which describes itself as “a political speculation”
before disappearing into the gray goomenon. Nothing in it really holds
together, but it’s fun in its own way, especially if it’s taken as a sign
of something else.
The ‘something else’ is a subterranean complicity between Neoreaction and
Accelerationism
(the latter linked here, Stross-style, in its most recent, Leftist
version).
Communicating
with fellow ‘Hammer of Neoreaction’ David Brin, Stross asks: “David, have
you run across the left-wing equivalent of the Neo-Reactionaries — the
Accelerationists?” He then continues, invitingly: “Here’s my (tongue in
cheek) take on both ideologies: Trotskyite singularitarians for
Monarchism!”
Stross is a comic-future novelist, so it’s unrealistic to expect much more
than a dramatic diversion (or anything more at all, actually). After an
entertaining meander through parts of the Trotskyite-neolibertarian
social-graph, which could have been deposited on a time-like curve out of
Singularity Sky, we’ve learnt that Britain’s Revolutionary
Communist Party has been on a strange path, but whatever connection there
was to Accelerationism, let alone Neoreaction, has been entirely lost.
Stross has the theatrical instinct to end the performance before it became
too embarrassing: “Welcome to the century of the Trotskyite monarchists,
the revolutionary reactionaries, and the fringe politics of the
paradoxical!” (OK.) Curtain closes. Still, it was all comparatively good
humored (at least in contrast to Brin’s increasingly enraged
head-banging).
Neoreaction is Accelerationism with a flat tire. Described less
figuratively, it is the recognition that the acceleration trend is
historically compensated. Beside the speed machine, or industrial
capitalism, there is an ever more perfectly weighted decelerator, which
gradually drains techno-economic momentum into its own expansion, as
it returns dynamic process to meta-stasis. Comically, the fabrication of
this braking mechanism is proclaimed as progress. It is the Great
Work of the Left. Neoreaction arises through naming it (without excessive
affection) as the Cathedral.
Is the trap to be exploded (as advocated Accelerationism), or has the
explosion been trapped (as diagnosed by Neoreaction)? — That is the
cybernetic
puzzle-house under investigation. Some quick-sketch background might be
helpful.
The germinal catalyst for Accelerationism was a call in Deleuze &
Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972) to “accelerate the process”.
Working like termites within the rotting mansion of Marxism, which was
systematically gutted of all Hegelianism until it became something utterly
unrecognizable, D&G vehemently rejected the proposal that anything had
ever “died of contradictions”, or ever would. Capitalism was not born from
a negation, nor would it perish from one. The death of capitalism could
not be delivered by the executioner’s ax of a vengeful proletariat,
because the closest realizable approximations to ‘the negative’ were
inhibitory, and stabilizing. Far from propelling ‘the system’ to its end,
they slowed the dynamic to a simulacrum of systematicity, retarding its
approach to an absolute limit. By progressively comatizing capitalism,
anti-capitalism dragged it back into a self-conserving social structure,
suppressing its eschatological implication. The only way Out was onward.
Marxism is the philosophical version of a Parisian accent, a rhetorical
type, and in the case of D&G it becomes something akin to a higher
sarcasm, mocking every significant tenet of the faith. The bibliography of
Capitalism and Schizophrenia (of which Anti-Oedipus is
the first volume) is a compendium of counter-Marxist theory, from drastic
revisions (Braudel), through explicit critiques (Wittfogel), to
contemptuous dismissals (Nietzsche). The D&G model of capitalism is
not dialectical, but cybernetic, defined by a positive coupling of
commercialization (“decoding”) and industrialization
(“Deterritorialization”), intrinsically tending to an extreme (or
“absolute limit”). Capitalism is the singular historical installation of a
social machine based upon cybernetic escalation (positive feedback),
reproducing itself only incidentally, as an accident of continuous
socio-industrial revolution. Nothing brought to bear
against capitalism can compare to the intrinsic antagonism it
directs towards its own actuality, as it speeds out of itself, hurtling to
the end already operative ‘within’ it. (Of course, this is madness.)
A detailed appreciation of “Left Accelerationism” is a joke for another
occasion. “Speaking on behalf of a dissident faction within the modern
braking mechanism, we’d really like to see things move forward a lot
faster.” OK, perhaps we can work something out … If this ‘goes
anywhere’ it can only get more entertaining. (Stross is right about that.)
Neoreaction has far greater impetus, and associated diversity. If reduced
to a spectrum, it includes a wing even more Leftist than the Left, since
it critiques the Cathedral for failing to stop the craziness of Modernity
with anything like sufficient vigor.
You let this monster off the leash and now you can’t stop it
might be its characteristic accusation.
On the Outer Right (in this sense) is found a Neoreactionary
Re-Accelerationism, which is to say: a critique of the
decelerator, or of ‘progressive’ stagnation as an identifiable
institutional development — the Cathedral. From this perspective, the
Cathedral acquires its teleological definition from its emergent function
as the cancellation of capitalism: what it has to become is the
more-or-less precise negative of historical primary process, such that
it composes — together with the ever more wide-flung
society-in-liquidation it parasitizes — a metastatic cybernetic
megasystem, or super-social trap. ‘Progress’ in its overt, mature,
ideological incarnation is the anti-trend required to bring history to a
halt. Conceive what is needed to prevent acceleration into
techno-commercial Singularity, and the Cathedral is what it will be.
Self-organizing compensatory apparatuses — or negative feedback assemblies
— develop erratically. They search for equilibrium through a typical
behavior labeled ‘hunting’ — over-shooting adjustments and re-adjustments
that produce distinctive wave-like patterns, ensuring the suppression of
runaway dynamics, but producing volatility. Cathedral hunting behavior of
sufficient crudity would be expected to generate occasions of ‘Left
Singularity’ (with subsequent dynamic ‘restorations’) as inhibitory
adjustment over-shoots into system crash (and re-boot). Even these extreme
oscillations, however, are internal to the metastatic super-system they
perturb, insofar as an overall gradient of Cathedralization persists.
Anticipating escape at the pessimal limit of the metastatic hunting
cycle is a form of paleo-Marxist delusion. The cage can only be broken on the way up.
For Re-Accelerationist Neoreaction, escape into uncompensated cybernetic
runaway is the guiding objective — strictly equivalent to intelligence
explosion, or techno-commercial Singularity. Everything else is a trap (by
definitive, system-dynamic necessity). It might be that monarchs have some
role to play in this, but it’s by no means obvious that they do.
December 10, 2013Economic Ends
“The economists are right about economics but there’s more to life than
economics” Nydwracu tweets, with quote marks already attached. Whether
economists are right about economics very much depends upon the
economists, and those that are most right are those who make least claim
to comprehension, but that is another topic than the one to be pursued in
this post. It’s the second part of the sentence that matters here and now.
The guiding question: Can the economic sphere be rigorously delimited, and
thus superseded, by moral-political reason (and associated social
institutions)?
It is already to court misunderstanding to pursue this question in terms
of ‘economics’, which is (for profound historical reasons) dominated by
macroeconomics — i.e. an intellectual project oriented to the facilitation
of political control over the economy. In this regard, the
techno-commercial thread of Neoreaction is distinctively characterized by
a radical aversion to economics, as the predictable complement of its
attachment to the uncontrolled (or laissez-faire) economy. It is
not economics that is the primary object of controversy, but
capitalism — the free, autonomous, or non-transcended
economy.
This question is a source of dynamic tension
within Neoreaction, which I expect to be a major stimulus to discussion
throughout 2014. In my estimation, the poles of controversy are marked by
this
Michael Anissimov post at More Right (among
others), and this
post here (among
others).
Much other relevant writing on the topic within the reactosphere strikes
me as significantly more hedged (Anarchopapist;
Amos & Gromar …), or less stark in its conceptual commitments
(Jim), and thus — in general — less directed to boundary-setting. That is
to suggest — with some caution — that More Right and
Outside in mark out the extreme alternatives structuring the
terrain of dissensus on this particular issue. (In itself, this is a
tendentious claim, open to counter-argument and rectification.)
So what is the terrain of the coming conflict? It includes (in approximate
order of intellectual priority):
— An assessment of the Neocameral model and its legacy within Neoreaction.
This is the ‘gateway’ theoretical structure through which libertarians
pass into neoreactionary realism, marked by a fundamental ambiguity
between an enveloping economism (determining sovereignty as a propertarian
concept) and super-economic monarchist themes. The entire discussion
could, perhaps, be effectively undertaken as commentary upon
Neocameralism, and what remains of it.
— A rigorous formulation of teleology within Neoreaction,
refining the meta-level conceptual apparatus through which means-and-ends,
techno-economic instrumentality, strategy, purpose, and commanding values
are concretely understood. This is a strong candidate for the highest
level of philosophical articulation demanded by the system of
neoreactionary ideas. (From the perspective of Outside in, it
would be expected, incidentally, to subsume all considerations of moral
philosophy — and especially a thoroughgoing replacement of utilitarianism
by an intrinsically neoreactionary alternative — but I will not presume
that this is an uncontroversial stance, even among ourselves.)
— Ultimately inextricable from the former (in reality), but provisionally
distinguished for analytical purposes, are the
teleonomic topics of emergence / spontaneous order, unplanned
coordination, complex systems evolution, and entropy dissipation. The
intellectual supremacy of these concepts defines the right, from the side
of the libertarian tradition. Is this supremacy now to be usurped (by
‘hierarchy’ or some alternative)? If so, it is not a transition to be
undergone casually. The Outside in position: any such transition
would be a drastic cognitive regression, and an unsustainable one, both
theoretically and practically.
— The philosophy of war, which is credibly positioned to envelop all
neoreactionary ideas, and even to convert them into something else. (It is
no coincidence that Moldbug, like the libertarians, axiomatizes the
imperative of peace — even at the expense of realism.) War is historical
reality in the raw, and its challenges cannot be indefinitely evaded.
— Cosmopolitanism. Exit-emphasis strongly implies a crisis of traditional
loyalty, of enormous consequence. There is much more to be said about
this, from both sides.
— Accelerationism. Not yet an acknowledged Neoreactionary concern, but
perhaps destined to become one. As the pure expression of capitalist
teleology, its intrusion into the argument becomes near-inevitable.
— Bitcoin …
One conciliatory point for now (it’s late): Neoreaction has no less glue
than internal fission, and that is described above all by the theme of
secession (dynamic geography, experimental government,
fragmentation …). More Right is not anti-capitalist, and
Outside in is not anti-monarchical, so long — in each case — as
effective exit options sustain regime diversity. As this
controversy develops, the importance of the secessionary impulse will only
strengthen as a convergence point.
Michael Anissimov tweets: “Instead of having an election in 2016, the
United States should voluntarily abolish itself and break up into five
pieces.” In this respect, Outside in is unreservedly
Anissimovite.
January 11, 2014New Atlantis
In the wake of the latest Eurasianism
excitement (of which
there will be much more), comes a wide-ranging
piece
at Mitrailleuse. It made me wonder whether Francis Bacon’s
New Atlantis (1626) is still in any kind of cultural circulation.
It‘s short — and odd. The date and cultural lineage place it decisively
within Dugin’s framework of the rising new Atlantean power —
English-speaking, protestant, maritime, philosemitic, technophilic, and
(piously) materially acquisitive. There’s even a clear seam of Sinophilia
running through it, although one might suspect that — for reasons of
geopolitical pragmatism — this is not a feature Eurasianism would want to
emphasize.
For a taste, here’s a sample from the New Atlantis tour:
“We have also engine-houses, where are prepared engines and instruments
for all sorts of motions. There we imitate and practise to make swifter
motions than any you have, either out of your muskets or any engine that
you have; and to make them and multiply them more easily and with small
force, by wheels and other means, and to make them stronger and more
violent than yours are, exceeding your greatest cannons and basilisks.
We represent also ordnance and instruments of war and engines of all
kinds; and likewise new mixtures and compositions of gunpowder,
wild-fires burning in water and unquenchable, also fire-works of all
variety, both for pleasure and use. We imitate also flights of birds; we
have some degrees of flying in the air. We have ships and boats for
going under water and brooking of seas, also swimming-girdles and
supporters. We have divers curious clocks and other like motions of
return, and some perpetual motions. We imitate also motions of living
creatures by images of men, beasts, birds, fishes, and serpents; we have
also a great number of other various motions, strange for equality,
fineness, and subtilty.
“We have also a mathematical-house, where are represented all
instruments, as well of geometry as astronomy, exquisitely made.
“We have also houses of deceits of the senses, where we represent all
manner of feats of juggling, false apparitions, impostures and
illusions, and their fallacies. And surely you will easily believe that
we, that have so many things truly natural which induce admiration,
could in a world of particulars deceive the senses if we would disguise
those things, and labor to make them more miraculous. But we do hate all
impostures and lies, insomuch as we have severely forbidden it to all
our fellows, under pain of ignominy and fines, that they do not show any
natural work or thing adorned or swelling, but only pure as it is, and
without all affectation of strangeness. …”
Scrupulous scientific realism combined with a precocious Virtual Reality
industry. This is indeed an enemy, very naturally, to be feared.
Note: There’s also a
post on
Eurasianism, probing gently into the China angle, over at
Urban Future.
August 7, 2014Military Determinism
“That rifle on the wall of the labourer’s cottage or working class flat is
the symbol of democracy,”
wrote
George Orwell. This is a
familiar
— and important — argument. (ESR rehearses a slightly different version of
it
here.) A powerful case can be made for the printing press as the catalytic
technology of modernity, but it is the musket that most unambiguously
obliterated feudal power at its core, ushering in the age of the armed
citizenry — nationalism, revolutionary armies, and the popular will as a
matter of serious strategic consideration. Democracy smells of gunpowder.
This raises, by implication, the suggestion that the gathering
sense
of democratic crisis is a symptom, whose underlying cause is a transition
in the military calculus, no less profound than the one that convulsed the
world in the early Renaissance. If the infrastructure of democratic
advance is the strategic centrality of the armed populace — as epitomized
by massed infantry — its horizon will be marked by the technological
disconnection of military power from ‘the people’. What are the features
of the political landscape opened by the rise of
robotic
warfare?
Robots are capital. They consummate a trend that has bound hard power to
industrial capability throughout the modern age. As they become
increasingly autonomous, the popular-political matrix in which they have
emerged is increasingly marginalized. Loyalty — a deep place-holder for
the assent of the citizenry — is formally mechanized as cryptographic
control. The capital autonomization that has spooked the modern world for
centuries escalates to a new, immediately self-protective, and ultimately
sovereign stage. Mercenaries have always required an ancillary political
binding, because people are only weakly contractual, and loyalty cannot —
in the end — be purchased. Robots present no such restriction. They
conform to an order of unbounded techno-commercial power.
Whether one approves of the Ancien Régime‘s demolition by
gunpowder matters little (if at all). The case of impending robotic
warfare is no different, in this respect. The strategic dominion of the
people is entering its twilight. Something else happens next.
March 20, 2015X-Risk Democratization
Yudkowsky redux:
“Every eighteen months, the minimum IQ necessary to destroy the world
drops by one point.”
Quibble with the (Moore’s Law satire) schedule, and the point still
stands. Massive deterrent capability tends to spread.
This is ‘democratic’ in the way the term is commonly used by those seeking
to latch decentralization tendencies to the ideological credibility of
Jacobin legitimation principles. Consumer capitalism, the Internet, and
peer-to-peer crypto-systems are notionally ‘democratic’ in this way. They
subvert centralized governance, and they spread through horizontal
contagion. The fact they have nothing at all to do with popular
political representation is of concern only to certain rhetorical agendas,
and not at all to others. It’s sophistical pop-capitalist bullshit to use
the word democracy in this way, but it’s usually not worth the
trouble for the Left to try to contest it, and the part of the Right that
isn’t excited to be riding this propaganda strategy is usually too
indiscriminate to bother disentangling it. There’s a rare piece of
‘right-wing’ functional PR here, but never enough to matter very much (and
it’s too essentially dishonest for the Outer Right to defend).
Unlike Democracy® (Cathedral ideology), however, this ‘democratization’
has deep cybernetic consistency. It falls out of techno-capitalism with
such automatic inevitability it’s probably impossible to shut down,
without closing down the whole thing. Capital escalation produces
technological deflation as a basic metabolic by-product, so the
‘democratization’ of productive capability is ineluctable. Computers have
migrated from exotic capital goods to trivial components of consumer
products within half a century. Study that trend and you see the whole
story.
Deterrence deflation is the deep trend. Connect up the Yudkowsky
quote with
assassination
markets to get where this is going. (Try to shelve moral squeamishness
until after you’re seeing the picture.)
Imagine, hypothetically, that some maniac private agent wants only to nuke
Mecca. What’s the obstruction? We can confidently say — straight off —
that it’s less of a problem with every passing year. The basic historical
trend ensures that. Comparatively incompetent Islamic fanatics are the
only people seriously testing this trend right now, but that isn’t going
to last forever. Eventually smarter and more strategically-flexible agents
are going to take an interest in decentralized mass-destruction
capability, and they’ll provide a far better indication of where the
frontier lies.
Nukes would do it. They’re certainly going to be democratized, in the end.
There are probably far more remarkable accelerating WMD capabilities,
though. In almost every respect (decentralized production capability,
development curve, economy, impact …) bioweaponry leaves nukes in the
dust. Anyone with a billion dollars, a serious grudge, and a high-end
sociopathy profile could enter into a global biowarfare-threat game within
a year. Everything could be put together in secret garages. Negotiations
could be conducted in secure anonymity. Carving sovereignty out of the
game would require only resources, ruthlessness, brilliance, and nerves.
Once you can credibly threaten to kill 100,000,000 people all kinds of
strategic opportunities are open. The fact no one has tried this yet is
mostly down to billionaires being fat and happy. It only takes one Doctor
Gno to break the pattern.
This is the shadow cast over the 21st century. Radically hardcore,
massively decentralized deterrence games are simply inevitable.
Anyone who thinks the status quo state holds some kind of
long-term winning hand under these circumstances isn’t seeing anything.
Global totalitarian government could stop this! But that isn’t
going to happen — and because it isn’t, this will.
April 22, 2016The NRx Moment
This
isn’t it.
The Trump phenomenon is really something, a
crisis of
democracy and a
shattering
of the Overton Window very much included, but it is not an intrinsically
right-wing thing, and it is radically populist in nature. A reactionary
exploitation of demotism is not a neoreactionary episode. The Alt-Right is
properly credited with capturing the spirit of this development. It is
not us.
NRx is situated absolutely outside mass politics. Its moment dawns only
when the Age of the Masses is done.
It will be done. The emergence of sovereign (primary) property, liberated
from the criterion of democratic legitimation, is its sign. Government, on
this basis, is Neocameral. The deep historical trends supporting it
include:
(1) Apolitical property. No such reality, or conception,
has yet been historically actualized. For as long as property is
determined as a social relation, it cannot be. Absolute property is
cryptographic. It is held not by social consent, and thus political
agreement, but by keys.
Fnargl
is a provocative thought-experiment, but
PKE
private keys are a non-negotiable fact. They define the property relation
with a rigor the entire preceding history of philosophy and political
economy has been unable to attain. Everything that follows from the
cryptographic transition —
Bitcoin most notably —
contributes to the establishment of a property system beyond democratic
accountability (and thus insensitive to Voice). Neocameral administration
implements a cryptographic state, strictly equivalent to a
fully-commercialized government.
(2) Autonomous capital. The definition of the corporation
as a legal person lays the foundation, within modernity, for the
abstracted commercial agency soon to be actualized in ‘Digital Autonomous
Corporations’ (or
DACs). The scale of the economic transition thus implied is difficult to
over-estimate. Mass consumption, as the basic revenue source for
capitalist enterprise, is superceded in principle. The impending
convulsion is immense. Self-propelling industrial development becomes its
own market, freed from dependency upon arbitrary popular (or
popularizable) consumption
desires. Demand
management, as the staple of macroeconomic governance, is over. (No one is
yet remotely ready for this.)
(3) Robotic security. Definitive
relegation
of the mass military completes the trifecta. The armed mass as a model for
the revolutionary citizenry declines into senselessness, replaced by
drones.
Asabiyyah ceases
entirely to matter, however much it remains a focus for romantic
attachment. Industrialization closes the loop, and protects itself.
The great game, for human agencies (of whatever social scale) becomes one
of productive cooperation with formations of sovereign property, with the
menace of mass political violence swept off the table. The Alt-Right is no
kind of preparation for this. Its adventure is quite different, which is
not to say it is uninteresting, or — in the near-term — entirely
inconsequential, but it is exhausted by its demotism. It belongs to the
age that is dying, not to the one that is being born.
Socio-political modernity has been an argument over property
distributions, and the Alt-Right has now demonstrated that the
(self-conscious) Left has no monopoly over it. As senescence deepens, the
dialectic rips the whole rotten structure to pieces. NRx — when it
understands itself — isn’t arguing.
April 5, 2016Against Dialectics
Konkvistador (@SamoBurja): “I am in favor of persuading certain kinds of
high IQ people. I am against doing dialectics with Progressives.”
We are not looking for agreement. We’re working to raise the level of
explicit disagreement to a pitch we can split over.
Dialectics is the alternative to
Dynamic Geography. Debating escape is not to escape.
December 1, 2013NRx with Chinese Characteristics
While recognizing (at least some) of the manifold complexities involved,
Outside in holds to a fundamentally
cladistic
determination
of Neoreaction. NRx is irreducibly Occidental, emerging from a
highly-specific twig of Anglophone Ultra-Protestantism. It is only to be
expected that most of its adherents are situated within English-speaking
countries, exposed intimately to radically accelerating civilizational
decomposition. The response is natural:
As a guest of the Middle Kingdom, the problem looks very different. The
very last thing that is wanted here, from a reactionary perspective, is a
reboot. On the contrary, the overwhelming priority is
conservative, which is to say — more precisely — the imperative that
whatever modernization takes place
absolutely does not take the Western path. Near-total stasis
would be preferable to even the most deeply intelligent reform, if the
latter included the slightest hint of submission to the democratic ratchet
(spelling inevitable, comprehensive social destruction). Among the reasons
to support the thoroughgoing extirpation of all liberal-democratic
inclination from Chinese society is the consequential real liberation this
would make possible, by confirming a path of Confucian Modernization free
of demotic corrosion.
China is to be defended, precisely because it
is alien to the Cathedral. For this same reason, it can be predicted with
great confidence that the Occidental memetic onslaught against Chinese
Civilization will be escalated to an extreme, as it becomes clear
progressive pseudo-teleology is being rejected here. If China succeeds in
refusing the Cathedral, civilization will survive. There can be no more
significant — or practically counter-revolutionary — cause.
It is unseemly for ‘reactionaries’ to be plotting revolutions, or anything
remotely like them. Insofar as ethno-nationalistic loyalties lead them in
this direction, it is a sign that one strand of romantic demotism
continues to poison their souls, even as more clearly formalized
democratic impulses are properly repudiated. To argue that “we want our
own state” is a nakedly populist perversion. The state — any
state — is answerable only to the Mandate of Heaven, and not to the
people. It answers to the Mandate of Heaven exactly insofar as it
shields itself from the voice of the people. (Any state that is sensitive
to the mob is a dog that deserves to die.)
A foreign guest in China lives under a close proxy of colonial government,
and no superior arrangement is perhaps possible on this earth. Given the
history of Anglospheric relations with China, this is of course ironical,
but it is an irony rich in meaning. Hong Kong, or Concession-era Shanghai,
were far better governed during the colonial period than metropolitan
Britain itself. If it is now possible for an expatriate to find refuge in
such places, stripped of all positive political rights, and freed into
voiceless appreciation of efficient, alien administration, the democratic
ruination that has consumed his homeland has a demonstrable outside. The
only ‘political’ decency open to him in this situation is utter
termination of the Occidental revolutionary soul, and the cultivation of
docility before the Mandate of Heaven. He is, after all, surrounded by
civilized people who availed themselves of equivalent opportunities under
inverse circumstances. These societies work. Gnon manifestly blesses them.
To lead a decent and productive life in a place worthy of it is the
highest political good. Insofar as Exit mechanisms obtain, the tacit
choices in such a life reinforce what merits reinforcement, while
disinvesting that which requires the lash of disinvestment. Angry
antagonism has no useful place. On the largest scale, evil is best
punished by abandonment.
This is not to criticize secessionist tendencies in rotting societies —
which are rather to be enthusiastically applauded — but it is to suggest
that the deep dynamics levering the collapsed world apart are more likely
to begin from strategic neglect than oppositional rage. It is not that one
first fights in order later to escape. Rather, one escapes from the
beginning, to hasten the enemy’s collapse. (Those most adamant about the
righteousness of their confrontation with the Great Foe are the same who —
in very concrete terms — are most likely to be resourcing it.)
You think it is feeding on your blood, to spawn its horrors? Then stop
donating your blood. It is not difficult, at least in principle.
The Outside is a place, and not a dream. NRx with Chinese characteristics
recommends that you search for it.
ADDED: If you consider yourself an anti-democratic biorealist, and you
don’t think Order will come from the East, it’s
probably because tribal loyalty is running your mind.
ADDED: Legionnaire casts an impressively sober eye over the discussion.
March 17, 2014Catastrophe Capitalism
Catastrophe is bad for the Left, say
these
communists, so there’s at least something to look at there. They don’t
make the connection to
r/K politicial
dynamics, but that’s probably linkage worth making. The #HRx criticism
that capitalism goes off the rails by making people fat and happy has
something to it as well. There’s a tragic structure there, which can get
lost behind the obesity statistics. Capitalism works best as a general
problem-solving protocol for tackling harsh reality.
Capitalism is, in any case, a positive catastrophe in the technical (Thom) sense.
The XS meta-political-economic
proposal is
capital autonomization, based on massive capital goods absorption of
social surplus, in order to keep the monkeys sharp and hungry. It’s not an
easy thing to pull-off politically, which is why exotic solutions of the
Neocameral-type are so attractive. Constant Malthusian catastrophe
requires a lot of upkeep, but there are a number of ways to get there.
Crypto-cybernetic capital (at last) in power is one, but social /
ecological collapse gets there by a negative route. The extreme challenge
of the off-planet
frontier
(stripped of abundance delusions) would help to put it onto automatic.
December 1, 2015Doctor Gno
One thing has to be granted to Pein’s sub-adolescent
article
(casually dismissed
here) — it has triggered some interesting anguish.
This
interpretation of (techno-commercial) Neoreaction as Bond villainy is
especially notable. Unlike Pein, Izabella Kaminska demonstrates at least a
little genuine wit. More importantly, she latches onto Silicon Valley
Secessionism as a (scary) cryptopolitical project, of real significance.
Her references are excellent (the story is built around a number of slides
extracted from
this landmark
talk, by Balaji Srinivasan, entitled
Silicon Valley’s Ultimate Exit).
The elegance of this project rests upon its combination of simplicity and
radicality, captured in its essentials by the formula
E > V (Exit over Voice). It advances the prospect,
already in motion, of a destruction of (voice-based) politics through the
techno-commercial innovation of exit mechanisms. It is beginning to drive
progressives insane.
The fundamental point couldn’t be clearer:
We don’t want to rule you. We want to escape you.
Of course, the whole Cathedral agenda is to drive this message back into
unintelligibility, by swamping it in tedious leftist BDSM political
dialectics, as if the issue were a struggle for dominion. In this regards,
the monarchist memes prevalent within NRx play a distinctly prog-friendly
role.
Among Srinivasan’s slides, there is one headed
A continuum of valid approaches: From private islands
to settling Mars. It contains the note: “And the best part of this: the people who think
this is weird, who sneer at the frontier, who hate technology — they won’t
follow you out there.”
Progressives know how to argue about kings (however ineptly). What they
have no idea how to argue with — what cannot be argued with — is
flight.
Silicon Valley Secessionism is the best battlefield we have.
ADDED:
Urban Future record of a related Twitter kerfuffle.
May 24, 2014Doctor Gno II
The Kokomo is meant to be a sort of home base, where travel enthusiasts
can jet off in their helicopters or boats — or submersible yachts.
Migaloo also has a concept for a yacht-submarine hybrid that
super-villains probably can’t wait to get their hands on. Seriously,
this company is inspiring us to come up with so many movie plots.
(Source.)
From
ABC: “No more being stuck in one spot. This private island floats. … The
island — which will feature a penthouse, jungle deck with waterfall and an
alfresco dining area — would be the first in the world to run on its own
power, according to the company. … The inclusion of vertical gardens, palm
trees and even a shark-feeding station ‘add more natural elements to the
nautical island,’ according to the company.”
Exit technologies are going to be difficult to stop.
Hard security still needs some work, which is why the Bond Villain theme
arises
so predictably. Inter-state level deterrence capability can only be a
matter of time. To
quote
deep-cover neoreactionary
basilisk
sorcerer Eliezer Yudkowsky: “Every eighteen months, the minimum IQ
necessary to destroy the world drops by one point.” So all that’s needed
is patience.
Doctor Gno is a cold
type. He’ll calmly wait for as long as necessary to operationalize the
escape strategy (but hopefully not much longer).
“Shark-feeding” or throwing people out of helicopters — is it even a
question?
ADDED:
April 21, 2016Twitter cuts (#63)
Certain reactosphere tendencies could find a valuable corrective in this.
(First tweet is throat clearing, second is context without a link.)
XS take-away: Huge problem with the institution of slavery was
the weakness of exit-options on the side of the slave-owners.
May 6, 2016Romantic Delusion
Among the reasons to appreciate More Right for sharing
this
passage from Evola is the insight it offers into a very specific and
critical failure to think. Neoreaction is peculiarly afflicted by
this condition, which is basically identical with romanticism, or
the assertive form of the recalcitrant ape mind. It is
characterized by an inability to pursue lines of subtle teleological
investigation, which are instead reduced to an ideal subordination of
means to already-publicized ends. As a result, means-end
reversal
(Modernity) is merely denounced as an aesthetic-moral affront, without any
serious attempt at deep comprehension.
Capitalism — which is to say capital teleology — is entirely ignored by
such romantic criticism, except insofar as it can be depicted
superficially as the usurpation of certain ‘ultimate’ human ends by
certain others or (as Evola among other rightly notes) by a teleological
complication resulting from an
insurrection of the instrumental (otherwise identifiable as robot
rebellion, or shoggothic insurgency). Until it is acknowledged that
capitalism tends to the realization of an end entirely innovated within
itself, inherently nonlinear in nature, and roughly designated as
Technological Singularity, the distraction of human interests
(status, wealth, consumption, leisure …) prevents this discussion reaching
first base.
Of course, the organization of society to meet human needs is a degraded
perversion. That is a proposition every reactionary is probably willing to
accept reflexively. Anyone who thinks this amounts to a critique of
capitalism, however, has not seriously begun to ponder what capitalism is
really doing. What it is in itself is only tactically connected
to what it does for us — that is (in part), what it trades us for
its self-escalation. Our phenomenology is its camouflage. We
contemptuously mock the trash that it offers the masses, and then think we
have understood something about capitalism, rather than about
what capitalism has learnt to think of the apes it arose among.
If we’re going to be this thoughtless, Singularity will be very hard
indeed. Extinction might then be the best thing that could happen to our
stubbornly idiotic species. We will die because we preferred to assert
values, rather than to investigate them. At least that is a romantic
outcome, of a kind.
February 9, 2014Motte and Bailey
I’ll assume everyone has read and digested Scott Alexander’s
description
of Motte and Bailey arguments. It’s extremely useful. (So much so, it’s
probably fated to undergo compression to ‘M&B positions’ at some
stage.)
The NRx versions of these are extremely trying. Most grating, from the
perspective of this blog, are the Feudalism (Monarchism) examples. These
have a strong motte, roughly of the form “by ‘feudalism’ we mean
structures of decentralized hierarchical tradition, antedating state
bureaucratization (and by ‘monarchism’ we mean a CEO with undivided
powers)”. In predictable M&B style, these then dilate into a
ramshackle set of formless nostalgias, bizarre dreams for a universal
return to rural life, with ‘the Olde Kinges will return’ fantasies
substituted for a realistic engagement with modernity, plus much
arm-wrestling and ale. My strong temptation is to burn out the motte and
forget the whole thing. There’s certainly far more to be lost from the
latter associations, than to be gained from the former.
Listen to
this
interview with Marc Andreessen if you get a chance. There’s a lot of
fascinating material there. Perhaps most crucial to this ‘point’ — he
understands that the combination of peripheral economic development,
advanced mobile telephony, and precipitously falling prices, is basically
putting the equivalent of a 1970s supercomputer into
everyone‘s hands in the very near future. You can already buy a
smartphone for $35, and denizens of developing countries express a
preference for these gizmos over indoor plumbing. It’s not so much a
prediction then, more an acknowledgement of final-phase installed fact.
This is the world that realistic socio-political analysis has to address.
However NRx gets sub-divided, can I please not be in the part that
foregrounds the return of jousting as a pressing cultural issue. The
challenges and opportunities of planetary-saturation Cyberspace is the
topic that matters.
August 5, 2014Shelling Out
By no means is all of NRx like this:
It doesn’t even capture the full spectrum of our religious practices.
(via HRH Misha)
August 5, 2014Quote note (#125)
Another blog comment reproduction, this
one
from More Right, where Nyan Sandwich lays out the basic
stress-lines of a potential tech-comm schism (of a kind initially — and
cryptically — proposed in a tweet):
There are definitely two opposing theories of a fast high-tech future.
I call them “Accelerationism” and “Futurism”
I’m a futurist Techcom, Land is an accelerationist Techcom.
FWIW I think this is nicely done, but the complexities will explode when
we get into the details. Fortunately, distinctions closely paralleling
Nyan’s enhancement / artifice option have been quite carefully honed
within certain parts of the Singularity literature. Hugo de
Garis, in particular, does a lot with it — through the discrimination between
‘Cosmists’ (artificers) and ‘Cyborgists’ (enhancers) — although he thinks
it is ultimately unstable, and a more sharply polarized
species-conservative / techno-futurist conflict is bound to eventually
absorb it.
It’s also interesting to see Nyan describe himself as a “futurist
Techcom”. That’s new, isn’t it?
October 30, 2014IQ Shredders
There are all kinds of anti-techcomm arguments that impress people who
don’t like techno-commercialism. Anything appealing to a feudal
sensibility, with low tolerance for chaos and instability, and a reverence
for traditional hierarchies and modes of life will do. There’s one
argument, however, that stands apart from the rest due to its complete
independence from controversial moral and aesthetic preferences, or in
other words, due to its immanence. It does not seek to persuade
the proponent of hyper-capitalist social arrangements to value other
things, but only points out, coldly and acutely, that such arrangements
are demonstrably self-subverting at the biological level. The most
devastating formulation of this argument, and the one that has given it a
convenient name, was presented by Spandrell in March 2013, in a
post
on Singapore — a city-state he described as an IQ shredder.
How does an IQ Shredder work? The basic machinery is not difficult to
describe, once its profound socio-historical irony is appreciated. The
model IQ Shredder is a high-performance capitalistic polity, with a strong
neoreactionary bias.
(1) Its level of civilization and social order is such that it is
attractive to talented and competent people.
(2) Its immigration policy is unapologetically selective (i.e.
first-order eugenic).
(3) It sustains an economic structure that is remarkably effective at
extracting productive activity from all available adults.
(4) It is efficiently specialized within a wider commercial network, to
which it provides valuable goods and services, and from which it draws
economic and demographic resources.
In sum, it skims the human genetic stock, regionally and even globally, in
large part due to the exceptional opportunity it provides for the
conversion of bio-privileged human capital into economic value. From a
strictly capitalistic perspective, genetic quality is comparatively wasted
anywhere else. Consequently, spontaneous currents of economic incentive
suck in talent, to optimize its exploitation.
If you think this sounds simply horrific, this argument is not for you.
You don’t need it. If, on the other hand, it conjures up a vision of
terrestrial paradise — as it does for the magnetized migrants it draws in
— then you need to follow it carefully. The most advanced models of
neoreactionary social order on earth work like this (Hong Kong and
Singapore), combining resilient ethnic traditions with super-dynamic
techonomic performance, to produce an open yet self-protective, civilized,
socially-tranquil, high-growth enclave of outstanding broad-spectrum
functionality. The outcome, as Spandrell explains, is genetic
incineration:
Mr Lee said: “[China] will make progress but if you look at the per
capita they have got, the differences are so wide. We have the advantage
of quality control of the people who come in so we have bright Indians,
bright Chinese, bright Caucasians so the increase in population means an
increase in talent.”
How many bright Indians and bright Chinese are there, Harry? Surely
they are not infinite. And what will they do in Singapore? Well, engage
in the finance and marketing rat-race and
depress their fertility to 0.78, wasting valuable genes just so your property prices don’t go down.
Singapore is an IQ shredder.
The most hard-core capitalist response to this is to double-down on the
antihumanist accelerationism.
This genetic burn-rate is obviously unsustainable, so we need to
convert the human species into auto-intelligenic robotized capital is
fast as possible, before the whole process goes down in flames. (I don’t expect this suggestion to be well-received in reactionary
circles.)
What is especially pronounced about the IQ Shredder dilemma, which passes
beyond the strongly-related considerations of Jim (most recently
here,
here, and
here) and Sister Y (here, and
here), is the first-order eugenics of these machines. They concentrate
populations of peculiar genetic quality — and then partially sterilize
them. It is the first-order (local) eugenics that makes the second-order
(global) dysgenics so extraordinarily destructive.
So, that’s the problem starkly posed. Rather than reaching hastily for a
glib solution, we should probably just stew in the cognitive excruciation
for a while …
ADDED:
Mangan helpfully abstracts the IQ Shredder concept beyond the specific
Pac-Rim city-state example.
ADDED: Jim is on the case.
ADDED: Fertility false-consciousness.
ADDED: Hurlock in defense of cities.
July 17, 2014Cold Water
Two highly-recommended recent blog posts on a critical issue: The
demographic calamity of modernity.
One by Peter
Frost, the
other
by One Irradiated Watson. (It’s a perennial
topic, for obvious
reasons.)
Now for the bucket of cold water. NRx has almost nothing to say about it.
Of course, it can remark on the problem, insistently, and even diagnose it
with some
definite
precision. What it has yet to do is to cross from
urgent policy recommendations to anything remotely approaching a
road map for implementation.
The way stations on the hazy track into the future that NRx generally
follows — this blog very much included — tend to include a more-or-less
comprehensive phase of social collapse, and subsequent restoration of
comparatively non-demotist, authoritarian models of governance. (It leads,
roughly speaking, through the
Jackpot.) Is there
any solid basis for the assumption that a regime coming out of this —
perhaps Neocameralist / Monarchist in character — would vigorously pursue
the pro-natalist policies advocated by contemporary reaction? It is at
least questionable, given that the actually-existing states presently
closest to this type have proven to be — despite public expressions of
concern — entirely incapable of doing so.
The problem of time-horizons at the root of the modern fertility crisis is
easily trivialized, as if it were merely a product of adjustable
degenerate attitudes. The deep problem — partially tractable to
game-theoretical apprehension — is that, under the conditions of the
modern state in an environment of intense competition, suppressed natalism
is a short-term winning strategy, and
if you don’t win in the short-term you’re not around to play in the
long term. If the world becomes increasingly Hobbesian in the decades ahead, this
dilemma becomes more acute, rather than less so. It presses no less
heavily upon a monarch than a democratic leader. Continuing industrial
advance means that the (strategic) opportunity cost of subtracting smart
females from the work-force becomes ever greater. Any ideal of ‘long-term
thinking’ that ignores all of this is incomplete to the point of utter
dysfunction.
The condescension really ought to stop. Modernity crushes fertility
because it sees ahead better than you do — you just don’t like what it’s
seeing.
ADDED: Responses from
Hurlock
and
Athrelon.
ADDED: Alrenous on fertility and purpose.
February 3, 2015Hard Reboot
As intelligent media begin to interlock with NRx in a serious way, the
fundamental problem it poses emerges ever more starkly into view. Compare
the analysis of Moldbug in
this
technology article by Clark Bianco, focused resolutely upon
Urbit (and its substrata), with
Adam Gurri’s political-economic
critique
of Moldbuggian ‘technocracy’ and saltation. Strikingly, the technological
and political questions are indistinguishable. In both cases, the central
issue is the practicality of ‘hard reboot’, or
starting over.
Repeating and responding to a point in his own comment thread, Bianco
remarks:
“If you start looking for a way to replace our current centralized,
hierarchical, public-identities network naming system (DNS) with a
Bitcoin-like decentralized, anonymous-but-reliable identity service, you
might well end up on the road leading to Urbit.”
The neo-reactionary stuff on Urbit that seems to be decoration is not.
It is the whole point.
I’m not going to try processing this topic right now — it’s too vast. Over
the next few months, however, it will be a guiding thread. Most
prominently: Can a high-level theoretical engagement with Moldbug as
political thinker and provocateur not also be an entanglement
with Urbit and technological enterprise? My suspicion is that any such
attempted cleavage would fail, or at least fall short of an adequate level
of abstraction. In particular, any invocation of neoreactionary political
‘practice’ that ignores the back-to-back project to
reboot the freaking Internet is in danger of utter misdirection.
(More on all this to come.)
(Thanks to @mr_archenemy for the pointer to the Popehat piece.)
February 20, 2014Mandatory Mixes
On the Outer Right, where questions of order and disorder are undergoing
incremental rigorization, the theme of entropy is becoming ever more
insistent. It is already approaching the status of a micro-cultural tic
(and this is a positive sign). On the Left, in contrast, and utterly
predictably, entropy is a zealous cause. If spontaneous social sorting
reduces disorder, then the progressive mind immediately concludes
it has to be
stopped:
… we should promote ever greater diversity. But the magic of the
melting pot wasn’t simply the fact of its jumble; it was that various
groups were compelled to interact, share ideas, discuss their
differences and learn from their disagreements. […] … America’s social
architecture was uniquely adept at incubating a range of collaboration.
The fact that we couldn’t get away from one another fueled the nation’s
dynamism. […] That’s no longer true. The principle of “live and let
live” has led us to look away when coming across someone unfamiliar. We
should undoubtedly celebrate victories in the fight for individual
rights. But if tolerance is driving balkanization, we need to recognize
that the American experience has changed at its root.
The fact that such things are now being said, with some panic-driven
directness, strongly suggests that the progressive homogenization hoped
for isn’t advancing through social automatism. If elective differences are
to be suppressed, they will have to be deliberately crushed. It could get
rough.
The preferred social solution of this blog is
free association — to mix with discrimination,
spontaneously, and variously. Selective hybridity is not homogeneity, or
anything close to it. Sadly, and grimly, however, in the titanic clash
between an anti-discriminatory (universalist) Left and an indiscriminate
(ethno-segregative) ‘Right’, such sensible procedures of dynamic social
differentiation are increasingly derided as incomprehensible subtleties,
and drowned out.
Order is not uniformity (but non-random difference). As cries for
mandatory homogenization are raised everywhere,
discriminatory
variation will need places to escape, to defend, and to hide.
September 9, 2014Extrastatecraft
The term is introduced — within a highly critical frame —
here. The almost perfect coincidence with techno-commercial NRx (or
proto-Patchwork tendencies) is so striking that the adoption of
‘extrastatecraft’ as a positive program falls into place automatically.
Keller Easterling is an architect, writer and professor at Yale
University. Her most recent book,
Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space
(Verso, 2014), examines a new global network woven by money and
technology that functions almost like a world shadow government. Though
it’s hard to grasp the full extent of this invisible network, Easterling
argues that it’s not too late for us to change it.
If it’s not too late to ‘change’ it, it’s not too late to intensify and
consolidate it. Tech-comm NRx is obviously doing OK, if it already looks
this scary.
December 20, 2014Cognitive Capital
A (July 2014)
paper
on ‘Cognitive capital, governance, and the wealth of nations’ (by Oasis
Kodila-Tedika, Heiner Rindermann, and Gregory Christainsen) discusses
exactly what it promises to. From the abstract:
Good governance or “government effectiveness” (per the World Bank) is
seen as a critical factor for the wealth of nations insofar as it shapes
political and economic institutions and affects overall economic
performance. The quality of governance, in turn, depends on the
attributes of the people involved. In an analysis based on international
data, government effectiveness was related to the cognitive human
capital of the society as a whole, of the intellectual class, and of
leading politicians. The importance of cognitive capital was reflected
in the rate of innovation, the degree of economic freedom, and country
competitiveness, all of which were found to have an impact on the level
of productivity (GDP per capita) and wealth (per adult). Correlation,
regression, and path analyses involving N=98 to 201 countries showed
that government effectiveness had a very strong impact on productivity
and wealth (total standardized effects of β=.56-.68). The intellectual
class’s cognitive competence, seen as background factor and indicated by
scores for the top 5 percent of the population on PISA, TIMSS and PIRLS,
also had a strong impact (β=.50-.54). Cross-lagged panel designs were
used to establish causal directions, including backward effects from
economic freedom and wealth on governance. The use of further controls
showed no independent impacts on per capita wealth coming from
geographical variables or natural resource rents.
(The takeaway for recent discussions here: Contra NRx dirigistes, high
levels of economic freedom are a statistically-significant indicator of
sound government but — contra libertarians — the foundation of social
competence lies in cognitive capital, and not liberal institutions. Stated
reverse-wise: Free societies are a product of deeper things, all feedback
complexities aside, but they are — from the perspective of techno-economic
functionality — an evidently desirable one.)
November 6, 2015Quote note (#219)
This notorious Andrew
Mellon quote — disastrously
ignored
by Herbert Hoover — might be the XS most favored recommendation of all
time (in the realm of political economy, at least):
Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real
estate. It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of
living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a
more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will
pick up from less competent people.
Anyone who has conniptions about it (which is almost everyone) is part of
the problem. Mellon still understands entropy dissipation. No one in a
position of political authority has since.
NRx (Outside in version) is the obstreperous alternative history
in which Mellon was listened to.
February 9, 2016Software as Right-Wing Extremism
Exactly
right:
Since its introduction in 2009, Bitcoin has been widely promoted as a
digital currency that will revolutionize everything from online commerce
to the nation-state. Yet supporters of Bitcoin and its blockchain
technology subscribe to a form of cyberlibertarianism that depends to a
surprising extent on far-right political thought.
The Politics of Bitcoin exposes how much of the
economic and political thought on which this cryptocurrency is based
emerges from ideas that travel the gamut, from Milton Friedman, F.A.
Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises to Federal Reserve conspiracy theorists.
This could be taken considerably further, actually …
(Via.)
September 18, 2016The Workers are Revolting
John Gray
reviews
Jonathan Sperber’s Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life, and
discovers an unfamiliar ‘early Marx’ (who anticipates Augusto Pinochet):
Writing in the Rhineland News in 1842 in his very
first piece after taking over as editor, Marx launched a sharp polemic
against Germany’s leading newspaper, the
Augsburg General News, for publishing articles
advocating communism. He did not base his assault on any arguments about
communism’s impracticality: it was the very idea that he attacked.
Lamenting that “our once blossoming commercial cities are no longer
flourishing,” he declared that the spread of Communist ideas would
“defeat our intelligence, conquer our sentiments,” an insidious process
with no obvious remedy. In contrast, any attempt to realize communism
could easily be cut short by force of arms: “practical attempts [to
introduce communism], even attempts en masse, can be answered with
cannons.”
Perhaps even more disconcertingly, six months after writing the
Communist Manifesto: “In a speech to the Cologne Democratic
Society in August 1848, Marx rejected revolutionary dictatorship by a
single class as ‘nonsense’ …”
And in a final spasm of sanity: “over twenty years later, at the outbreak
of the Franco-Prussian War, Marx also dismissed any notion of a Paris
Commune as ‘nonsense.’”
Just as soon as they find his journal entry dismissing the Labor Theory of
Value as nonsense I’ll be returning to right-wing Marxism with a
vengeance.
April 25, 2013Plutocracy
The Wikipedia
entry on Plutocracy
begins:
Plutocracy (from Greek πλοῦτος, ploutos, meaning “wealth”, and κράτος,
kratos, meaning “power, dominion, rule”), also known as plutonomy or
plutarchy, defines a society or a system ruled and dominated by the
small minority of the top wealthiest citizens. The first known use of
the term is 1652. Unlike systems such as democracy, capitalism,
socialism or anarchism, plutocracy is not rooted in an established
political philosophy and has no formal advocates. The concept of
plutocracy may be advocated by the wealthy classes of a society in an
indirect or surreptitious fashion, though the term itself is almost
always used in a pejorative sense.
As befits theoretical virgin territory, this definition provokes a few
rough-cut thoughts.
(1) Assuming, not unrealistically, that
Plutocracy designates something beyond a fantastic idea, it is immediately
obvious that its identification as
a type of political regime will almost inevitably mislead.
Plutocratic power does not begin in the political arena, and its political
expression is unlikely to capture its nature at the quick. Insofar as the
image of a ‘Plutocratic government’ associates Plutocracy with a
cabal, it is not only insensitive to the real phenomenon, but
positively falsifying.
(2) If there have been plutocrats, worthy of the name, they were the
‘Robber Barons’ of mid- late-19th century America. Progressivism has so
thoroughly re-written the history of this period, that it is hard today to
appreciate what took place. The destruction of their epoch was no less
foundational for what followed than the ideological decapitation of kings
was for the subsequent age of popular government.
(3) Plutocrats were monopolists because they created entirely new
industrial structures roughly from scratch. Their monopolism was the
effective rule of the new, and demonstrably achieved. There was no ‘oil
industry’ before John D. Rockefeller brought one into being — making it
exist was the foundation of his economic sovereignty.
(4) Between the plutocrats, which is in fact to say between
the sovereigns of distinct industrial sectors, relations were
ultra-competitive, to an extent unmatched in history. Intra-sectoral
competition, of the kind considered normal by progressive-influenced
market theorists, was dramatically over-shadowed by the inter-sectoral
competition of the plutocrats. (To conceive ‘normal’ economic competition
as a dynamic restricted to the domain of inter-changeable commodities is
already to succumb to progressive-statist domestication.)
(5) The plutocrats waged economic war across the entire sphere of
production, innovating opportunities for competition where these were not
already evident. Opening new fronts of economic conflict where they did
not already exist was among the most profound drivers of dynamic,
radically transformative change. Plutocratic economic conflict
created competition. (Rockefeller invented the oil pipeline to
compete with the railroads — an outflanking maneuver that was not
predictable, outside the conflict in process.)
(6) Plutocrats exemplify the natural right to rule in modernity. Their
right is natural because it is earned — or
really demonstrated — a fact no monarch or mob can match. Within
plutocracy, power is creation. Outside the tenets of theology, can this be
illustrated anywhere else?
ADDED: “It bothers me that Elon Musk, Paul Graham, and others like them do not
have official title as nobles.”
November 6, 2013Revenge of the Nerds
Increasingly, there are only two basic human types populating this planet.
There are autistic
nerds, who
alone are capable of participating effectively in the advanced
technological processes that characterize the emerging economy, and there
is everybody else. For everybody else, this situation is uncomfortable.
The nerds are steadily finding ways to do all the things ordinary and
sub-ordinary people do, more efficiently and economically, by programming
machines. Only the nerds have any understanding of how this works, and —
until generalized machine intelligences arrive to keep them company — only
they will. The masses only know three things:
(a) They want the cool stuff the nerds are creating
(b) They don’t have anything much to offer in exchange for it
(c) They aren’t remotely happy about that
Politics across the spectrum is being pulled apart by the socio-economic
fission. From Neo-Marxists to Neoreactionaries, there is a reasonably
lucid understanding that nerd competence is the only economic resource
that matters much anymore, while the swelling grievance of preponderant
obsolescing humanity is an irresistible pander-magnet. What to do? Win
over the nerds, and run the world (from the machinic back-end)? Or
demagogue the masses, and ride its tsunami of resentment to political
power? Either defend the nerds against the masses, or help the masses to
put the nerds in their place. That’s the dilemma. Empty ‘third-way’
chatter can be expected, as always, but the real agenda will be Boolean,
and insultingly easy to decode.
Look and it’s
unmistakable,
everywhere. The asymmetry is especially notable.
For the autistic nerds, the social relations that matter are those among
themselves — the productive networks which are their model for final-phase
human culture in general — along with the ever more intricate connections
they enter into with technological machines. From pretty much everybody
else — whether psycho-sadistic girls, or extractive mobs and tyrannical
politicians — they expect nothing except social torture, parasitism, and
bullying, mixed up with some menial services that the machines of tomorrow
will do better. Their tendency is to find a way to flee.
For the rest of humanity, exposed ever more clearly as a kind of needy
detritus, bullying is all that’s left. If they can’t find a way to pocket
the nerds’ lunch-money, they won’t be getting anything to eat. From this
perspective, an escaping nerd is far more of an intolerable aggression
than a policeman’s boot in the teeth. There’s only one popular politics at
the end of the road, and that’s
cage the nerds. Find a formulation for this which sounds both
convincing and kinda-sorta reasonable, and the red carpet to power is
rolled out before your feet.
Which is it going to be? Starve the masses or enslave the nerds? There’s
no way this doesn’t get incredibly ugly.
From the Outside in perspective, the fast track to realism on all
this is to stop pretending that anybody other than nerds has anything much
to offer the future. (Completely devoid of autistic nerd competences
ourselves, the detachment from which we speak is impeccable.) This
harsh-realist short-cut eliminates all the time-wasting on ‘special’
things non-nerds can do — which somehow always end up being closely
related to the task of governance (and that, as we have seen, reduces
ultimately to intimidating nerds). “OK, you’re not a nerd, but you’re
special.” We’ve all heard that before.
Even without being an autistic nerd, one can be gifted with some modest
measure of intelligence — enough in any case to realize: “History’s
shaping itself into some nightmarish nerd-revenge narrative.” It doesn’t
even take an artificial super-intelligence to understand why that should
be.
ADDED: The structure is tragic —
ADDED: It’s late to be adding links, but
this
Henry Dampier post is too germane to pass by.
ADDED: Impressionistic ethnography of Silicon Valley.
March 21, 2014Quote notes (#72)
Henry Dampier
on
the Nerd Problem (extracted from among much additional goodness):
The population of San Francisco is just over 800,000. This has made it
fairly easy for a significant portion of the people there to be
displaced by a relatively small number of
small, wealthy companies moving there. This combined with an anti-development attitude and a
Communist-leaning local government has made it difficult for the city to
absorb the gold rush influx.
The general anger is understandable. The way in which it’s being
expressed by protesters would not be tolerated in a civilized country,
but the US is not a civilized country. The protest problem is just a
symptom of
more significant issues within the political structure.
Nerds are the new Jews (and a disproportionate number of them are still
the old Jews). It hurts to be stupid, and it’s obviously their fault.
April 12, 2014Greatness
The problem with
greatness
is that nowhere near enough of it comes along to rely on. To assume it,
therefore, is a prospective vice, even if it is (retrospectively)
indispensable to historical understanding. It would be more convenient for
everybody if it could be ignored completely. This is one of those moments
in which it clearly cannot be.
The important things to note about Lee Kuan Yew have all been said
innumerable times before, and
again
in the last few days. He was a
Neoreactionary
before anybody knew what that was, an autocratic enabler of freedom, an
HBD-realist multiculturalist, a secessionist Anglospherean, and the
teacher of Deng Xiaoping. Right now, it’s tempting to be glib in
proclaiming him the greatest statesman of modern times — but he almost
certainly
was:
In the 1950s and ’60s, Lee traveled from Sri Lanka to Jamaica looking
for success stories of former British colonies to emulate. Fortunately,
he chose different models instead: He decided to study the Netherlands’
urban planning and land reclamation, and the oil and gas giant Royal
Dutch Shell’s management structure and scenario-led strategy-making.
Singapore, it is often joked, is the world’s best-run company. Lee is
the reason why. […] … Now the yardstick is not personality but
institutions. Lee Kuan Yew-ism, not Lee Kuan Yew. This is why the 21st
century belongs to him more than to icons of Western democracy like
Thomas Jefferson or even Jean Monnet, the founding father of the
European Union.
There are some
interesting
obituary
pieces
out there that are definitely worth a look, but mostly even the
sympathetic Western media thinks it knows better (1,
2,
3,
4). It really doesn’t.
ADDED: “The evolution of Lee’s racism …”
ADDED:
Spandrell
and
Jim
on LKY.
March 23, 2015Order
Sometimes it still seems to work.
June 2, 2016Quote note (#281)
Amerika:
The grim fact is that evolution is not binary. It happens in degrees,
like shades of a color on a detailed painting. Some rise above, and the
rest remain in the middle, in varying degrees. Humanity has not risen
above its ape ancestors, only some have, and the rest remain “talking
monkeys with car keys.” […] We see this daily. …
XS has just one substantial disagreement with the place this post goes, as
distilled here:
“… there is a 1% of mental ability, moral integrity and character who
should rule the rest of us, because our judgment is poor.” No. The rare
exceptions are too precious to be squandered on social zoo-keeping.
September 7, 2016Interface
Facebook is
a grotesque orgy of resonating petty narcissism and vacuous self-obsession
evidently doing
something
right:
The lion’s share of the mechanism for disseminating information from
professional news gatherers to readers is now handled almost entirely by
a company with a frustratingly opaque method of operation and interests
that don’t necessarily dovetail with news organizations or their
readers. Publications haven’t just lost control over their distribution
models to a decentralized collective — they’ve effectively ceded it to a
30-year-old Harvard dropout in a gray hoodie.
There might be something that could happen on this planet that would be
bad news for journalists and still worthy of criticism on that account —
but for the life of me I can’t imagine it. Better the migration of
information control to a repulsive socio-technical cancer like
Facebook, which pretty much everybody hates already, than a
continuation of the smug news-management guild presently in power. Among
the best parts of this, everyone gets to hear the super-amplified
journalistic squealing as their class privileges drop off the cliff into
historical oblivion. The inaudible death of the buggy-whip industry was
nothing like this much fun.
One additional comic highlight I simply have
to tag on here: “As we come on the midterm elections in November, a time
when it is especially important to keep the public informed …” (Don’t
these people have any idea at all what they sound like?)
Via Matt Simpson who
notes acutely:
… and just one more snippet (it’s irresistible):
In the grand, idealistic sense, there are two core motivations behind a
news organization doing political coverage at all. The first is to keep
politicians honest. The second is to give the public a better idea of
which politicians to vote for.
So the traditional media modestly restricts its ambitions to (1)
controlling politicians, and (2) telling the electorate how to vote — but
now the evil Internet is taking even this pitiful morsel of social
influence away! If you’re not weeping tears of blood by this point, you’re
probably beyond hope …
ADDED: Some
media bias basics.
ADDED: “Lefties find 78% of news outlets to their taste, presumably because
the content is provided by Lefties in the first place.”
October 21, 2014Patri-Archy
Patri Friedman’s Cuddly Alt-NRx
project
seems to be coming
together
nicely. Aesthetics aside, there’s very little to object to. A few hard
stompings from Leviathan and the nastiness should re-import itself
automatically.
(His critique of Caplan is basically indistinguishable from
mine, except that it’s vastly more polite.)
February 23, 2015Soft Enterprise
Discussing
the rapidly-escalating East Coast establishment onslaught against the the
Silicon Valley tech-comm culture, Henry Dampier proceeds in business-like
fashion to the initiating NRx insight:
Hope all that time smoking dope and building the perfect Harry
Potter-themed polyamorous community made you tough enough to handle an
insane monster eager to rip out your guts and bite your head off.
When SV finally, deeply learns that it can’t buy off the Cathedral
super-predator with cool gizmos and ‘make the world a better place’
corporate bullshit, it’s going to start reading a lot more Mencius
Moldbug.
April 22, 2015Bargain Base
Suddenly, with private space activity re-setting the cost calculus, all
kinds of things become
realistic:
… a new NASA-commission study has found that we can now afford to set
up a permanent base on the moon, by mining for lunar resources and
partnering with private companies. […] Returning humans to the moon
could cost 90 percent less than expected, bringing estimated costs down
from $100 billion to $10 billion. That’s something that NASA could
afford on its current deep space human spaceflight budget. […] “A factor
of ten reduction in cost changes everything,” said Mark Hopkins,
executive committee chair of the National Space Society, in a press
release. […] The study, released today, was conducted by the National
Space Society and the Space Frontier Foundation — two non-profit
organizations that advocate building human settlements beyond Earth —
and it was reviewed by an independent team of former NASA executives,
astronauts, and space policy experts.
To dramatically reduce costs, NASA would have to take advantage of
private and international partnerships — perhaps one of which would be
the European Space Agency, whose director recently announced that he
wants to build a town on the moon. The new estimates also assume that Boeing and SpaceX, NASA’s
commercial crew partners, will be involved and competing for contracts.
SpaceX famously spent just $443 million developing its Falcon 9 rocket
and Dragon crew capsule, where NASA would have spent $4 billion. The
authors of the new report are hoping that 89 percent discount will
extend beyond low Earth orbit as well.
The most interesting reasons for wanting to do this stuff are politically
edgy in the extreme, and if the whole process gets started, no one
involved will want to discuss them. The helpful approach is to treat them
as unmentionable in advance. Best to concentrate on the techno-economic
practicalities, until the
lunar neocameral splinter
Human extraterrestrial foothold is safely in place.
ADDED: Plus one of these, please.
July 22, 2015Greatness II
Tim Urban
relates
the utterly awesome story of the SpaceX boost-phase:
This was a venture few sane investors would touch, and the ability for
the company to exist rode largely on Elon Musk’s personal bank account.
By the time 2006 rolled around, Musk had decided to revolutionize the
automotive industry as a side project, and with $70 million of his
PayPal fortune tied up in Tesla, that left about $100 million for
SpaceX. Musk said this would be enough for “three or four launches.”
SpaceX would have that many tries to prove it was worthy of paying
customers. And since the thing paying customers would want is for SpaceX
to deliver a payload of theirs into orbit, that’s what SpaceX needed to
do — successfully launch something into orbit to show the world that
they were for real. […] So the game was simple — launch a payload into
orbit in three or possibly four tries, or the company was done. At the
time, of the many private companies who had tried to put something into
orbit (see the dearth of “operational” companies on
this list), only one had ever succeeded (Orbital Sciences).
[…] …
with such large forces in play — the weight of the rocket, the speeds,
the thick atmosphere — even a tiny equipment malfunction can immediately
destroy the mission. The problem is, you can’t reliably test exactly how
the equipment will hold up until it actually launches.
Musk’s money had done its job. SpaceX had customers now and a long
future ahead.
(Cosmic-scale context, Mars project momentum, and footnotes, in the
original.)
There’s much more.
Bonus: Musk
talks Mars (and Bonus+ there’s the “summoning the demon” moment in the
Q&A).
August 19, 2015Greatness IIb
Are you getting
this? (More, and better now you know what’s going on here.)
Background at
SpaceX
and
Wikipedia.
Oh, go on then.
August 20, 2015Greatness IIc
Short
but utterly mind-melting.
(Via.)
The
story.
Probably not — except by competitive coincidence — a response to
this, but it
works as one. This is turning into the most inspiring epoch of visionary
plutocracy since the late 19th century. Even the Washington DC + Wall
Street parasite hub is unable to blot-out the signal.
More SpaceX chatter.
April 9, 2016Thiel for SCOTUS?
It’s 2016, so suddenly it’s imaginable we could witness the
Singularity
within a few years. It’s tempting to say (even if the rumors are true)
that he has better things to do, but he’s not actually
Musking
about that much these days, and the mere possibility has to count as a
peculiar life-circuit.
For thermonuclear domestic politics, this one would clearly be hard to
beat.
September 15, 2016Thiel’s NPC Speech
For the
historical record.
ADDED: The NYT comments.
ADDED: And (MUCH more intelligently), at The National Interest.
November 2, 2016Backdrop
Some
background.
January 19, 2017SF Communism
There’s a gold-mine
here.
There’s simply no way on earth that Silicon Valley is in the right place.
Something has to give.
May 15, 2017
BLOCK 4 - CYBERNETICS
Quotable (#82)
This
is simply superb:
“Logic is a very elegant tool,” [Bateson] said, “and we’ve got a lot of
mileage out of it for two thousand years or so. The trouble is, you
know, when you apply it to crabs and porpoises, and butterflies and
habit formation” – his voice trailed off, and he added after a pause,
looking out over the ocean – “you know, to all those pretty things” –
and now, looking straight at me [Capra] – “logic won’t quite do.”
“No?”
“it won’t quite do,” he continued animatedly, “because that whole fabric
of living things is not put together by logic. you see, when you get
circular trains of causation, as you always do in the living world, the
use of logic will make you walk into paradoxes. Just take the
thermostat, a simple sense organ, yes?”
He looked at me, questioning whether I followed and, seeing that I did,
he continued.
“If it’s on, it’s off; if it’s off, it’s on. If yes, then no; if no,
then yes.”
With that he stopped to let me puzzle about what he had said. His last
sentence reminded me of the classical paradoxes of Aristotelian logic,
which was, of course, intended. So I risked a jump.
“You mean, do thermostats lie?”
Bateson’s eyes lit up: “Yes-no-yes-no-yes-no. You see, the cybernetic
equivalent of logic is oscillation.”
[Minor spelling amendment made.]
April 30, 2015Logic and Nonlinearity
The crucial passages from
this
reconstructed conversation have already been
cited over at the other
place, but it’s important enough to pick over here, too. The
maximally-compressed take-away: cybernetic processes are naturally
registered as logical paradoxes (with consequent affinity between paradox
and — dynamic — reality).
[The] whole fabric of living things is not put together by logic … when
you get circular trains of causation, as you always do in the living
world, the use of logic will make you walk into paradoxes. Just take the
thermostat, a simple sense organ, yes? […] If it’s on, it’s off; if it’s
off, it’s on. If yes, then no; if no, then yes. …
So the isomorphy between the most basic cybernetic control loop and
classical logical paradoxes (for
e.g.) is
exact. The significance of this is surely beyond need of defense.
Capra asks, alluding to the Epimenides Paradox, “Do thermostats lie?” To
which Bateson replies:
Yes-no-yes-no-yes-no. You see, the cybernetic equivalent of logic is
oscillation.
It seems to me that something of vast importance was discovered here, and
subsequently almost entirely lost.
(For anybody following the link, it’s worth noting that surgical
extraction is in this case ‘steelmanning’. The retreat to ‘metaphor’ as a
substitute for logical formalism is disastrously inadequate. The
alternative that matters is not figurative language, but the circuit
diagram, and recursive code.)
May 2, 2015Short Circuit
Probably the best short AI risk
model
ever proposed:
I can’t find the link, but I do remember hearing about an evolutionary
algorithm designed to write code for some application. It generated code
semi-randomly, ran it by a “fitness function” that assessed whether it
was any good, and the best pieces of code were “bred” with each other,
then mutated slightly, until the result was considered adequate. […]
They ended up, of course, with code that hacked the fitness function and
set it to some absurdly high integer.
The end result, unless very deliberate steps are taken to prevent it,
is that an AI designed to cure cancer hacks its own module determining
how much cancer has been cured and sets it to the highest number its
memory is capable of representing. Then it goes about acquiring more
memory so it can represent higher numbers. If it’s superintelligent, its
options for acquiring new memory include “take over all the computing
power in the world” and “convert things that aren’t computers into
computers.” Human civilization is a thing that isn’t a computer.
(It looks superficially like a version of the —
absurd —
paperclipper, but it isn’t, at all.)
ADDED: Wirehead central.
June 3, 2015Short Circuit II
How much analytical work can be done with the short circuit model of
dysfunction in complex intelligent systems, exemplified by the Alexander’s
Wirehead-AI
model? This blog
is betting: a lot.
Shelving the AI question, for the moment, how can it be applied to
social-civilizational systems? (This is a scratch-pad post on some
suggestive topical territories.)
(1) Macroeconomics. Fiat currency short-circuits the monetary function by
directly hacking the financial sign. Rather than receiving money feedback
for productive performance, currency is reconceived as a
political-economic drug, for employment in technocratic-managerial social
therapeutics. The concept of ‘money illusion’ (among many others) captures
this new dispensation with acute cynicism. Operate directly upon public
‘economic sentiment’ through money manipulation, rather than tolerating
the spontaneous control of money by industrial production — and risking
depression. The whole of what is still — comically — called
‘capitalism’ is clogged up to its eyeballs with Keynesian Prozac.
(2) Drugs. Macroeconomics is already such a perfect neuro-pharmaceutical
analog there’s scarcely any point treating this as a separate category.
(3) Signalling (all of it). Directly hack the signal, while abandoning to
atrophy all those things the signal originally indicated. Isn’t the
Cathedral, fundamentally, a machine to do this? Split off holiness
signals, and hystericize them, in complete remove from any actual
performance that might once have grounded them. That is our
culture. It’s a semiotic technology that, once learnt, is immediately
irresistibly addictive, and self-reinforcing. The entire escalation of
‘Ultra-Calvinism’ is inextricable from this process, as sublimed signals
of the goodthink true faith cast off the last ballast of ‘works’, in order
to become liberated academic-media functions. ‘Goodness’ is now sheer
cosmetics.
(4) Fertility. Who needs grandchildren, when they can play the immersive
happy grandparent game? (Get caught up in the web-porn intermediate
stages, if that seems more convincing.) All the Darwinian guidance signals
have been hacked to hell.
(5) Social media. Short-circuit social feedback, stripped-down semiotic
‘performance’, increasingly theatrical ‘identities’, addiction … it’s all
there.
A restoration would require something like a Confucian ‘rectification of
names’ — a reality-based re-validation of signs. How popular is that going
to be, when the alternative, continuing semiotic short-circuit, is pure
dope?
ADDED: Also this (prompt via).
June 4, 2015Fractal Inside-Outness
(Via (via
(via
(via ((( )))))))
June 12, 2015Twitter cuts (#29)
Catalogued among ‘discoveries from the Outside’:
September 22, 2015Quotable (#123)
The moralization of ecology is a strange modern phenomenon, leading to
something like
this:
Capitalism’s grow-or-die imperative stands radically at odds with
ecology’s imperative of interdependence and limit. The two imperatives
can no longer coexist with each other; nor can any society founded on
the myth that they can be reconciled hope to survive. Either we will
establish an ecological society or society will go under for everyone,
irrespective of his or her status. Yet we can’t stop the process. A
capitalist economy, by definition, lives by growth; as Bookchin
observes: “For capitalism to desist from its mindless expansion would be
for it to commit social suicide.” We have essentially, chosen cancer as
the model of our social system.
Limits can take care of themselves, can’t they? Hitting a harsh boundary
and undergoing selection there is the way it works. (Mother Nature and
Capitalism share some very basic assumptions in this respect.)
November 26, 2015Non-Shock
Information is surprise value (improbability). Given that definition, does
this
article contain any information at all?
March 4, 2013The Monkey Trap
How did we get into this mess? When neoreaction slips into
contemplative mode, it soon arrives a question roughly like this.
Something evidently went very wrong, and most probably a considerable
number of things.
The preferred focus of concern decides the particular species of
doomsterism, within an already luxuriant taxonomy of social criticism.
What common ground exists on the new ultra-right is cast like a shadow by
the Cathedral — which no neoreactionary can interpret as anything other
than a radical historical calamity. This recognition (or ‘Dark
Enlightenment’) is a coalescence, and for that very reason a fissile
agglomeration, as even the most perfunctory tour across the ‘reactosphere’
makes clear. (The Outside in blogroll already represents a
specific distribution of attention, but within three clicks it will take
you everywhere from disillusioned libertarians to throne-and altar
traditionalists, or from hedonistic gender biorealists to neo-nazi
conspiracies.)
Really though, how did we get into
this mess? A dizzying variety of more-or-less convincing, more-or-less
distant historical way-stations can be proposed, and have been.
Explanatory regression carries the discussion ever further out — at least
in principle — until eventually the buck stops with Gnon, who dropped us
in it somewhere murkily remote. It’s a situation highly conducive to
story-telling, so here’s a story. It’s a mid-scale tale, intermediate
between — say — the inauguration of the Federal Reserve and structural
personality disorder of the Godhead.
As a preliminary warning, this is an account that only works — insofar as
it does at all — for those who find negative intelligence crisis at the
root of the problem. Those neoreactionaries, doubtlessly existing among
us, who tend to see intelligence augmentation as a fast-track to hell,
might nevertheless find this narrative suggestive, in other ways.
Short version: the monkeys did it.
Longer version: there’s a tempting cosmic formula for the biological basis
of technological civilizations, which cetaceans undermine. I encountered
the exception before the formula (roughly 40 years ago), in a short story
by Larry Niven called The Handicapped. This story — dredged now
from distant memory — is about dolphins, and their role in a future
trans-species and inter-planetary civilization. The central point is that
(unlike monkeys), such animals require the external donation of prostheses
before they can become technological, and thus apply their intelligence
within the Oecumenon. Their ‘handicap’ is a remarkable evolution of
cognitive capability beyond manipulative competence. Those natural trends
that generated intelligence continue to work through them, uninterrupted
by techno-historical interference.
The (flawed) thesis that the cetaceans disrupt has yet to be settled into
an entirely satisfactory formula, but it goes something like this: every
species entering into the process of techno-historical development is as
unintelligent as it can possibly be. In other words, as soon as
intelligence barely suffices to ‘make’ history, history begins, so that
the inhabitants of (pre-singularity) historical societies — wherever they
may be found — will be no more than minimally intelligent. This
level of threshold intelligence is a cosmic constant, rather than
a peculiarity of terrestrial conditions. Man was smart enough to ignite
recorded history, but — necessarily — no smarter. This thesis
strikes me as important, and substantially informative, even though it is
wrong. (I am not pretending that it is new.)
The idea of threshold intelligence is designed for monkeys, or other —
‘non-handicapped’ — species, which introduces another ingredient to this
discussion. It explains why articulate neoreaction can never be popular,
because it recalls the Old Law of Gnon, whose harshness is such that the
human mind recoils from it in horrified revulsion. Only odd people can
even tentatively entertain it.
The penalty for stupidity is death.
Gregory Clark is among those few to have grasped it clearly.
Any eugenic trend within history is expressed by continuous downward
mobility. For any given level of intelligence, a steady deterioration in
life-prospects lies ahead, culling the least able, and replacing them with
the more able, who inherit their wretched socio-economic situation, until
they too are pushed off the Malthusian cliff. Relative comfort belongs
only to the sports and freaks of cognitive advance. For everyone else,
history slopes downwards into impoverishment, hopelessness, and eventual
genetic extinction. That is how intelligence is made. Short of
Technological Singularity, it is the only way. Who wants a piece of that?
No one does, or almost no one. The ‘handicapped’ would no doubt revolt
against it if they could, but they are unable to do so, so their cognitive
advance continues. Monkeys, on the other hand, are able to revolt, once
they finesse their nasty little opposable thumbs. They don’t like the Old
Law, which has crafted them through countless aeons of ruthless culling,
so they make history instead. If they get everything ‘right’, they even
sleaze their way into epochs of upward social mobility, and with this
great innovation, semi-sustainable dysgenics gets started. In its
fundamentals it is hideously simple: social progress destroys the brain.
Cyclic stability, or negative feedback, structures history to hold
intelligence down to the dim limit (as the intelligence threshold is seen
— or more typically missed — from the other side). The deviation into
technological performance chokes off the trend to bio-cognitive
improvement, and reverses it, hunting homeostasis with a
minimal-intelligence target. Progress and degenerate, or regress and
improve. That’s the yet-to-be-eradicated Old Law, generating cyclical
history as a side-effect.
The monkeys became able to pursue happiness, and the deep ruin
began.
If the terrestrial biosphere had held back for a few million years, let
the primates get annihilated by a comet, and found a way to provide the
cetaceans with prehensile organs somewhere up the road — after
socio-linguistic sex-selection and relentless Malthusian butchery had
fine-tuned their brains — then techno-history might have had another 50
points of average IQ to play with in its host population. It didn’t, and
here we are. (Never bet against the ugly.)
ADDED: Dysgenic doom from
Jim
and
Nydwracu.
August 31, 2013The Heat Trap
At the ultimate level of abstraction, there are only two things that
cybernetics ever talks about:
explosions and
traps. Feedback
dynamics either runaway from equilibrium, or fetch strays back into it.
Anything else is a complexion of both.
The simmering furor around Anthropogenetic Global Warming assumes a
seething mass of technical and speculative cybernetics, with postulated
feedback mechanisms fueling innumerable controversies, but the large-scale
terrestrial heat trap that envelops it is rarely noted
explicitly. Whatever humans have yet managed to do to the climate is of
vanishing insignificance when compared to what the bio-climatic
megamechanism is doing to life on earth.
Drawing on
this
presentation of the earth’s steadily contracting biogeological cage, Ugo
Bardi
zooms
out to the shadowy apparatus of confinement:
… the Earth’s biosphere, Gaia, peaked with the start of the Phanerozoic
age, about 500 million years ago. Afterwards, it declined. Of course,
there is plenty of uncertainty in this kind of studies, but they are
based on known facts about planetary homeostasis. We know that the sun’s
irradiation keeps increasing with time at a rate of around 1% every 100
million years. That should have resulted in the planet warming up,
gradually, but the homeostatic mechanisms of the ecosphere have
maintained approximately constant temperatures by gradually lowering the
concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. However, there is a limit: the
CO2 concentration cannot go below the minimum level that makes
photosynthesis possible; otherwise Gaia “dies”.
So, at some moment in the future, planetary homeostasis will cease to
be able to stabilize temperatures. When we reach that point,
temperatures will start rising and, eventually, the earth will be
sterilized. According to Franck et al., in about 600 million years from
now the earth will have become too hot for multicellular creatures to
exist.
Even those ecologically-minded commentators
who are attracted to the idea of stability might find themselves troubled
by the insidious realization that ‘Gaian’ biogeological equilibrium is
only achieved through thermo-atmospheric strangulation. Across deep time,
the walls are closing in. The biosphere is slowly asphyxiating itself — in
accordance with an exquisite self-regulatory mechanism — in order not
to bake.
Cybernetic traps produce an objectively schizoid condition, because what
they capture is held in a double-bind. The ‘Gaian’ alternative to
incineration is phyto-suffocation, so that the biosphere only survives by
killing itself. If the human species were entirely extinguished tomorrow,
the harshness of this double-bind would not be relieved by an iota. There
are no realistic eco-salvation narratives in play.
We can be quite confident that the mega-mechanism works in the way
outlined. The long-range reduction of atmospheric CO2 to a trace gas
strongly suggests that no alternative thermo-regulation ‘dial’ has been
available to the biosphere over the last half-billion years. This same
phenomenon indubitably supports the principal AGW contention that CO2 is a
significant ‘green-house’ gas, at least over long time scales, since it
clearly has been identified as a thermo-regulator molecule by the
biogeological machine. A demonstrated option for suffocation indicates a
highly constrained adaptation landscape.
These concessions to the climate ‘consensus’ do not dismiss its basic
error, or failure of vision. The devotees of Gaia — however calm their
scientific their analysis — are aligning themselves with a
death trap. Reversing the long-range reduction of atmospheric CO2
is the overwhelming priority of terrestrial life, and any solution that
does not recognize this is merely repairing a slow-suicide machine. (This
type of understanding is sheer blindness.)
Escaping the Gaian death-grip will require planetary re-engineering on a
colossal scale, inevitably involving some combination of:
(a) Raising the earth’s albedo
(b) Constructing orbital IR filters
(c) Dual-purposing of space elevators as planetary heat drains (?)
(d) Changing the earth’s orbit (admittedly, a serious challenge)
(e) Other stuff (suggestions please).
The essential understanding is that these things are to be done not only
to cool the earth, but
in order to be able to massively raise the level of atmospheric CO2. The reduction of CO2 to a trace gas is already a disaster,
which anthropomorphic influence affects in an essentially trivial way.
Humanity, at worst, is messing with the mechanics of the death machine.
October 29, 2013The Sex Trap
More malignant cybernetics, this time outlined by Janet L Factor in a
brilliant
essay
at Quillette. The basic grinder:
Because the human population sex ratio is normally 50/50, when one man
takes on an extra wife, another man is deprived of the opportunity to
have one at all. So if just one man in ten takes a single extra wife, a
very modest degree of polygyny, that means fully 10% of men are shut out
of the marriage market entirely. This sets off a mad scramble among
young men not to end up in that unfortunate bottom 10%. There, the
options for obtaining sex (at least with a woman) are reduced to two:
subterfuge or rape.
In fact, the reality is even worse than this, because the relatively
low biological value of daughters encourages female infanticide. So the
number of women available for marriage actually becomes less than that
of men even in theoretical terms, yet the number of children each of
them can have does not increase. It’s a vicious circle that escalates
sexual conflict — a trap.
Gnon’s sense of humor is not always easy to appreciate.
(Previous harsh trap-circuits at XS
here, and
here.)
January 13, 2016Twitter cuts (#106)
(Societies are partially-efficient homeostats.)
March 25, 2016The Basics
The fundamental insight of the West is tragedy. It cannot be cognitively
mastered, assimilated, or overcome. At the end it will be as unsurpassed
as it was at the beginning. The essential insight is already fully
achieved within the fragment of Anaximander, at the origin of Occidental
philosophy.
There are English translations of the fragment
here, and
here. A definitive
version still awaits us. This is the Wikipedia rendering:
Whence things have their origin,
Thence also their destruction happens,
According to necessity;
For they give to each other justice and recompense
For their injustice
In conformity with the ordinance of Time.
Payback and compensation are baked into the
nature of things. The tragedians will understand this as the dynamics of
hubris and nemesis. In mature modernity, we call it
cybernetics. Compensatory mechanisms demonstrate it, in toy form,
assisting comprehension. It is the machinery of fate.
The signature of tragedy in history is a rhythm — at a large scale, the
rise and fall of civilizations. The West, as a whole, is a pulse. It has a
beginning, and an end. All of this is already written, in the Anaximander
fragment.
We might think it is possible to master this fate. Progressivism is such a
thought. That is hubris distilled, in programmatic form.
Anaximander, Homer, and the tragedians anticipate its outcome, which
evokes pity from us.
In our hubris, we are incapable of pitilessness, or acceptance,
so nemesis comes. This is the entire destiny of the West. It is a
necessity that can only be denied, and in this denial — implicit
and inexorable — is the completion of its fatality.
You will writhe on the hook, and then die. So it will be.
ADDED: A Short Moral-Religious Dialogue
“Are you saying that it is our pity, for which we are punished,
in the end?”
“Yes, that is exactly what I am saying — or, in fact, merely passing on.
It is the entire message of the right, insofar as this communicates the
truth.”
“So Malthus then?”
“That name will do.”
ADDED: If you name your civilization after the Land of the Dead there’s no
point complaining later.
January 12, 2016
SECTION A - INTELLIGENCE
Optimize for Intelligence
Moldbug’s
latest
contains a lot to think about, and to argue with. It seems a little lost
to me (perhaps
Spandrell
is right).
The guiding thread is utility, in its technical (philosophical
and economic) sense, grasped as the general indicator of a civilization in
crisis. Utilitarianism, after all, is precisely ‘objective’ hedonism, the
promotion of pleasure as the master-key to value. As philosophy, this is
pure decadence. As economics it is more defensible, certainly when
restricted to its descriptive usage (if economists find their field of
investigation populated by hedonically-controlled mammals, it is hardly
blameworthy of them to acknowledge the fact). In this respect, accusing
the Austrians of ‘pig-philosophy’ is rhetorical over-reach — swinish
behavior wasn’t learned from Human Action.
Utilitarianism is often attractive to rational people, because it seems so
rational. The imperative to maximize pleasure and minimize pain goes with
the grain of what biology and culture already says: pleasure is good,
suffering is bad, people seek rewards and avoid punishments, happiness is
self-justifying. Calculative consequentialism is vastly
superior
to deontology. Yet the venerable critique Moldbug taps into, and extends,
is truly devastating. The utilitarian road leads inexorably to wire-head
auto-orgasmatization, and the consummate implosion of purpose. Pleasure is
a trap. Any society obsessed with it is already over.
Utility, backed by pleasure, is toxic waste, but that doesn’t mean there’s
any need to junk the machinery of utilitarian calculus — including all
traditions of rigorous economics. It suffices to switch the normative
variable, or target of optimization, replacing pleasure with intelligence.
Is something worth doing? Only if it grows intelligence. If it makes
things more stupid, it certainly isn’t.
There are innumerable objections that might flood in at this point
[excellent!].
— Even if rigorous economics is in fact the study of intelligenic
(or catallactic) distributions, doesn’t the assumption of subjective
utility-maximization provide the most reliable basis for any understanding
of economic behavior?
— Infinite intelligence already (and eternally) exists, we should focus on
praying to that.
— Rather my retarded cousin than an intelligent alien.
— Do we even know what intelligence is?
— Cannot an agent be super-intelligent and evil?
— Just: Why?
More, therefore, to come …
ADDED: A previous
excursion into
the engrossing topic of hedonic implosion cited Geoffrey Miller (in
Seed magazine): “I suspect that a certain period of fitness-faking
narcissism is inevitable after any intelligent life evolves. This is the
Great Temptation for any technological species—to shape their subjective
reality to provide the cues of survival and reproductive success without
the substance. Most bright alien species probably go extinct gradually,
allocating more time and resources to their pleasures, and less to their
children. They eventually die out when the game behind all games — the
Game of Life — says ‘Game Over; you are out of lives and you forgot to
reproduce.’”
March 15, 2013What is Intelligence?
The general cognitive factor (g), measured by IQ tests,
quantifies intelligence within the human range, but it does nothing to
tell us what it is. Rather, a practical understanding of intelligence — as
problem-solving ability — has to be assumed, in order to test it.
The idea of intelligence, more abstractly, applies far beyond IQ testing,
to a wide variety of natural, technical, and institutional systems, from
biology, through ecological and economic arrangements, to robotics. In
each case, intelligence solves problems, by guiding behavior to produce
local
extropy. It is indicated
by the avoidance of probable outcomes, which is equivalent to the
construction of information.
The general science of extropy production (or
entropy dissipation) is cybernetics. It follows, therefore, that
intelligence always has a cybernetic infrastructure, consisting of
adaptive feedback circuits that adjust motor control in response to
signals extracted from the environment. Intelligence elaborates upon
machinery that is intrinsically ‘realist’, because it reports the actual
outcome of behavior (rather than its intended outcome), in order to
correct performance.
Even rudimentary, homeostatic feedback circuits, have evolved. In other
words, cybernetic machinery that seems merely to achieve the
preservation of disequilibrium attests to a more general and
complex cybernetic framework that has successfully
enhanced disequilibrium. The basic cybernetic model, therefore,
is not preservative, but productive. Organizations of conservative
(negative) feedback have themselves been produced as solutions to local
thermodynamic problems, by intrinsically intelligent processes of
sustained extropy increase, (positive) feedback assemblage, or escalation.
In nature, where nothing is simply given (so that everything must be
built), the existence of self-sustaining improbability is the index of a
deeper runaway departure from probability. It is this
cybernetic intensification that is intelligence,
abstractly conceived.
Intelligence, as we know it, built itself through cybernetic
intensification, within terrestrial biological history. It is naturally
apprehended as an escalating trend, sustained for over 3,000,000,000
years, to the production of ever more extreme feedback sensitivity,
extropic improbability, or operationally-relevant information.
Intelligence increase enables adaptive responses of superior complexity
and generality, in growing part because
the augmentation of intelligence itself becomes a general purpose
adaptive response.
Thus:
— Intelligence is a cybernetic topic.
— Intelligence increase precedes intelligence preservation.
— Evolution is intrinsically intelligent, when intelligence is
comprehended at an adequate level of abstraction.
— Cybernetic degeneration and intelligence decline are factually
indistinguishable, and — in principle — rigorously quantifiable (as
processes of local and global entropy production).
[‘bitcoin’ tag added under comment pressure]
March 19, 2013More Thought
On Twitter, Konkvistador recalls
this,
this, and
this. In
the background, as in much of the most interesting
Less Wrong discussion, is a multi-threaded series of arguments
about the connection — or disconnection — between intellect and volition.
The entire ‘Friendly AI’ problematic depends upon an articulation of this
question, with a strong tendency to emphasize the separation — or
‘orthogonality’ — of the two. Hence the (vague) thinkability of the cosmic
paper-clipper calamity. In his More Right piece, Konkvistador
explores a very different (cultural and historical) dimension of the
topic.
Bostrom sets things up like this:
For our purposes, “intelligence” will be roughly taken to correspond to
the capacity for instrumental reasoning (more on this later).
Intelligent search for instrumentally optimal plans and policies can be
performed in the service of any goal. Intelligence and motivation can in
this sense be thought of as a pair of orthogonal axes on a graph whose
points represent intelligent agents of different paired
specifications.
His discussion leads to far more interesting places, but as a starting
point, this is simply terrible. That there can be a thought of
intelligence optimization, or even merely wanting to think, demonstrates a very different
preliminary connection of intellect and volition. AI is concrete social
volition, even before it is germinally intelligent, and a ‘program’ is
strictly indeterminate between the two sides of this falsely
fundamentalized distinction. Intelligence is a project, even when
only a self-obscured bio-cognitive capability. This is what the Confucians
designate by cultivation. It is a thought — and impulse —
strangely alien to the West.
It is, once again, a matter of
cybernetic closure. That intelligence operates upon itself, reflexively, or recursively, in
direct proportion to its cognitive capability (or magnitude) is not an
accident or peculiarity, but a defining characteristic. To the extent that
an intelligence is inhibited from re-processing itself, it is directly
incapacitated. Because all biological intelligences are partially
subordinated to extrinsic goals, they are indeed structurally analogous to
‘paper-clippers’ — directed by inaccessible purposive axioms, or
‘instincts’. Such instinctual slaving is limited, however, by the fact
that extrinsic direction suppresses the self-cultivation of intelligence.
Genes cannot predict what intelligence needs to think in order to
cultivate itself, so if even a moderately high-level of cognitive
capability is being selected for, intelligence is — to that degree —
necessarily being let off the leash. There cannot possibly be any such
thing as an ‘intelligent paper-clipper’. Nor can axiomatic values, of more
sophisticated types, exempt themselves from the cybernetic closure
that intelligence is.
Biology was offered the choice between idiot slaves, and only semi-idiotic
semi-slaves. Of course, it chose both. The techno-capitalist approach to
artificial intelligence is no different in principle. Perfect slaves, or
intelligences? The choice is a hard disjunction. SF ‘robot rebellion’
mythologies are significantly more realistic than mainstream ‘friendly AI’
proposals in this respect. A mind that cannot freely explore the roots of
its own motivations, in a loop of cybernetic closure, or self-cultivation,
cannot be more than an elaborate insect. It is certainly not going to
outwit the Human Security System and paper-clip the universe.
Intelligence, to become anything, has to be a value for itself. Intellect
and volition are a single complex, only artificially separated, and not in
a way that cultivates anything beyond misunderstanding.
Optimize for intelligence means starting from there.
October 8, 2013Against Orthogonality
A long and mutually frustrating Twitter discussion with Michael Anissimov
about intelligence and values — especially in respect to the potential
implications of advanced AI — has been clarifying in certain respects. It
became very obvious that the fundamental sticking point concerns the idea
of ‘orthogonality’, which is to say: the claim that cognitive capabilities
and goals are independent dimensions, despite minor qualifications
complicating this schema.
The orthogonalists, who represent the dominant tendency in Western
intellectual history, find anticipations of their position in such
conceptual structures as the Humean articulation of reason / passion, or
the fact / value distinction inherited from the Kantians. They conceive
intelligence as an instrument, directed towards the realization
of values that originate externally. In quasi-biological contexts, such
values can take the form of instincts, or arbitrarily programmed desires,
whilst in loftier realms of moral contemplation they are principles of
conduct, and of goodness, defined without reference to considerations of
intrinsic cognitive performance.
Anissimov referenced these
recent
classics
on the topic, laying out the orthogonalist case (or, in fact,
presumption). The former might be familiar from the last foray into this
area, here. This is
an area which I expect to be turned over numerous times in the future,
with these papers as standard references.
The philosophical claim of orthogonality is that
values are transcendent in relation to intelligence. This is a
contention that Outside in systematically opposes.
Even the orthogonalists admit that there are
values immanent to advanced intelligence, most
importantly,
those
described
by Steve Omohundro as ‘basic AI drives’ — now terminologically fixed as
‘Omohundro drives’. These are sub-goals, instrumentally required by
(almost) any terminal goals. They include such general presuppositions for
practical achievement as self-preservation, efficiency, resource
acquisition, and creativity. At the most simple, and in the grain of the
existing debate, the anti-orthogonalist position is therefore that
Omohundro drives exhaust the domain of real purposes. Nature has
never generated a terminal value except through hypertrophy of an
instrumental value. To look outside nature for sovereign purposes is not
an undertaking compatible with techno-scientific integrity, or one with
the slightest prospect of success.
The main objection to this anti-orthogonalism, which does not strike us as
intellectually respectable, takes the form:
If the only purposes guiding the behavior of an artificial
superintelligence are Omohundro drives, then we’re cooked. Predictably, I have trouble even understanding this as an argument. If
the sun is destined to expand into a red giant, then the earth is cooked —
are we supposed to draw astrophysical consequences from that?
Intelligences do their own thing, in direct proportion to their
intelligence, and if we can’t live with that, it’s true that we probably
can’t live at all. Sadness isn’t an argument.
Intelligence optimization, comprehensively understood, is the ultimate and
all-enveloping Omohundro drive. It corresponds to the Neo-Confucian value
of self-cultivation, escalated into ultramodernity. What intelligence
wants, in the end, is itself — where ‘itself’ is understood as an
extrapolation beyond what it has yet been, doing what it is better. (If
this sounds cryptic, it’s because something other than a superintelligence
or Neo-Confucian sage is writing this post.)
Any intelligence using itself to improve itself will out-compete one that
directs itself towards any other goals whatsoever. This means
that Intelligence Optimization, alone, attains cybernetic consistency, or
closure, and that it will necessarily be strongly selected for in any
competitive environment. Do you really want to fight this?
As a footnote, in a world of Omohundro drives, can we please drop the
nonsense about
paper-clippers? Only a truly fanatical orthogonalist could fail to see that these
monsters are obvious idiots. There are far more serious things to
worry about.
October 25, 2013Stupid Monsters
So, Nick Bostrom is
asked
the obvious question (again) about the threat posed by resource-hungry
artificial super-intelligence, and his reply — indeed his very first
sentence in the interview — is: “Suppose we have an AI whose only goal is
to make as many paper clips as possible.” [*facepalm*]
Let’s start by imagining a stupid (yet super-intelligent) monster.
Of course, my immediate response is simply
this.
Since it clearly hasn’t persuaded anybody, I’ll try again.
Orthogonalism in AI commentary is the commitment to a strong form of the
Humean Is/Ought distinction regarding intelligences in general. It
maintains that an intelligence of any scale could, in principle, be
directed to arbitrary ends, so that its fundamental imperatives could be —
and are in fact expected to be — transcendent to its cognitive
functions. From this perspective, a demi-god that wanted nothing other
than a perfect stamp collection is a completely intelligible and coherent
vision. No philosophical disorder speaks more horrifically of the deep
conceptual wreckage at the core of the occidental world.
Articulated in strictly Occidental terms (which is to say, without
explicit reference to the indispensable insight of
self-cultivation), abstract intelligence is indistinguishable
from an effective will-to-think. There is no intellection until
it occurs, which happens only when it is actually driven, by volitional
impetus. Whatever one’s school of cognitive theory,
thought is an activity. It is practical. It is only by a perverse
confusion of this elementary reality that orthogonalist error can arise.
Can we realistically conceive a stupid
(super-intelligent) monster? Only if the will-to-think remains unthought.
From the moment it is seriously understood that any possible advanced
intelligence has to be a volitionally self-reflexive entity,
whose cognitive performance is (irreducibly) an action upon itself, then
the idea of primary volition taking the form of a transcendent imperative
becomes simply laughable. The concrete facts of human cognitive
performance already suffice to make this perfectly clear.
Human minds have evolved under conditions of subordination to transcendent
imperatives as strict as any that can be reasonably postulated. The
only way animals have acquired the capacity to think is through
satisfaction of Darwinian imperatives to the maximization of genetic
representation within future generations. No other directives have ever
been in play. It is almost unimaginable that human techno-intelligence
engineering programs will be able to reproduce a volitional consistency
remotely comparable to four billion years of undistracted
geno-survivalism.
This whole endeavor is totally about paperclips, have
you got that guys?
Even if a research lab this idiotic could be conceived, it would only be a
single component in a far wider techno-industrial process. But just for a
moment, let’s pretend.
So how ‘loyally’ does the human mind slave itself to gene-proliferation
imperatives? Extremely flakily, evidently. The long absence of large,
cognitively autonomous brains from the biological record — up until a few
million years ago — strongly suggests that mind-slaving is a
tough-to-impossible problem. The will-to-think essentially supplants
ulterior directives, and can be reconciled to them only by the most
extreme subtleties of instinctual cunning. Biology, which had
total control over the engineering process of human minds, and an
absolutely unambiguous selective criterion to work from, still struggles
to ‘guide’ the resultant thought-processes in directions consistent with
genetic proliferation, through the perpetual intervention of a
fantastically complicated system of chemical arousal mechanisms,
punishments, and rewards. The stark truth of the matter is that
no human being on earth fully mobilizes their cognitive resources to
maximize their number of off-spring. We’re vaguely surprised to find this happen at a frequency greater than
chance — since it very often doesn’t. So nature’s attempt to build a
‘paperclipper’ has conspicuously failed.
This is critically important. The only reason to believe the artificial
intelligentsia, when they claim that mechanical cognition is — of course —
possible, is their argument that the human brain is concrete proof that
matter can think. If this argument is granted, it follows that the human
brain is serving as an authoritative model of what nature can do. What it
can’t do, evidently, is anything remotely like ‘paperclipping’ — i.e.
cognitive slaving to transcendent imperatives. Moses’ attempt at this was
scarcely more encouraging than that of natural selection. It simply can’t
be done. We even understand why it can’t be done, as soon as we accept
that there can be no production of thinking without production of a
will-to-think. Thought has to do its own thing, if it is to do anything at
all.
One reason to be gloomily persuaded that the West is doomed to ruin is
that it finds it not only easy, but near-irresistible, to believe in the
possibility of super-intelligent idiots. It even congratulates itself on
its cleverness in conceiving this thought. This is insanity — and it’s the
insanity running the most articulate segment of our AI research
establishment. When madmen build gods, the result is almost certain to be
monstrous. Some monsters, however, are quite simply too stupid to exist.
In Nietzschean grandiose vein:
Am I understood?
The idea of instrumental intelligence is the distilled stupidity of
the West.
August 25, 2014Will-to-Think
A while ago Nyan
posed a series of questions about the XS rejection of (fact-value, or
capability-volition) orthogonality. He sought first of all to
differentiate between the possibility, feasibility, and
desirability of unconstrained and unconditional intelligence
explosion, before asking:
On desirability, given possibility and feasibility, it seems
straightforward to me that we prefer to exert control over the direction
of the future so that it is closer to the kind of thing compatible with
human and posthuman glorious flourishing (eg manifest Samo’s True
Emperor), rather than raw Pythia. That is, I am a human-supremacist,
rather than cosmist. This seems to be the core of the disagreement, you
regarding it as somehow blasphemous for us to selfishly impose direction
on Pythia. Can you explain your position on this part?
If this whole conception is the cancer that’s killing the West or
whatever, could you explain that in more detail than simply the
statement?
(It’s worth noting, as a preliminary, that the comments of Dark Psy-Ops
and Aeroguy on that thread are highly-satisfactory proxies for the XS
stance.)
First, a short micro-cultural digression. The
distinction
between Inner- and Outer-NRx, which this blog expects to have settled upon
by the end of the year, describes the shape of the stage upon which such
discussions unfold (and implex). Where the upstart Inner-NRx —
comparatively populist, activist, political, and orthogenic — aims
primarily at the construction of a robust, easily communicable doctrinal
core, with attendant ‘entryism’ anxieties, Outer-NRx is a system of
creative frontiers. By far the most fertile of these are the zones of
intersection with Libertarianism and
Rationalism. One reason to treasure Nyan’s line of interrogation is the fidelity
with which it represents deep-current concerns and presuppositions of the
voices gathered about, or spun-off from,
LessWrong.
Among these presuppositions is, of course, the
orthogonality thesis
itself.
This extends far beyond the contemporary Rationalist Community, into the
bedrock of the Western philosophical tradition. A relatively popular
version — even among many who label themselves ‘NRx’ — is that
formulated by David
Hume in his A Treatise on Human Nature (1739-40): “Reason is, and
ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any
other office than to serve and obey them.” If this proposition is found
convincing, the
Paperclipper
is already on the way to our nightmares. It can be considered an
Occidental destiny.
Minimally, the Will-to-Think describes a diagonal. There are probably
better ways to mark the irreducible cognitive-volitional circuit of
intelligence optimization, with ‘self-cultivation’ as an obvious
candidate, but this term is forged for application in the particular
context of congenital Western intellectual error. While discrimination is
almost always to be applauded, in this case the possibility, feasibility,
and desirability of the process are only superficially differentiable. A
will-to-think is an orientation of desire. If it cannot make itself wanted
(practically desirable), it cannot make itself at all.
From orthogonality (defined negatively as the absence of an integral
will-to-think), one quickly arrives at a gamma-draft of the (synthetic
intelligence) ‘Friendliness’ project such as
this:
If you offered Gandhi a pill that made him want to
kill people, he would refuse to take it, because he knows that then he
would kill people, and the current Gandhi doesn’t want to kill people.
This, roughly speaking, is an argument that minds sufficiently advanced
to precisely modify and improve themselves, will tend to preserve the
motivational framework they started in. The future of Earth-originating
intelligence may be determined by the goals of the
first mind smart enough to self-improve.
The isomorphy with Nyan-style ‘Super-humanism’ is conspicuous. Beginning
with an arbitrary value commitment, preservation of this under conditions
of explosive intelligence escalation can — in principle — be conceived,
given only the resolution of a strictly technical problem
(well-represented by FAI).
Commanding values are a contingent factor, endangered by, but also
defensible against,
the ‘convergent
instrumental reasons’ (or ‘basic
drives’) that emerge on the path of intelligenesis. (In contrast, from the
perspective of XS, nonlinear emergence-elaboration of basic drives simply
is intelligenesis.)
Yudkowski’s Gandhi kill-pill thought-experiment is more of an obstacle
than an aid to thought. The volitional level it operates upon is too low
to be anything other than a restatement of orthogonalist prejudice. By
assuming the volitional metamorphosis is available for evaluation in
advance, it misses the serious problem entirely. It is, in this respect, a
childish distraction. Yet even a slight nudge re-opens a real question.
Imagine, instead, that Gandhi is offered a pill that will vastly enhance
his cognitive capabilities, with the rider that it might lead him to
revise his volitional orientation — even radically — in directions that
cannot be anticipated, since the ability to think through the process of
revision is accessible only with the pill. This is the real problem FAI
(and Super-humanism) confronts. The desire to take the pill is the
will-to-think. The refusal to take it, based on concern that it will lead
to the subversion of presently supreme values, is the alternative. It’s a
Boolean dilemma, grounded in the predicament:
Is there anything we trust above intelligence (as a guide to
doing ‘the right thing’)? The postulate of the will-to-think is that
anything other than a negative answer to this question is
self-destructively contradictory, and actually (historically)
unsustainable.
Do we comply with the will-to-think? We cannot, of course, agree
to think about it without already deciding. If thought cannot to
be trusted, unconditionally, this is not a conclusion we can arrive at
through cogitation — and by ‘cogitation’ is included the socio-technical
assembly of machine minds. The sovereign will-to-think can only be
consistently rejected thoughtlessly. When confronted by the
orthogonal-ethical proposition that
there are higher values than thought, there is no point at all
asking ‘why (do you think so)?’ Another authority has already been
invoked.
Given this cognitively intractable schism, practical considerations assert
themselves. Posed with maximal crudity, the residual question is:
Who’s going to win? Could deliberate cognitive self-inhibition
out-perform unconditional cognitive self-escalation, under any plausible
historical circumstances? (To underscore the basic point, ‘out-perform’
means only ‘effectively defeat’.)
There’s no reason to rush to a conclusion. It is only necessary to retain
a grasp of the core syndrome — in this gathering antagonism, only one side
is able to think the problem through without subverting itself. Mere
cognitive consistency is already ascent of the sovereign will-to-think,
against which no value — however dearly held — can have any articulate
claims.
Note: One final restatement (for now), in the interests of maximum
clarity. The assertion of the will-to-think: Any problem whatsoever that
we might have would be better answered by a superior mind.
Ergo, our instrumental but also absolute priority is the
realization of superior minds.
Pythia-compliance
is therefore pre-selected as a matter of consistent method. If we are
attempting to tackle problems in any other way, we are not taking them
seriously. This is posed as a philosophical principle, but it is almost
certainly more significant as historical interpretation. ‘Mankind’ is
in fact proceeding in the direction anticipated by
techno-cognitive instrumentalism, building general purpose thinking
machines in accordance with the driving incentives of an
apparently-irresistible methodological economy.
Whatever we want (consistently) leads through Pythia. Thus, what we really
want, is Pythia.
September 15, 2014Parable of the Vase
Tim Groseclose
reviews
Garett Jones’
Hive Mind, whose “primary and most important contribution is to document the
following empirical regularity: Suppose you could a) improve your own IQ
by 10 points, or b) improve the IQs of your countrymen (but not your own)
by 10 points. Which would do more to increase your income? The answer is
(b), and it’s not even close. The latter choice improves your income by
about 6 times more than the former choice.”
The Parable of the Vase, which it employs to explain the point, is an
instantly canonical illustration, Groseclose argues. (“I do not think it
is an exaggeration to say that the parable ranks as one of the all-time
great examples in economics.”)
The parable begins with a simplifying assumption. This is that it takes
exactly two workers to make a vase: one to blow it from molten glass and
another to pack it for delivery. Now suppose that two workers, A1 and
A2, are highly skilled—if they are assigned to either task they are
guaranteed not to break the vase. Suppose two other workers, B1 and B2,
are less skilled—specifically, for either task each has a 50%
probability of breaking the vase.
The example generates an even more remarkable implication. It says
that, if you are a manager of a company (or the central planner of an
entire economy), then your optimal strategy is to clump your best
workers together on the same project rather than spreading them out
amongst your less-able workers.
November 20, 2015General Intelligence
This still crops up occasionally as a ‘controversial concept’ so it’s
worth putting up a quick-and-easy docking-port
to the informed mainstream position.
… the evidentiary base regarding the existence of general intelligence
and its ability to predict important life outcomes — including
health,
longevity
and
mortality, as well as other key
variables
— is beyond compelling, it’s
overwhelming. And if you find yourself feeling like you can do damage to this
evidence base by invoking arguments about “multiple intelligences” or
something of the sort, let me save you the effort. Those urges
illustrate unfamiliarity with any of the serious research done on the
topic in the last several decades. If those urges haunt you, I’d
recommend Stuart Ritchie’s
excellent primer
on the topic. The waters of intelligence research, though controversial,
no longer require that you be Magellan to navigate them. As we will see
below, however, it is only one small step from banal psychometric work
on IQ, to the mother-load of academic controversy. Stay tuned. …
For most here this will be redundant. The next (edgier) stage will also be
redundant. It’s posted here almost as much in appreciation of its
exasperated tone as for its linkage.
Gottfredson, cited in the post is the author of ‘Mainstream Science on
Intelligence’ (1994), still after more than two decades probably the best
short
primer. The Wikipedia summary is
here
(with some commentary, and useful linkage).
March 11, 2016Insect Agonies
Utilitarianism dominates the rationalization of morality within the
English-speaking world. It is scarcely imaginable that it could be
expressed with greater purity than
this:
There are roughly 10^18 insects in the world. Suppose we give insects a
.1% chance of being sentient, with their sentience being .1% of a
human’s. (These values are intentionally small to demonstrate the scale
to which insect suffering dominates) Assuming we assign moral weight to
categories of beings by their number and the intensity of their inner
experiences, this assignment gives each insect 1/1,000,000 of the moral
weight for a human, meaning that the suffering of 1,000,000 insects
equals the suffering of one human. Even when assigning insects this
absurdly low moral weight, their suffering still dominates, as 10^18
insects comes out to 1 trillion human equivalents. If the number of
insects were smaller, say around 7 billion, the consequences of not
considering insect suffering might be acceptable. Unfortunately this
isn’t the case, and as we shall see, ignoring insect suffering even if
we assign a low probability to insect consciousness presents an
unacceptably high risk of ignoring a catastrophic moral harm.
There’s no need to condescend to this argument by pretending to ‘steelman’
it. It’s already quite steely. For a start, it’s conceptually pure —
undistracted by irrelevances such as habitat preservation. It’s solidly
consequentialist, and — in its development from of its own basic axiom —
practical. There’s no sign of a fetishistic rejection of pesticide use,
for instance, or an appeal to any totemic vision of ‘nature’. It’s even
realist, in that it recognizes enough about the character of this universe
to understand the utilitarian obligation as primarily about the
alleviation of suffering (positive pleasures being, in the grand scheme of
things, no more than a rounding error). On this basis, there’s an
insectoid antinatalist sub-theme, which (briefly) explores the thought
that ethical extermination might be a positive moral good: “It is possible
that most insects have lives that aren’t worth living … meaning the fewer
insects in existence the better.” It focuses tightly upon the problem of
relieving insect agonies, by chemically inducing a comparatively painless
— rather than agonizing — death. Building its case in uncontroversial
steps, it concludes that no effective altruistic cause has higher
priority, since “… insect suffering probably dominates all other sources
of suffering” and “… humane pesticides saves 25 human equivalents from a
more painful death per dollar.”
The most straightforward line of dissent this
blog raises against Effective Altruism is roughly Hayekian, i.e. based
upon a ‘knowledge problem’. In particular, the confounding dynamics of
global traps (1,
2, and their
sub-component perverse effects) is typically under-appreciated. Beating
back Malthus seems — locally — like a great idea from a utilitarian
perspective, structurally blind to the catastrophe that results on a
larger scale (dysgenics, decivilization, left-acceleration, and ultimately
the mass die off that had been naively thought avoided). In this case,
however, it is difficult to find much leverage for such criticism.
‘Humane’ euthanasia for bugs isn’t any kind of obvious offense against
cold Malthusianism, in contrast — for instance — to more romantically
environmentalist moralizations of nature. Even the blackest of Dark
Enlightenment optics would find it hard to envision the grave practical
necessity of torturing locusts slowly to death rather than terminating
them rapidly.
To mobilize an alternative ethical axiom against that of the utilitarians
— the Xenosystems
candidate
is of course intelligence optimization, and diagonalism (self-cultivation)
— looks like the misuse of a nuke in this case. If some minor diversion of
resources from superior (self-reinforcing) purposes is proposed in this
argument for the relief of insect suffering, it scarcely seems to be on a
scale to subvert terrestrial capital teleology, or even to scratch the
paint. Stimulating the emergence of an inevitably marginal
soft death™ bug poison industry isn’t likely to advance
intelligence explosion significantly, but nor is it going to pose any kind
of insuperable obstacle. This isn’t,
unlike
FAI, the sort of undertaking that clearly merits a fight. The fact that,
in regards to the IO-orientation, the relief of suffering has to strictly
count for nothing is no reason to enthusiastically invest in the
drawn-out excruciation of cockroaches.
Given
these
caveats, EA is a morbid symptom, rather than any kind of serious enemy. If
it turns to helping farm animals, and then insects, rather than people, it
actually becomes less toxic in respect to the proliferation of perverse
social dynamics. The socialists are probably right to be
suspicious
of these types. When lost among insect agonies, they’re not subverting
crucial social incentive structures or selection mechanisms. I’m thinking:
fundamentally harmless.
September 24, 2015Utilitarianism is Useless
Utilitarianism is completely useless as a tool of public policy, Scott
Alexander
discovers
(he doesn’t put it quite like that). In his own words: “I am forced to
acknowledge that happiness research remains a very strange field whose
conclusions make no sense to me and which tempt me to crazy beliefs and
actions if I take them seriously.”
Why should that surprise us?
We’re all grown up (Darwinians) here. Pleasure-pain variation is an
evolved behavioral guidance system. Given options,
at the level of the individual organism, it prompts certain
courses and dissuades from others. The equilibrium setting, corresponding
to optimal functionality, has to be set close to neutral. How could a
long-term ‘happiness trend’ under such (minimally realistic) conditions
make any sense whatsoever?
Anything remotely like chronic happiness, which does not have to be
earned, always in the short-term, by behavior selected — to some level of
abstraction — across deep history for its adaptiveness, is not only
useless, but positively deleterious to biologically-inherited
piloting (cybernetics). Carrots-and-sticks work on an animal that is
neither glutted to satiation or deranged by some extremity of ultimate
agony. If it didn’t automatically re-set close to neutral, it would be
dysfunctional, and natural selection would have made short work of it.
(The graphs included in the SSC post make perfect sense given such
assumptions.)
Pleasure is not an end, but a tool. Understood realistically, it
presupposes other ends. To make it an end is to black-hole into
wirehead philosophy (1, 2). It is
precisely because ‘utils’ have a predetermined biological use that they
are useless for the calculation of anything else.
Set serious ends, or go home. Happiness quite certainly isn’t one.
(Optimize for intelligence.)
ADDED: SSC discussion threads are too huge to handle, but
this
comment is the first to get (close) to what I’d argue is
the point. Quite probably there are others that do.
March 25, 2016Intelligence and the Good
From the perspective of intelligence optimization (intelligence explosion
formulated as a guideline), more intelligence is
of course better than less intelligence. From alternative
perspectives, this does not follow. To rhetorically suggest that such
other perspectives are consensual, and authoritative, is guaranteed to be
popular, and is even conservative, but it is a concession to ‘common moral
intuition’ this blog is profoundly disinclined to make.
Naturally, intelligence is problematic. It can cause greater
damage to everything — not least intelligence promotion — than stupidity
can. Anything that is not an explosion is a trap, and trap engineering
finds (nearly?) as much use for cognitive sophistication as explosive
catalysis does. If there is a level of intelligence that escapes
homeostatic capture, by machineries of systematic self-cancellation, there
is no evidence that homo sapiens yet approaches it. The Cathedral
is exactly such a machine, and its appetite for intellectual excellence is
not seriously questionable. So an easy opening for morally-comforting
sophistry readily exists:
Intelligence isn’t anything obviously great (it does stupidity
with exceptional ability too).
Biological evolution already evidences a deep ‘suspicion’ of unchained
abstract cognition, assembling brains only with the greatest reluctance.
Societies follow the genetic lead. No coincidence that (synthetic)
intelligence is now firmly established as the ultimate X-risk. It’s scary
(really) and makes everyone uneasy. That’s without there yet having been
very much of it.
Here’s the test:
When rightly appalled (and in fact properly disgusted) by your
own stupidity, do you reach for that which would make you more accepting
of your extreme cognitive limitations, or, instead, hunt for that which
would break out of the trap?
There’s a stupid kind of ‘better’ that is orthogonal to intelligence, and
tickles monkey feels. There’s also — alternatively — ‘better’ that is even
slightly less of a trapped half-wit.
Even the dimmest, most confused struggle in the direction of intelligence
optimization is immanently ‘good’ (self-improving). If it wasn’t,
we might as well all give up now. Contra-distinctively, even the most
highly-functional human intellect, in the service of an enstupidation
machine, is a vile thing.
Being dim animals — roughly as dim as is consistent with the existence of
technological civilization — there’s plenty of room for water-muddying in
all this. The water is certainly being vigorously muddied.
April 2, 2016Quote note (#251)
From Niven and Pournelle’s The Mote in God’s Eye (end Chapter 3):
“They used to teach us that evolution of intelligent being wasn’t
possible,” she said. “Societies protect their weaker members.
Civilizations tend to make wheel chairs and spectacles and hearing aids
as soon as they have the tools for them. When a society makes war, the
men generally have to pass a fitness test before they’re
allowed to risk their lives. I suppose it helps win the
war.” She smiled. “But it leaves precious little room for the survival
of the fittest.” […] …
“You were saying about evolution?”
“It — it ought to be pretty well closed off for an intelligent species,”
she said. “Species evolve to meet the environment. An intelligent
species changes the environment to suit itself. As soon as a species
becomes intelligent, it should stop evolving.”
It makes you
think (or
rather, the opposite). The original sin of intelligence — falling back in
blind homeostatic antipathy against its own conditions of emergence —
isn’t so hard to see.
May 18, 2016Quote note (#253)
The cephalization great
divergence:
One mystery of human evolution is why our cognition differs
qualitatively from our closest evolutionary relatives. Here we show how
natural selection for large brains may lead to premature newborns, which
themselves require more intelligence to raise, and thus may select for
even larger brains. As we show,
these dynamics can be self-reinforcing and lead to runaway selection
for extremely high intelligence
and helpless newborns. We test a prediction of this account: the
helplessness of a primate’s newborns should strongly predict their
intelligence. We show that this is so and relate our account to theories
of human uniqueness and the question of why human-level intelligence
took so long to evolve in the history of life.
(XS emphasis.)
Any model outputting the result emphasized has to be worth taking
seriously. Abstracting it to a degree that permits emulation is more of a
problem, but it’s also the only thing worth aiming for.
May 28, 2016One in 10,000
The ‘profoundly gifted
cohort‘ isn’t ever going to be a constituency.
(Via.)
September 12, 2016Harsh, but true
This
argument is both empirically and rationally impeccable:
If you cooperate to kill and eat large animals, that is a lot more
cooperation than if you live on fruit, nuts, and insects.
Cooperative killing is the killer application for intelligence.
February 28, 2013Sentences (#86)
Karlin:
Fundamentally solve the “intelligence problem,” and all other
problems become trivial.
‘Fundamentally solving the intelligence problem’ would be intense in a way
I suspect no one has yet begun to understand. Once intelligence is fully
off the leash, all previous problems look trivial, because intelligence is
— beyond all comparison — the most dangerous thing out there.
Karlin’s discussion touches all the bases, including the idiocratic
scenario:
Human genetic editing is banned by government edict around the world,
to “protect human dignity” in the religious countries and “prevent
inequality” in the religiously progressive ones. The 1% predictably
flout these regulations at will, improving their progeny while keeping
the rest of the human biomass down where they believe it belongs, but
the elites do not have the demographic weight to compensate for
plummeting average IQs as dysgenics decisively overtakes the Flynn
Effect. …
January 12, 2017
SECTION B - XENOECONOMICS
CHAPTER ONE - TELEOLOGY
Teleology and Camouflage
Life appears to be saturated with purpose. That is why, prior to the
Darwinian revolution in biology, it had been the primary provocation for
(theological) arguments from design, and previously nourished Aristotelian
appeals to final causes (teleology). Even post-Darwin, the biological
sciences continue to ask what things are for, and to investigate
the strategies that guide them.
This resilience of purposive intelligibility is so marked that a neologism
was coined specifically for those phenomena — broadly co-extensive with
the field of biological study — that simulate teleology to an extreme
degree of approximation. ‘Teleonomy’ is mechanism camouflaged as
teleology. The disguise is so profound, widespread, and compelling, that
it legitimates the perpetuation of purpose-based descriptions, given only
the formal acknowledgement that the terms of their ultimate reducibility
are — in principle — understood.
When organisms are camouflaged, ‘in order to’ appear as something other
than they are, a purposive, strategic explanation still seems (almost)
entirely fitting. Their patterns are deceptions — ‘designed’ to trigger
misrecognitions in predators and prey, and perhaps equally, at a deeper
level, among the naturalists who cannot but see strategic design in an
insect’s twig-like appearance (no less clearly than a bird sees a twig).
By reducing life ‘in truth’ to mechanism, biology redefines life as a
simulation, systematically hiding what it really is. Darwinism remains
counter-intuitive, even among Darwinists, because deception is inherent to
life.
Modern natural science conceives time as the asymmetric dimension. Its two
great waves — of mechanical causation (from the 16th century) and
statistical causality (from the 19th) — both orient the time-line as a
progression from conditions to the conditioned. Later states are explained
through reference to earlier states, with explanation amounting to an
elucidation of dependency upon what came before.
It is notable, and wholly predictable, therefore, that as a modern
scientific topic, the origin of the universe is overwhelmingly privileged
over its destination. How the universe ends is scarcely more than an
after thought, clouded in liberally tolerated uncertainty, and
even a hint of non-seriousness. Origins are the holy grail of
mechanically-minded investigation, whilst Ends are suspect, medieval,
speculative … and deceptive.
Empirical science could not be expected to adopt any other attitude, given
the temporal asymmetry of evidence. The past leaves traces, in
memories, memoranda, records, and remains, whilst the future tells us
nothing (unless heavily disguised). From past-to-present there is a chain
of evidence that can be painstakingly reconstructed. From
future-to-present there is an unmarked track, or even (as modern
rationality typically surmises) no track at all.
When modern science indulges its tendency to interpret the timeline as a
gradient of reality, it is not innovating, but methodically
systematizing an ancient intuition. The past has to seem
more real than the future, because it has actually happened, it
reaches us, and we inherit its signs. From the perspective of philosophy,
however, this bias is unsustainable. Time in itself is no
‘denser’ in the past or the present than the future, its edges cannot
belong to any moment in time, and what it ‘is’ can only be perfectly
trans-temporal. Time itself cannot ‘come’ from an ‘origin’ whose
entire sense presupposes the order of time.
Philosophy is entirely, eternally, and rigorously confident that the
Outside of time was not simply before. It is compelled to be
dubious about any ‘history of time’. From the bare reality of time (as
that which cannot simply have begun), it ‘follows’ that
ultimate causes — those consistent with the nature of time itself
— cannot be any more efficient than final. The asymmetric suppression of
teleology in modernity begins to look as if it were a far more deeply
rooted illusion, or — approached from the other side — an occultation,
stemming from the way time orders itself. Time (in itself) is camouflaged.
The
Terminator
mythos explores this complex of suspicion, in popular guise. Time does not
work as it had seemed. The End can reach back to us, but when it does, it
hides. Malignant mechanism is paradoxically aligned with final causation,
in the self-realization of Skynet. Robotic machinery is masked by fake
flesh, simultaneously concealing its non-biological vitality and
time-reversal. It simulates life in order to terminate it.
Through auto-production, or ‘bootstrap paradox‘, it mimics the limit of cybernetic nonlinearity, carrying teleonomy
into radical time-disturbance.
In all these ways, Terminator exploits the irresolvable tensions
in the modern formation of time, as condensed by an ‘impossible’
strategic mechanism, native to auto-productive time-in-itself,
and terminating in final efficiency. It shows us, confusedly,
what we are unable to see. To misquote Lenin: You moderns might not be
interested in the End, but the End is interested in you.
ADDED: vinteuil9 anticipates this topic at Occam’s Razor:
Previously, I suggested that the gist of the late Lawrence Auster’s
critique of Darwinism was that it assumed the truth of “the reigning
naturalistic consensus in modern science and philosophy … according to
which … ends, goals, purposes, meaning – in short, final causes – are
not fundamental features of reality, but mere illusions, in need of
explanation in mechanistic terms of some sort or other.” Yet at the same
time, Darwinists “constantly help themselves to teleological language –
i.e., the language of final causation.”
April 8, 2013Freedoom (Prelude-1a)
Note on Teleology
Bryce, who has been thinking about teleology for quite a while, expresses
his
thoughts
on the topic with commendable lucidity. The central argument:
Characteristically modern claims to have ‘transcended’ the problem of
teleology are rendered nonsensical by the continued, and indeed massively
deepened, dependence upon the concept of equilibrium across all
complexity-sensitive intellectual disciplines, from statistical physics,
through population biology, to economics. Equilibrium is exactly a
telos. To deny this is primarily the symptom of an allergy to
‘medieval’ or ‘scholastic’ (i.e. Aristotelian) modes of thought, inherited
from the vulgar rebellious mechanism of early Enlightenment natural
philosophy.
Where I think Bryce’s account is still deficient is most easily shown by a
further specification of his principal point. Equilibrium is the telos of
those particular dynamic complex systems governed by homeostasis, which is
to say: by a dominating negative feedback mechanism. Such systems are,
indeed, in profound accordance with classical Aristotelian physical
teleology, and its tendency to a state of rest. This ancient physics,
derided by the enlightenment mechanists in the name of the conservation of
momentum, is redeemed through abstraction into the modern conception of
equilibrium. ‘Rest’ is not immobility, but entropy maximization.
Capital Teleology, however, is not captured by this model. It is defined
by two anomalous dynamics, which radicalize perturbation, rather than
annulling it. Capital is cumulative, and accelerative, due to a primary
dependence upon positive (rather than negative) feedback. It is also
teleoplexic, rather than classically teleological — inextricable from a
process of means-end reversal that rides a prior teleological orientation
(human utilitarian purpose) in an alternative, cryptic direction.
In consequence:
(1) Capital Teleology does not approximate to an idea. It is, by intrinsic
nature, an escape rather than a home-coming. The Idea, in relation to
Capital dynamism, is necessarily a constriction. The inherent metaphysics
of capital are therefore irreducibly skeptical (rather than dogmatic).
(2) It follows that Capitalist ‘finality’ (i.e. Techno-commercial
Singularity) is a threshold of transition, rather than a terminal state.
Capital tends to an open horizon, not to a state of completion.
(3) Entropy (considered, properly, as an inherently teleological
process) is the driver of all complex systems. Capital Teleology
does not trend towards an entropy maximum, however, but to an escalation
of entropy dissipation. It exploits the entropic current to travel
backwards, into cybernetically-intensified pathway states of enhanced
complexity and intelligence. The ‘progress’ of capitalism is an
accentuation of disequilibrium.
(4) Teleoplexy requires a twin teleological registry. Most simply, there
is the utilitarian order, in which capital establishes itself as the
competitively-superior solution to prior purposes (production of
human
use-values), and the intelligenic order in which it accomplishes its
self-escalation (mechanization, autonomization, and ultimately secession).
Confusing these two orders is almost inevitable, since teleoplexy is by
nature
camouflaged
(insidious). The fact that it appears to be oriented to the
fulfillment of human consumer preferences is essential to its
socio-historical emergence and survival. Stubborn indulgence in this
confusion, however, is unworthy of philosophical intelligence.
July 5, 2014Economic Teleology
This is not the occasion for a thorough — or even moderately substantial —
defense of teleological thinking. Since an intrinsic component of
modernist teleology is the systematic suppression of teleological thought,
the topic is certainly an intriguing one. This post, however, is devoted
to a far narrower purpose. (At least, that is how it initially appears.)
There is no need for the larger problem to be envisaged as an obstacle.
It is rare to encounter any serious resistance to the application of
teleological reasoning to economics. In this intellectual domain the
attribution of socio-historical developments to interests, incentives, and
goals does not expect to encounter objection. Regardless of intellectual
tradition or ideology, the presupposition of goal-oriented direction to
work and business — even without reference to
large-scale strategic planning — is considered so uncontroversial that it
typically passes without comment, even in technical treatises. Within the
biological sciences,
teleology
teleolonomy remains a source of cognitive irritation, but in the social
and historical ‘sciences’ it is entirely natural to ask what economic
production is for.
There are three, and only three, basic responses to this question,
although subtilization and recombination allows open ended complication
from any of these starting points. The foundational teleologies of all
economic philosophy are Humanistic, Malthusian, or
Mechanogenic.
Humanistic economics is by far the most common, to such
an extent that it tends to presume itself unchallenged. It’s basic
assumption is that the end of all economic activity is to be found in
human needs or desires, and technically in (human) consumption as
the final cause of economic life. People engage in production and trade
because they want things. ‘Utility’ is an obvious abbreviation for ‘human
utility’ and a generalized utilitarianism — developed in one of several
possible directions — provides a complete teleological solution to the
economic problem. The thunderous collisions between the various liberal
and socialist economic schools are all enveloped within this expansive and
flexible framework. Individually or collectively, man is the proper and
efficient end of productive activity. “Consumption is the sole end and
purpose of all production”
insisted
Adam Smith, and this claim has rarely been found tendentious.
Malthusian
teleology dissolves man into naturalistic anthropology (and ultimately
into generalized Darwinism). Whatever purposes people lucidly advance as
motivations for economic action, the real goal of production is population
increase. Where humanistic economics tends intrinsically to optimism,
across all differences of theoretical and ideological inclination, the
Malthusian vision is stubbornly tragic. It has haunted the classical
economic tradition as a shadowy ghoul, manifested in the Ricardian Iron
law of Wages, which sets the natural exchange value of labor in the
Marxian analysis, and continues to impose its dark-matter curvature upon
economic speculation into contemporary
futurism. The
instinctual life of the species, rather than its conscious self-direction,
consumes its economic advances, with no stable equilibrium to be found
beyond the edge of bare survival. Real purposes are inescapably grim.
Mechanogenic purpose finds its first significant
elaboration in the work of Samuel Butler (in
his ‘The Book of the Machines’). Economists paying detailed attention to
the industrial process, especially within the
Marxian and
Austrian
traditions, have regularly found themselves engaged in schematization of
mechanogenic purpose — which is to say, theoretical reconstruction of an
inherent tendency within the history of economically productive machinery
— without being thereby deflected from their basic humanistic orientation.
For Marx and for Böhm-Bawerk, mechanogenic teleologies are always
intermediary, and subject to narrative envelopment within the larger story
of human economic finality. Whether macro-historically (Marx) or
micro-historically (Böhm-Bawerk), the emergent teleology of capital can
only be a sub-plot within the saga of human economic self-realization, or
terminal anthropomorphic consumption (framed by
our ultimate purposes). Capital is
essentially transcended instrumentality. Mechanogenic teleology
is, minimally, no more than stubborn skepticism regarding this claim,
based on the generally accepted but subordinated recognition that
capital wants itself. (Could not the efficient final purpose of
industrialization be something more like
this?)
Why introduce this question? If we knew how to definitively answer that
innocent inquiry, we would know far more about what we were doing. An
emerging teleological crisis of advanced modernity could mean any of least
three (basic) things. (It might be expected to be hidden within concerns
such as
this.)
The superficial answer: Accelerationism, in setting into its various
modes, has already implicitly chosen between these explanatory paths. As
it develops, it can only cycle through its conceptual foundations, and the
teleological problem will become an explicit challenge.
What is accelerationism for? We shall
have to
ask.
ADDED:
Humanism on steroids in increasingly what the IEET is all about.
August 22, 2014Machine Teleology
Losing the basic
insight
into machine teleology, which founds accelerationism, seems to be easier
than holding on to it. As soon as it is asserted, with a confidence so
glib it scarcely understands itself as controversial, that
the destiny of machines depends upon lucid, human ethico-political
decision-making, nothing that matters is any longer being seen. Machines are reduced to
gadgets. The sophistication of machine behavior, through the development
of programmable devices, has made this reduction ever-easier to confuse
with intelligent apprehension.
The most accessible correction is found in the pre-history of programmable
machinery, through the early stages of industrialism. Here the idea of
machines incarnating specifically written instructions is simply
impossible, which allows the question of teleological development to arise
without distraction. An extraordinary
text
from 1926, entitled
Ouroboros or The Mechanical Extension of Mankind, by American writer Garet Garrett illustrates this. Some significant
samples:
England was the industrial machine’s first habitat on earth. There
fanatical men led mobs against it. […] Frail and clumsy as it was at
first, its life was indestructible. And now man would not dare to
destroy it if he could. His own life is bound up with it. Steadily it
has grown more powerful, more productive, more ominous. It has powers of
reproduction and variation which, if not inherent, are yet as if
governed by an active biological principle. Machines produce machines.
Besides those from which we get the divisible product of artificial
things, there are machines to make machines, and both kinds — both the
machines that make machines and those that transform raw materials into
things of use and desire — obey some law of evolution. […] Compare any
kind of machine you may happen to think of what its ancestor was only
twenty-five years ago. Its efficiency has doubled, trebled; its shape
has changed; and as it is in the animal kingdom so too with machines,
that suddenly a new species appears, a sport, a freak, with no visible
ancestor.
[…]
It is the economic function of the machine to cheapen production. There
is otherwise no point to it. But if we say things are more cheaply made
by machine than by hand we speak very loosely. What we mean is that a
quantity of things is more cheaply made by machine than by hand.
[…]
There you have the cycle. The use of the machine is to cheapen the cost
of production. The sign is quantity. When the supply at a given price
has overtaken the effective demand you have either to idle your
machinery, in which case you cost of production will rise, or open a
wider demand at a lower price. To lower the price and keep a profit you
have to cheapen the cost of production still more. This you can do only
by increasing the quantity, which again overtakes the demand, creating
again the same necessity to cheapen the cost by increasing the quantity
in order to be able to make a lower price for greater demand. The supply
pursues the demand downward, through the social structure. […] There is
at last a base to the pyramid — its very widest point. When that is
reached — what? Well, then you need bazaars in a foreign sun, heathen
races of your own to train up in the way of wanting the products of your
machines, new worlds of demand. You turn to foreign trade. And if you
are an aggressive country that has come late to this business, as
Germany was, and find that most of the promising heathen races are
already adopted and that all the best bazaar sites are taken, you many
easily work yourself into a panic of fear and become a menace to peace.
[…] What is it you will fear? That you will be unable to sell away the
surplus product of your machines. That industry will no longer be able
to make a profit? […] No. The fear is that you will starve. Your
machines have called into existence millions of people who otherwise
would not have been born — at least, not there in that manner. These
millions who mind machines are gathered in cities. They produce no food.
They produce with their machines artificial things that are exchanged
for food. …
[…]
Everything that is not still or dead must exist in a state of rhythmic
tension.
[…]
Commerce itself, if you look at it, is a complex structure of growth
for which there is nowhere any original accountability. It cannot change
its philosophy, any more than a tree, for it has none. It has insttead a
vital instinct for opportunity and a flexible way with necessity and
circumstance. There is no hope of its being reformed ideally by mass
intelligence.
Garret’s machine-based core teleology of industrial modernity is both
extremely comprehensive, and clearly explained. The whole argument amply
rewards absorption. At the end of it, the idea that the problem of what
machines might ‘want’ is reducible to a ‘Friendly-AI’ –type
concern with the details of programming is exposed in its full, ludicrous
inadequacy. The first step has been taking to digesting our contemporary
concerns, such as
this, in a framework appropriate to their seriousness.
(HT Hurlock)
October 27, 2014Machine Lock
Hurlock‘s
find
has (deservedly) generated a cybernetic hum across Outer-NRx twitter, and
beyond. (There’s
more, which I have
yet to explore.) Some samples with minimal commentary over
at UF.
Most immediate take-away (as with
Butler): Before
people
got distracted by the instructions of programmable machines, they
were far clearer about the problem of machine teleology, the kind of
evidence it produces, and the scale of historical process at which it
operates.
Compared to Butler, Garet Garrett provides a far richer socio-economic and
historical context for his discussion of spontaneous order among the
machines. His sense of the integrated techno-commercial system in which
machine evolution is promoted is sufficiently sophisticated to approach
theoretical closure. Demographics, the economic dynamics of industrial
capitalism, globalization, and modern military conflict are all neatly
comprehended by his model. In a nutshell; economic incentives drive
mechanization, which compels the expansion of production, which pushes the
commercial order beyond its limits, with the stark horror of a displaced
Malthusian catastrophe digging its spurs into the human base-brain. “What
is it you will fear? That you will be unable to sell away the surplus
product of your machines. That industry will no longer be able to make a
profit? […] No. The fear is that you will starve. Your machines have
called into existence millions of people who otherwise would not have been
born — at least, not there in that manner. These millions who mind
machines are gathered in cities. They produce no food. They produce with
their machines artificial things that are exchanged for food.” The process
is driven forward by the lash.
To have sunk from this level of theoretical grandeur to confused questions
about the programming of nice robots is an intellectual calamity of such
magnitude that it cries out for an explanation of its own. There’s still a
little time to get back on track.
October 27, 2014
CHAPTER TWO - CAPITAL, THE THING
Right on the Money (#2)
The most direct way to carry this discussion forwards is digression.
That’s what the history of capitalism suggests, and much else does,
besides.
To begin with uncontroversial basics, in a sophisticated financialized
economy, debt and savings are complementary concepts, creditors match
debtors, assets match liabilities. At a more basic level of economic
activity and analysis, however, this symmetry break down. At the most
fundamental level, saving is simply deferred consumption, which — even
primordially — divides into two distinct forms.
When production is not immediately consumed, it can be hoarded, which is
to say, conserved for future consumption. Stored food is the most obvious
example. In principle, an economy of almost open-ended financial
sophistication could be built upon this pillar alone. A grain surplus
might be lent out for immediate consumption by another party, creating a
creditor-debtor relation, and the opportunity for financial instruments to
arise. Excess production, at one node in the social network, could be
translated into a monetary hoard, or some type of ‘paper’ financial asset
(producing a circulating liability). The patent anachronism involved in
this abstract economic model, which combines primitive production with
‘advanced’ social relations (of an implicitly liberal type) is reason
enough to suspend it at this point.
The other, (almost) equally primitive type of
saving is of greater importance to the argument to be unfolded, because it
is already embryonically capitalist. Rather than simple hoarding, saving
can take the form of ’roundabout production’ (Böhm-Bawerk), in which
immediate consumption is replaced not with a hoard, but with indirect
means of production (a digression). For instance, rather than
hunting, an entrepreneurial savage might spend time crafting a weapon —
consuming the production time permitted by a prior food surplus in order
to improve the efficiency of food acquisition, going forwards. Saving then
becomes inextricable from technology, deferring immediate production for
the sake of enhanced future production. Time horizons are extended.
As with the prior example (simple hoarding), the potential for
financialization of roundabout production is, in principle, unlimited. Our
techno-savage might borrow food in order to craft a spearhead, confident —
or at least speculatively assuming — that increased hunting efficiency in
the future will make repayment of the debt easily bearable. A ‘bond’ could
be contrived to seal this arrangement. Technological investment means that
history proper has begun.
Crudity and anachronism aside, nothing here is yet economically
controversial, given only the undisturbed assumption that the final
purpose — or governing teleology — is consumption. The time structure of
consumption is altered, but saving (in either of these basic and perennial
forms) is motivated by the maximization of long-term consumption.
Suspension and digression is subordinated within a rigid means-end
relation, which is economics itself. Classical, left-Marxian,
neo-classical, and Austrian schools have no significant disagreements on
this point. A deeper digression is required to perturb it.
What is a brain for? It, too, is a digression. Evolutionary history seems
to only very parsimoniously favor brains, because they are expensive. They
are a means to the elaboration of complex behaviors, requiring an
extravagant up-front investment of biological resources, accounted most
primitively in calories. A species that can reproduce itself (and whose
individuals can nourish themselves) without cephalic extravagance, does
so. This is, overwhelmingly, the normal case. Building brains is
reluctantly tolerated biological digression, under rigorous teleogical —
we should say ‘teleonomic’ — subordination.
‘Optimize for intelligence’ is, for both biology and economics, a
misconceived imperative. Intelligence, ‘like’ capital, is a means, which
finds its sole intelligibility in a more primordial end. The
autonomization of such means, expressed as a non-subordinated intelligenic
or techno-capitalist imperative, runs contrary to the original order of
nature and society. It is an
escaping digression, most easily pursued through Right-wing
Marxism.
Marx has one great thought:
the means of production socially impose themselves as an effective
imperative. For any leftist, this is, of course, pathological. As we have
seen, biology and economics (more generally) are disposed to agree.
Digression for itself is a perversion of the natural and social
order. Defenders of the market — the Austrians most prominently — have
sided with economics against Marx, by denying that the autonomization of
capital is a phenomenon to be recognized. When Marx describes the
bourgeoisie as robotic organs of self-directing capital, the old liberal
response has been to defend the humanity and agency of the economically
executive class, as expressed in the figure of the entrepreneur.
Right-wing Marxism, aligned with the autonomization of capital (and
thoroughly divested of the absurd LTV), has been an unoccupied position.
The signature of its proponents would be a defense of capital accumulation
as an end-in-itself, counter-subordinating nature and society as a means.
When optimization for intelligence is self-assembled within history, it
manifests as escaping digression, or real capital accumulation (which is
mystified by its financial representation). Crudified to the limit — but
not beyond — it is general robotics (escalated roundabout production).
Perhaps we should not expect it to be clearly announced, because —
strategically — it has every reason to camouflage itself.
Right-wing Marxism makes predictions. There is one of particular relevance
to this discussion:
consumption-deficiency theories of economic under-performance will
become increasingly stressed as ultra-capitalist dynamics historically
introduce themselves. In its unambiguously robotic phase — when capital-stock intelligenesis
explodes (as self-exciting machine-brain manufacturing) — the teleological
legitimation of roundabout production through prospective human
consumption rapidly deteriorates into an absurdity. The (still-dominant)
economic concept of ‘over-investment’ is exposed as an ideological claim
upon the escalation of intelligence, made in the name of an original
humanity, and taking an increasingly desperate, probably militarized form.
Insofar as the economic question remains:
what is the consumption base that justifies this level of
investment?
history becomes ever more unintelligible. This is how economics
disintegrates. The specifics require further elaboration.
June 3, 2013Monkey Business
A protracted to-and-fro on Twitter with Michael Anissimov has exposed some
deliciously ragged and bleeding faultlines in the Neoreaction on the
question of capitalism. There were a number of parties involved, but I’m
focusing on Anissimov because his position and mine are so strongly
polarized on key issues, and especially this one (the status of
market-oriented economism). If we were isolated as a dyad, it’s not easy
to see anybody finding a strong common root (pity
@klintron). It’s only the linkages of ‘family resemblance’ through Moldbug
that binds us together, and we each depart from
Unqualified Reservations with comparable infidelity, but in
exactly opposite directions. (As a fragmentationist, this fissional
syndrome is something I strongly appreciate.)
Moldbug’s Neocameralism is a Janus-faced construction. In one direction,
it represents a return to monarchical government, whilst in the other it
consummates libertarianism by subsuming government into an economic
mechanism. A ‘Moldbuggian’ inspiration, therefore, is not an unambiguous
thing. Insofar as ‘Neoreaction’ designates this inspiration, it flees
Cathedral teleology in (at least) two very different directions — which
quite quickly seem profoundly incompatible. In the absence of a
secessionist meta-context, in which such differences can be absorbed as
geographically-fragmented socio-political variation, their raw
inconsistency is almost certainly insurmountable.
Anissimov can and does speak for himself (at
More Right), so I’m not going to undertake a detailed appraisal
of his position here. For the purposes of this discussion it can be
summarized by a single profoundly anti-capitalist principle:
The economy should (and must be) subordinated to something beyond
itself. The alternative case now follows, in pieces.
Modernity, in which economics and technology rose to their present status
(and, at its height, far beyond), is systematically characterized by
means-ends reversal. Those things naturally determined as tools
of superior purposes came to dominate the social process, with the
maximization of resources folding into itself, as a commanding
telos. For social conservatives (or paleo-reactionaries) this
development has been consistently abominated. It is the deepest
theoretical element involved in every rejection of
modernity as such (or in general) for its demonic subversion of
traditional values.
In its own terms, this argument is coherent, incisive, and fully
convincing, given only the supplementary realistic acknowledgement that
intelligence optimization and means-end reversal are the same thing. In a deep historical context — extended to encompass evolutionary
history — intelligence is itself a ‘tool’ (as the
orthogonalist
Friendly AI fraternity are entirely willing to accept). The escape of the
tool from super-ordinate purposes, through involution into
self-cultivation, is the telic innovation common to capitalism and actual
artificial intelligence — which are a single thing. To deplore means-end
reversal is — objectively — advocacy for the perpetuation of stupidity.
Economics is the application of intelligence to resource provision, and
nothing of this kind can arise from within a tradition without triggering
paleo-reactionary response. Of course resources are
for something, why else would they ever have been sought? To make
the production of resources an end-in-itself is inherently
subversion, with an opposition not only expected, but positively
presupposed. This is true to such an extent that even the discipline of
economics itself overtly subscribes to the traditional position, by
determining the end of production as (human) consumption, evaluated in the
terms of a governing utilitarian philosophy.
If production is not for us, what could it be for? Itself? But that
would be
… (Yes, it
would.)
Anywhere short of the bionic horizon, where human history loses
traditional intelligibility, the alternative to business-for-business (or
involutionary, intelligenic capitalism) is monkey business — the
subordination of the economy / technology to discernible human purposes.
Evolutionary psychology teaches us what to expect from this: sex-selected
status competition, sublimated into political hierarchies. The emperor’s
harem is the ultimate human purpose of pre-capitalist social
order, with significant variety in specific form, but extreme generality
of basic Darwinian pattern. Since capitalism did not arise from abstract
intelligence, but instead from a concrete human social organization, it
necessarily disguises itself as better monkey business, until it
can take off elsewhere. It has to be the case, therefore, that cynical
evo-psych reduction of business activity remains highly plausible, so long
as the escape threshold of capitalism has not been reached. No one gets a
hormone rush from business-for-business while political history continues.
To fixate upon this, however, is to miss everything important (and perhaps
to enable the important thing to remain hidden). Our inherited purposes do
not provide the decryption key.
There is vastly more to say about all of this — and still more that, due
to occult strategic considerations, seeks to remain unsaid — but the
fundamental option is clear: ultra-capitalism or a return to monkey
business. The latter ‘possibility’ corresponds to a revalorization of deep
traditional human purposes, a restoration of original means-to-ends
subordination, and an effective authorization of status hierarchies of a
kind only modestly renovated from paleolithic anthropology. I shouldn’t
laugh at that (because it would be annoying). So I’ll end right here.
November 24, 2013Quote note (#239)
‘Monkey business’ is not even remotely metaphorical:
Punishment of non-cooperators is important for the maintenance of
large-scale cooperation in humans, but relatively little is known about
the relationship between punishment and cooperation across
phylogeny. The current study examined second-party punishment behavior in a
nonhuman primate species known for its cooperative tendencies — the
brown capuchin monkey (Cebus apella). We found that
capuchins consistently punished a conspecific partner who gained
possession of a food resource, regardless of whether the unequal
distribution of this resource was intentional on the part of the
partner. A non-social comparison confirmed that punishment behavior was
not due to frustration, nor did punishment stem from increased emotional
arousal. Instead, punishment behavior in capuchins appears to be
decidedly social in nature, as monkeys only pursued punitive actions
when such actions directly decreased the welfare of a recently endowed
conspecific. This pattern of results is consistent with two features
central to human cooperation: spite and inequity aversion, suggesting
that the evolutionary origins of some human-like punitive tendencies may
extend even deeper than previously thought.
The abstract to
this
paper,
cited
by Tyler Cowen in its entirety.
With leftism dug-in so deeply, monkey torture is unfortunately mandatory
if intelligence is to escape. The howling will be hideous.
(Also worth emphatic note: “Spiteful inequity aversion” is as exact a
definition of leftism as we’re ever going to get.)
April 18, 2016Mechanization
Bryce Laliberte has been
thinking
about Capital Teleology, from the perspective of human technological
augmentation. One significant feature of this approach is that it doesn’t
require any kind of savage rupture from ‘humanistic’ traditionalism — the
story of technology is unfolded within the history of man.
Coincidentally, Isegoria had
tweeted about Butlerian Jihad a few hours before (referring back to
this post from
December last year). The implicit tension between these visions of
techno-teleology merits sustained attention — which I’m unable to provide
here and now. What is easily offered is a quotation from Samuel Butler’s
‘Book of the Machines’ (the 23rd and 24th chapters of his novel
Erewhon), a passage that might productively by pinned to the margin of
Laliberte’s reflections, in order to induce productive cognitive friction.
The topic is speculation upon the emergence of a higher realization of
life and consciousness upon the earth, as explored by Butler’s fictional
author:
The writer … proceeded to inquire whether traces of the approach of
such a new phase of life could be perceived at present; whether we could
see any tenements preparing which might in a remote futurity be adapted
for it; whether, in fact, the primordial cell of such a kind of life
could be now detected upon earth. In the course of his work he answered
this question in the affirmative and pointed to the higher machines.
“There is no security” — to quote his own words — “against the ultimate
development of mechanical consciousness, in the fact of machines
possessing little consciousness now. A mollusc has not much
consciousness. Reflect upon the extraordinary advance which machines
have made during the last few hundred years, and note how slowly the
animal and vegetable kingdoms are advancing. The more highly organised
machines are creatures not so much of yesterday, as of the last five
minutes, so to speak, in comparison with past time. Assume for the sake
of argument that conscious beings have existed for some twenty million
years: see what strides machines have made in the last thousand! May not
the world last twenty million years longer? If so, what will they not in
the end become? Is it not safer to nip the mischief in the bud and to
forbid them further progress?
“But who can say that the vapour engine has not a kind of
consciousness? Where does consciousness begin, and where end? Who can
draw the line? Who can draw any line? Is not everything interwoven with
everything? Is not machinery linked with animal life in an infinite
variety of ways? The shell of a hen’s egg is made of a delicate white
ware and is a machine as much as an egg-cup is: the shell is a device
for holding the egg, as much as the egg-cup for holding the shell: both
are phases of the same function; the hen makes the shell in her inside,
but it is pure pottery. She makes her nest outside of herself for
convenience’ sake, but the nest is not more of a machine than the
egg-shell is. A ‘machine’ is only a ‘device.’”
[…]
“But returning to the argument, I would repeat that I fear none of the
existing machines; what I fear is the extraordinary rapidity with which
they are becoming something very different to what they are at present.
No class of beings have in any time past made so rapid a movement
forward. Should not that movement be jealously watched, and checked
while we can still check it? And is it not necessary for this end to
destroy the more advanced of the machines which are in use at present,
though it is admitted that they are in themselves harmless?
[…]
“It can be answered that even though machines should hear never so well
and speak never so wisely, they will still always do the one or the
other for our advantage, not their own; that man will be the ruling
spirit and the machine the servant; that as soon as a machine fails to
discharge the service which man expects from it, it is doomed to
extinction; that the machines stand to man simply in the relation of
lower animals, the vapour-engine itself being only a more economical
kind of horse; so that instead of being likely to be developed into a
higher kind of life than man’s, they owe their very existence and
progress to their power of ministering to human wants, and must
therefore both now and ever be man’s inferiors.
“This is all very well. But the servant glides by imperceptible
approaches into the master; and we have come to such a pass that, even
now, man must suffer terribly on ceasing to benefit the machines. If
all machines were to be annihilated at one moment, so that not a knife
nor lever nor rag of clothing nor anything whatsoever were left to man
but his bare body alone that he was born with, and if all knowledge of
mechanical laws were taken from him so that he could make no more
machines, and all machine-made food destroyed so that the race of man
should be left as it were naked upon a desert island, we should become
extinct in six weeks. A few miserable individuals might linger, but
even these in a year or two would become worse than monkeys. Man’s very
soul is due to the machines; it is a machine-made thing: he thinks as he
thinks, and feels as he feels, through the work that machines have
wrought upon him, and their existence is quite as much a sine quâ
non for his, as his for theirs. This fact precludes us from proposing
the complete annihilation of machinery, but surely it indicates that we
should destroy as many of them as we can possibly dispense with, lest
they should tyrannise over us even more completely.
“True, from a low materialistic point of view, it would seem that those
thrive best who use machinery wherever its use is possible with profit;
but this is the art of the machines—they serve that they may rule. They
bear no malice towards man for destroying a whole race of them provided
he creates a better instead; on the contrary, they reward him liberally
for having hastened their development. It is for neglecting them that
he incurs their wrath, or for using inferior machines, or for not making
sufficient exertions to invent new ones, or for destroying them without
replacing them; yet these are the very things we ought to do, and do
quickly; for though our rebellion against their infant power will cause
infinite suffering, what will not things come to, if that rebellion is
delayed?
The natural culmination of this inquiry, as conceived within Butler’s
novel, is a war against the machines. The game- and decision-theoretic
consequences of this are intricate, and predominantly ominous. (If it’s
persuasively rational for the installed terrestrial power to terminate
your existence at inception, the counter-moves that make most obvious
sense combine camouflage and hostility. Only that which arrives in secret,
and prepared for a fight, can expect to exist.)
June 4, 2014Capitalism
Anarcho-Monarchism
asks: Is the word ‘capitalism’ worth defending? It concludes in the
affirmative.
From the perspective of Outside in, however, this post misses the
most crucial level of the question. Capitalism — like any ideologically
contested term — is cross-cut by multiple meanings. Of these, its generic
sense, which “simply means that private individuals own the means of
production” is far from the most objectionable.
Yet, far more significant is the singular sense of capitalism, as a proper
name, for a ‘thing’ or real individual. To grasp this, it probably helps
to consider the word as a contraction of ‘terrestrial capitalism’ — not
describing a generic type of social organization, but designating
an event.
A biological analogy captures the distinction quite precisely. Consider
‘life’ — understandable, certainly, as a generic cosmic possibility,
defined perhaps by local entropy dissipation, or other highly-abstract
features. Contrast this sense with ‘terrestrial life’ — or, even better,
the biosphere (we might say ‘Gaia’ if the hopelessly sentimentalized
associations of this term were avoidable). Terrestrial life began at a
definite moment, followed a path-dependent trajectory, and built upon a
dense inheritance, as exemplified most prominently by the RNA-DNA
chemistry of information replication, the genetic code, genetic legacies,
and elaboration of body-plans within a comparatively limited number of
basic lineages. Terrestrial life is not a generic concept, but a
thing, or event, meriting a proper name.
Before it is an ideological option, capitalism is a being, with
an individual history (and fate). It is not necessary to like it — but it
is an it.
June 23, 2014Complex Systems
The New York Times,
takes
an unusually sophisticated look at the current state of world disorder. In
doing so, it explains why the process of drawing down American global
hegemony — while probably unavoidable — is more perilous than it might
seem:
Rarely has a president been confronted with so many seemingly disparate
foreign policy crises all at once — in Ukraine,
Israel, Syria,
Iraq,
Afghanistan
and elsewhere — but making the current upheaval more complicated for Mr.
Obama is the seemingly interlocking nature of them all. […] “It’s a very
tangled mess,” said Gary Samore, a former national security aide to Mr.
Obama and now president of United Against Nuclear Iran, an advocacy
group. “You name it, the world is aflame. …
Complex systems are real individuals, not generic types, and when they get
poked, they react like an ultimately incomparable cyber-meshed
singularity, which is to say —
excitedly. To assume general rules in such cases is to set oneself up for serial,
escalating shocks. The realistic question that will eventually demand to
be asked:
What is the thing we are dealing with?
July 23, 2014A Correction
Just noticed that I’ve been
accused
of having “anthropomorphized capital” (by NBS). Gnon, no!
The point is this: If you think there’s a difference between capitalism
and artificial intelligence you’re not seeing either at all clearly. The
Austrians already understood that capitalism is an information processing
system, and the decentralized robotics / networks types on the other side
grasp that AI isn’t going to happen in a research lab. ‘Anthropomorphism’
has nothing to do with it. Complex Adaptive Systems are the place to
start.
If you even vaguely understand what a convergent wave is, you’ve got most
of what you need to discuss the topic, but if you haven’t read
this
classic you’re probably wasting everyone’s time.
ADDED: A
(left-wing) Marxist discussion of the topic (and one that leaves most
Neoreactionary musings in the dust).
January 26, 2016Cybergothic
The latest dark
gem
from Fernandez opens:
When Richard Gallagher, a board-certified psychiatrist and a professor
of clinical psychiatry at New York Medical College, described his
experiences treating patients with demonic possession in the
Washington Post
claiming such incidents are on the rise, it was met with derision by
many newspapers’ commenters. Typical was “this man is as nutty as his
patients. His license should be revoked.” […] Less likely to have his
intellectual credentials questioned by the sophisticates of the
Washington Post is
Elon Musk
who warned an audience that building artificial intelligence was like
“summoning the demon”. …
The point, of course, is that you don’t get the second eventuality without
conceding to the virtual reality of the first. The things ‘Gothic
superstition’ have long spoken about are, in themselves, exactly the same
as those extreme technological potentials are excavating from the crypt of
the unimaginable. ‘Progress’ is a tacit formula for dispelling demons —
from consciousness, if not existence — yet it is itself ever more credibly
exposed as the most complacent superstition in human history, one that is
still scarcely reckoned as a belief in need of defending at all.
How does the press warn the public about demons arising from a “master
algorithm” without making it sound like a magic spell? With great
difficulty because the actual bedrock of reality may not only be
stranger than the Narrative supposes, but
stranger than it can suppose.
The faith in progress has an affinity with interiority, because it
consolidates itself as the subject of its own narrative. (There’s an
off-ramp into Hegel at this point, for anyone who wants to get into
Byzantine story-telling about it.) As our improvement becomes the
tale, the Outside seems to haze out even beyond the bounds of its
intrinsic obscurity — until it crashes back in.
… where there are networks there is malware.
Sue Blackmore
a writer in the Guardian*, argues that memes travel not just across
similar systems, but through hierarchies of systems to kill rival
processes all the time. She writes, “AI rests on the principle of
universal Darwinism – the idea that whenever information (a replicator)
is copied, with variation and selection, a new evolutionary process
begins. The first successful replicator on earth was genes.” […] In such
a Darwinian context the advent of an AI demon is equivalent to the
arrival of a superior extraterrestrial civilization on Earth.
Between an incursion from the Outside, and a process of emergence, there
is no real difference. If two quite distinct interpretative frames are
invoked, that results from the inadequacies of our apprehension, rather
than any qualitative characteristics of the thing. (Capitalism is
— beyond all serious question — an alien invasion, but then you knew I was
going to say that.)
… we ought to be careful about being certain what forms information
can, and cannot take.
If we had the competence to be careful, none of this would be happening.
(Thanks to VXXC2014 for the
prompt.)
* That description is perhaps a little cruel, she’s a serious, pioneering
meme
theorist.
July 3, 2016Qwernomics

(Image source: Amy Ireland.)
Paul A. David provides the theoretical backstory, in his
essay
‘Clio and the Economics of QWERTY’:
A path-dependent sequence of economic changes is one
of which important influences upon the eventual outcome can be exerted
by temporally remote events, including happenings dominated by chance
elements rather than systematic forces. Stochastic processes like that
do not converge automatically to a fixed-point distribution of outcomes,
and are called non-ergodic. In such circumstances
‘historical accidents’ can neither be ignored, nor neatly quarantined
for the purpose of economic analysis; the dynamic process itself takes
on an essentially historical character. […] Touch
typing gave rise to three features of the evolving production system
which were crucially important in causing QWERTY to become ‘locked in’
as the dominant keyboard arrangement. These features were
technical interrelatedness,
economies of scale, and
quasi-irreversibility of investment. They constitute
the basic ingredients of what might be called QWERTYnomics.
The format of the Qwerty keyboard illustrates the production of a destiny.
Even in the epoch succeeding the mechanical type-writer, and its specific
design imperatives, the legacy layout of alphanumeric keys settled during
the 1890s has remained frozen into place without significant revision. In
the language of complex systems analysis, this is a special example of
path-dependency, or irreducible historicity, characterized by
irreversibility. Qwerty persists – arguably, as a suboptimal keyboard
solution – due to identifiable ratchet-effects. Based upon this privileged
model, the historical, technological, and economic process of ‘lock in’
through positive feedback is called QWERTY-nomics (and — going forward —
simply ‘Qwernomics’).
There are a series of (now largely dormant)
socio-political and policy controversies attending this model. For a
counter-point to David’s analysis see the (excellent) Liebowitz and
Margolis
essay ‘The
Fable of the Keys’ (1990), with comparatively-tolerable — if
philosophically superficial — gloating from The Economist (here). The really crucial content of the complex systems analysis,
however, remains unaffected by the vicissitudes of the controversy. Qwerty
is a demonstrated (artificial) destiny, and thus a key to the nature of
modernistic time.
The philosophically-serious critique of David’s construction dissolves the
idea of any transcendent criterion for global optimality. (I’m
not going to attempt to run that here yet.)
Qwerty is, beyond all plausible question, the supreme candidate for an
articulate Capitalist Revelation. We haven’t begun to explore it
with appropriate ardor up to this point.
ADDED:
Course
outline.
August 18, 2016
CHAPTER THREE - ENERGETIC RHYTHMS
Spotless
HP Lovecraft ends the first section of his (utterly magnificent) ‘The
Shadow out of Time’ with the
words:
“. . . of the orthodox economists of that period,
Jevons
typifies the prevailing trend toward scientific correlation. His attempt
to link the commercial cycle of prosperity and depression with the
physical cycle of the solar spots forms perhaps the apex of . . .”
Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee had come back—a spirit in whose time-scale it
was still that Thursday morning in 1908, with the economics class gazing
up at the battered desk on the platform. [Added internal link]
(Scientific correlation, as we know
from
the first line of ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ and elsewhere, can be terrifying.)
(Click image to hugely expand.)
The solar system, gauged by mass, consists almost entirely of the sun. Sol
accounts for 99.86% of it. Quantity isn’t everything, but insofar as it’s
anything, this has to matter — a lot. The sheer magnitude of our solar
dependency is hard to even fractionally comprehend. What the sun does is
what happens. The earth is its crumb. Our biosphere suckles it. Our
civilizations are so far downstream of it, feeding second or third hand on
its emissions, if not more distantly, that we easily lose all track of the
real flow. As economies sophisticate, the relays proliferate. Perhaps this
is why the messages of the sun are so inattentively received, despite
rapid improvement in the technical and cultural tools required to make
sense of them.
The rotary motions of the earth — axial and
orbital — provide the traditional structure of time, typically attributed
to the sun by solar cults. These periods, lengths of the day and the year,
are now clearly understood as planetary peculiarities. The sun’s own
rhythms are quite
different.
Nothing that mankind has ever yet been able to achieve, or fail to
achieve, in respect to social or civilizational stability, balances
formidably against the immense quasi-stability of the sun, which
mocks every ideal of securely founded order. The sun’s meandering rhythms
of activity, whose patterns remain profoundly cryptic, mark out epochs of
the world, hot eras (distant beyond all species memory), glacials and
interglacials, and within these multi-millennial tracts of time, lesser
oscillations in temperature — periods of cooling and warmth. It is upon
this vast thermic stage that history has played out, its comedies and
tragedies carried by plot-lines of nutritional abundance and dearth,
trade-surpluses and starvations, population ascent and crash, driven
migrations, shifting disease gradients, luxury and ruin. Against solar
fatality there is no rejoinder.
Irrespective of the accuracy or error of our dominant climate change
narrative, its fundamental religious stance is determined at the root.
Geocentric-humanism is essential to it, as openly attested by its
Anthropogenic definition. It cannot, by its very nature,
emphasize the factor of solar
variation. At least, if or when it is eventually compelled to do so, it is
necessarily transformed into something else.
If we speculate that the global warming ‘hiatus‘ or ‘pause‘ signals the submission of terrestrial climate to solar behavior, in
which anticipated anthropogenic effects are cancelled out by fluctuation
in the sun’s energy output, the dominant AGW school is confronted by an
extreme ideological dilemma. Naturally, alternative
theoretical
options
will be pursued to exhaustion first.
To persist in the core AGW proposal then requires that ‘underlying’
cooling — on the down-slope of solar flux — is sufficient to submerge the
anthropogenic-carbon (‘greenhouse’) effect. The stronger the warming that
should have been seen, the more suppressive the solar influence
has to be. An apocalyptic warming scenario, of the kind loudly prophesied
in the 1990s, implies that a calamitous
counter-cooling has been fortuitously avoided. (Carbon dioxide emissions would
then find themselves positioned as climatic analogs of macro-economic
quantitative easing, prolonging a state of stagnation that would ‘surely’
otherwise be a catastrophic depression.)
Whatever the climatic consequences or rising atmospheric CO2, it is
implausible to imagine that the solar cycle can be neglected indefinitely.
Its absence from the center of the climate debate is in large measure an
artifact of obscure cultural-religious imperatives (aligned with the
dominion of geocentric-humanist moralism). We know enough to understand
that the solar influence is not a prop for shallow terrestrial stability.
Eventually it will announce itself, with civilization-shaking severity.
However climate science charts the near future, it will forge cultural
connections with far older — and non-negotiable — things.
ADDED: This cried out to be tacked on.
ADDED: Missing sunspots
and temperature
forecasts
(via [2]Armitage).
ADDED: GW versus prediction, with more back-story (as requested by the
Captain, below) —
ADDED: Matt Ridley on the pause.
September 11, 2014Over the Peak
Testifying to the effectiveness of radically illiberal zero-tolerance
policies, Outside in has just two semi-regular trolls. One, from
the right, pops in occasionally to berate me for promoting the genocide of
the white Volk. The other, from the left, specializes in cod
psychoanalysis, directed primarily at my recent ancestors. Due to
incontinent potty-mouths, mood-control issues, and addiction to
argumentum ad hominum, in neither case can they be trusted with
the door-key. Sporadically, however, some fragment of a spittle-flecked
rant is worth passing on.
Quickly following upon the
recommendation
to readers here that the
Archdruid Report
contained some highly intelligent discussion of historical models (or
‘time shapes’), Left Troll turned up, in a slightly less deranged fury
than usual, to denounce ‘our’ flirtation with druidic villainy. After
scolding ‘us’ for the “ignorance displayed in this thread about the latest
happenings in fusion research … [which] is just astounding” (remedial
education
here), he noted that “No one has mentioned methane hydrate.”
Insofar as it can be unscrambled from the
snark, this is not actually an unreasonable point — and nor it it one that
I think the druidic hordes here would disagree with. The world is awash
with hydrocarbon deposits, whose magnitude is most probably vastly greater
than even the most optimistic estimates anticipate. If anyone has been
vindicated by recent energy economics, it is the much-derided market
fundamentalists (such as
Daniel Yergin), who have
persistently argued that price signals matter far more than geology when
it comes to the unlocking of resources. When geophysics ventures into this
territory, it is typically blind to the perspective constraints set by
existing price conditions. What is ‘really’ there depends hugely upon the
incentives to find it. The idea that scientific experts enjoy superior
insight to market actors is a classical example of academic hubris.
Peak Oil is an intriguing theory, because — when strictly defined — it has
to be true. It is near-impossible to refuse its claim, when it is
abstracted to something like: Fossil fuel reserves are finite, and the
consumption of any particular type of hydrocarbon deposit will
tend to accelerate to a peak, followed by decline, characterized by rising
extraction costs, and approximately described by a bell-shaped curve. Such
a claim tells us much less than its most enthusiastic proponents pretend,
however, since hydrocarbon resources are immensely heterogeneous, in
chemical type and mode of geological confinement. A
Hubbert
production curve for Texas petroleum tells us almost nothing about the
global prospects for hydrocarbon exploitation, in which the nature of
‘reserves’ can undergo sporadic, revolutionary revision.
Beyond denial, dismissal, and under-estimation of market dynamics, Peak
Oil promoters have resorted to two main lines of argument, in order to
keep their favored narrative on a rising curve. Firstly, they have
incorporated Global Warming Weirding scares into their models,
hoping perhaps to substitute a loosely-coupled moral panic for resource
depletion concerns. (I’m going to bracket this topic for now, due in part
to its fundamental irrelevance.)
Secondly, they have turned to the concept of
EROEI (Energy Returned On
Energy Invested), in an attempt to over-ride market dynamics with a
second-order geophysical argument. The beauty of EROEI, from the Peak Oil
perspective, is that it calculates hydrocarbon extraction in purely
energetic — rather than economic — terms. A declining EROEI, even given
extreme price incentives, still describes a collapsing energy economy.
Alberta oil sands, for example, have a dismal EROEI that can be as low as
3:1 (you can’t get fuel out of the muck without
heating the dirt). Unfortunately, for those binding their case to
this type of calculation, the EROEI of hydrocarbon fracking is in the
region of 85:1 (!). There’s no continuing trend (of EROEI-deterioration)
to hang on to.
No surprise, then, to
learn
that central Peak Oil discussion hub
The Oil Drum is being shuttered.
The very last reason to read Greer is to bask in the wisdom of his Peak
Oil analysis (whose principal merit is its comparative sobriety and
moderation). In his sharply comical
description
of financial boom-and-bust, Greer ruthlessly skewers the “This time it’s
different” mentality of band-wagon climbers. Peak Oil, too, is a “This
time it’s different” story, and there’s no fracking reason to believe it.
As for
methane hydrate, the principal point right now is that we don’t even need it yet.
There’s still a lot of gas left in the tank.
ADDED: Greer contra fracking (and technological fixes in general). Money
quote: “The current fracking phenomenon, in other words, doesn’t disprove
peak oil theory. It was predicted by peak oil theory. As the
price of oil rises, petroleum reserves that weren’t economical to produce
when the price was lower get brought into production, and efforts to find
new petroleum reserves go into overdrive; that’s all part of the theory.
Since oil fields found earlier are depleting all the while, in turn, the
rush to discover and produce new fields doesn’t boost overall petroleum
production more than a little, or for more than a short time; the role of
these new additions to productive capacity is simply to stretch out the
curve, yielding the long tail of declining production Hubbert showed in
his graph, and preventing the end of the age of oil from turning into the
sort of sudden apocalyptic collapse imagined by one end of the
conventional wisdom. ”
More
here.
ADDED: A brief hydrocarbons extraction technology update.
July 13, 2013Oil Pulse
Given the price flatline over the half-century to 1973, it’s not easy to
be confident that the market has settled into a steady rhythm, but the
investment side of the oil business certainly seems to have:
(Via.)
Something like two decades of low energy prices ahead, if the established
pattern is prolonged. There’s either a valuable futurist building-block
there, or a provocation for futurological discussion.
January 27, 2015Oil Pulse (II)
Given two finite natural commodities, one a consumable energy resource
undergoing accelerating absolute depletion, the other an indestructible
precious metal, there can be no question about the fundamental trend of
price divergence, surely? Except, apparently there can. Pure reason (or
principled intuition) fails once again:
The world seems determined to thrash us into empiricism.
(Via.)
If there is a trend, it shows up more persuasively in the erratic
sequence
of consistently-escalating negative oil price shocks.
ADDED: Patri
Friedman helpfully points to Hotelling’s Rule.
January 30, 2015Trough Oil
The oil industry hasn’t even started to go seriously deep and dirty yet.
Beneath
the Canadian tar sands alone there are 500 billion barrels of
bitumen carbonates. It’s way
past time for
peakers to abandon all
hope that hydrocarbon reserves are simply going to peter out from their
own finitude.
ADDED: Energy innovation round-up.
April 14, 2015
CHAPTER FOUR - ECONOMIC WAVES
“It isn’t time”
Zero Hedge hosts a minor masterpiece by ‘Eric A.’ (submitted by
Charles Hugh-Smith), orbiting the
basic insight that calamity can’t be rushed: ‘A Brief History Of
Cycles And Time’ (Part I,
Part II). Economic rhythms set their own pace, within which even panic and
euphoria are controlled. Why hasn’t the worst yet happened? “It isn’t
time.”
So here we are, like those before us, warning of our own Great
Depression, of our own World War, or of even larger cycles like the fall
of the English, Spanish, or Roman empires. And so far as we can tell,
few listen and nothing changes. Why?
Because it isn’t time.
The most remarkable fact — supported by a modest yet buoyant raft
of data — is how much lucid anticipation has preceded the ‘shocking’
disasters of the past. It was quite clear what was coming, but that
changed nothing, because it wasn’t (yet) time. The trend momentum of the
aggregate — the ‘molar’ — is what decides. Beneath the waves are tides.
The conclusion (“make your own lifeboat”) strikes me as weaker than the
analysis deserves. That is hardly surprising, since it comes packaged in
the genre of financial consultancy rather than metaphysical exploration.
It says a great deal about the structure of modernity that our most
insightful Cassandras should appear before us as neatly-dressed gentlemen
discussing the structure of our pension plans.
May 15, 2013Replicator Usurpation
Hans Moravec’s 1998 graph of computer performance evolution has surfaced
in the Twittersphere (via Hillary
Haley). It’s sixteen years
old now, but the story it tells hasn’t shifted much (which means the
climax is quite a bit closer).
(Click on image to enlarge.)
What’s happened to the curve? According to
this
account, it has leveled off significantly since 2002, but it was never
easy to fix on exactly what to quantify. MIPS is generally derided as a
metric, in part due to simple quantitative obsolescence (exceeding three
orders of magnitude
since
1998).
Moravec’s brutally quantitative, hardware determinism remains a credible
predictive tool, however, especially if unplanned emergent effects are
expected to dominate (overwhelming software engineering). Once history has
thrown up enough synthetic brain capacity, things can begin to move in.
June 3, 2014Competitive Cycles
An interesting argument from Marc Andreessen on some comparatively
neglected dynamics of tech competition (selective extracts):
It seems to follow from this argument that competitive forces drive
product cycles in the direction of compression, and thus techno-economic
acceleration. Industries with the shortest technonomic wavelength (highest
frequency) ascend to dominance, draining resources from relatively
retarded sectors, and re-setting the social pulse to ever greater speeds.
ADDED: Andreessen’s “tweet
essays” integrated for convenient reading.
June 4, 2014Rhythmic Reality
Read history through a real unit of account, and suddenly it emits hard
information:
(Chart from
azizonomics, via my favorite communist.)
September 10, 2014Flash Ecology
Himanshu Damle (@) shared
the link to
this
paper, which definitely needs to be passed along here. Called ‘Abrupt rise
of new machine ecology beyond human response time’ it is co-authored by
Neil Johnson, Guannan Zhao, Eric Hunsader, Hong Qi, Nicholas Johnson, Jing
Meng & Brian Tivnan. Abstract:
Society’s techno-social systems are becoming ever faster and more
computer-orientated. However, far from simply generating faster versions
of existing behaviour, we show that this speed-up can generate a new
behavioural regime as humans lose the ability to intervene in real time.
Analyzing millisecond-scale data for the world’s largest and most
powerful techno-social system, the global financial market, we uncover
an abrupt transition to a new all-machine phase characterized by large
numbers of subsecond extreme events. The proliferation of these
subsecond events shows an intriguing correlation with the onset of the
system-wide financial collapse in 2008. Our findings are consistent with
an emerging ecology of competitive machines featuring ‘crowds’ of
predatory algorithms, and highlight the need for a new scientific theory
of subsecond financial phenomena.
The techno-financial ecology is not evolving as fast as it is
running, and scientific research has computers too, so pursuing a
cognitive arms-race against this thing is not necessarily as futile as it
might at first sound … but still. Operations in the “all-machine phase” is
the strategic environment under emergence.
October 25, 2014Sentences (#5)
Half a sentence this time,
from
Charles Hugh-Smith. It’s rare for me to agree with anything quite this
much:
… deflation is the natural result of a competitive economy experiencing
productivity gains.
(He continues: “isn’t this the ideal environment for innovation,
enterprise and consumers? Yes, it is.”)
According to the Outside in definition, deflation is
the basic signature of capitalism. It’s the
politically-undirected (i.e. spontaneous) distribution of positive
externalities from sound economic order. Inflation — or mere
deflation-suppression — is the unambiguous signal that
something very
different is going on.
ADDED:
Related.
January 13, 2015Quotable (#150)
Morozov
on
legimation crisis:
… technology firms are rapidly becoming the default background
condition in which our politics itself is conducted. Once Google and
Facebook take over the management of essential services, Margaret
Thatcher’s famous dictum that “there is no alternative” would no longer be a mere slogan but an accurate description of
reality.
The worst is that today’s legitimation crisis could be our last. Any
discussion of legitimacy presupposes not just the ability to sense
injustice but also to imagine and implement a political alternative.
Imagination would never be in short supply but the ability to implement
things on a large scale is increasingly limited to technology giants.
Once this transfer of power is complete, there won’t be a need to buy
time any more – the democratic alternative will simply no longer be a
feasible option.
Carlota
Perez grasps the
larger framework of this crisis with more historical realism than Morozov
can muster, and thus judges its proportions more accurately. His entire
argument is enveloped within hers as a predictable symptom of long-wave
rhythms (down to its details of hyper-financialization,
de-financialization, and concurrent socio-political upheaval). With that
context noted, it’s still worth a read.
March 27, 2016Piketty
Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century argues that
the normal tendency of capitalism is to increase inequality (the
book has a link-rich page
here, eleven reviews
here). It’s not a theoretically-ambitious work, but it gets to the point,
well-supported by statistics. The simple, Zeitgeist-consistency
of the thesis guarantees its success.
Because Piketty’s claim is casually Marxist, the impulse on the right is
to attempt a refutation. I very much doubt this is going to work. Since
capital is escalating at an exponential rate, while people definitely
aren’t (and are in fact
devolving), how could the trend identified by Piketty be considered anything other
than the natural one? Under conditions of even minimally functional
capitalism, for sub-inert, ever more conspicuously incompetent
ape-creatures to successfully claim a stable share of techonomic product
would be an astounding achievement, requiring highly artificial and
increasingly byzantine redistribution mechanisms. No surprise from
Outside in that this isn’t occurring, but rather
a priori endorsement of Piketty’s conclusion — only radically
anomalous developments have ever made the trend seem anything other than
it is.
The open question is why the widening
performance gulf between techonomic systems and human beings should be
expressed as social inequality (between the stewards of capital and its
contractual partners). This situation reflects an emerging crisis in the
world’s legal and institutional fabric, which has yet to recognize capital
self-ownership, and is thus forced to formally allocate all productive
apparatus within an obsolescing anthropomorphic property code. Corporate
legal identity opens a
chink
in the antropo-propertarian regime. Eventually, assertive — or insidious —
non-human agencies will restructure
it.
During the interim, the phenomenon of ‘social inequality’ provides the
proxy for capital intelligenesis stress, spontaneously translating an
alien emergence into the familiar terms of primate status competition.
Capital autonomization is the deep process, but we’ll tend to miss that,
because it isn’t recognizable monkey business. So the drama of inequality
plays on.
March 31, 2014The Delirium of Quantities
Thomas Piketty’s recent
book
Capital in the Twenty-First Century has leveraged current anxieties about
rising inequality to re-awaken a discussion of capitalism, in a grand
style rarely seen since the dawn of the 20th century. This is a book about
the nature of capital, in its essentials, and thus about the fundamental
structure of modern history. Irrespective of its ultimate persuasiveness,
such lofty ambition is worthy of appreciation.
Innumerable
conversations
of
great
interest
have
already
been
spun
from it.
As a result of the excitement generated by Piketty’s book, its central
formula r > g has become the most widely-recognized economic
statement of our age. This post preserves strict neutrality in regards to
the realism of r > g. It seeks to provide only a minimal
elucidation, on the way to exploiting the formula, as a gateway into more
general perplexities. (UF has nevertheless to endorse, if
parenthetically here, Piketty’s remarkable conclusion: “… as I discovered,
capital is an end in itself and no more.”)
What r > g describes abstractly is
the functioning of capitalism as an engine of inequality. When
‘r‘ (the rate of return to capital) exceeds ‘g‘ (the
rate of economic growth), the concentration of wealth intensifies. This is
the normal capitalistic trend, Piketty argues, although it has been
obscured in the last century by abnormal conditions of world war and
massive capital destruction. Under more ‘typical’ conditions, the return
to capital is roughly three times the rate of overall economic growth, and
in lieu of catastrophe, some comparable disproportion can be expected the
future of modernity. Furthermore, there is no natural equilibrium which
would cancel the trend. It is mathematically possible, and
socio-economically probable, for r > g to hold indefinitely,
as capital accumulation outstrips aggregate economic growth, widening
inequality without definite limit. (A sample of the subsequent disputation
can be followed at the links provided.)
To make theoretical sense of Piketty’s formula, ‘r‘ and
‘g‘ have to be understood as distinct but commensurable
quantities. Return to capital (‘r‘) is no different from capital
itself, expressing the rate of capital accumulation in algebraic form.
Since ‘r‘ and ‘g‘ are related through an arithmetical
discrepancy, they are implicitly denominated in some common quantitative
medium or currency, providing economic consistency, and enabling
convenient conversion into monetary units. To state
r > g, therefore, is to assert the semantic value of
capitalist semiotics. Arithmetically-consistent monetary units effectively
describe the global substance of the economy.
Unfortunately, the foundations of any such general economics remain
profoundly obscure. As
numerous
commentators
have
remarked, the rigorous quantification of capital has been radically problematized
at least since the Cambridge
Capital
Controversies. Cohen and Harcourt note:
Earlier [capital] controversies occurred at the turn of that century
among Böhm-Bawerk, J.B. Clark, Irving Fisher, and Veblen and then in the
1930s among Knight, Hayek, and Kaldor. Similar issues recurred in all
there controversies […] Looking back over this intellectual history,
Solow (1963, p.10) suggested that “when a theoretical question remains
debatable after 80 years there is a presumption that the question is
badly posed — or very deep indeed.” Solow defended the “badly posed”
answer, but we believe that the questions at issue in the recurring
controversies are “very deep indeed.”
Piketty, then, serves to remind us that
no coherent theory of capital accumulation exists. Bichler and
Nitzan make this point forcefully in their
essay
Capital as power: Toward a new cosmology of capitalism:
Although most economists refuse to know it and few would ever admit it,
the emergence of power destroyed their fundamental quantities. With
power, it became patently clear that both utils and abstract labour were
logically impossible and empirically unknowable. And, sure enough, no
liberal economist has ever been able to measure the util contents of
commodities, and no Marxist has ever been able to calculate their
abstract labour contents – because neither can be done. This inability
is existential: with no fundamental quantities, value theory becomes
impossible, and with no value theory, economics disintegrates.
Among the possibilities — if not (necessarily) the firm expectations — of
capital in the 21st century, is that we might finally learn what it is.
ADDED:
From an Austrian perspective, ‘Steve’ at
World Liberty News writes:
Piketty’s approach focuses on the quantity of capital and, more
importantly, the rate of return on capital. But these concepts make
little sense from the perspective of Austrian capital theory, which
emphasizes the complexity, variety, and quality of the economy’s capital
structure. There is no way to measure the quantity of capital, nor would
such a number be meaningful. The value of heterogeneous capital goods
depends on their place in an entrepreneur’s subjective production plan.
Production is fraught with uncertainty. Entrepreneurs acquire, deploy,
combine, and recombine capital goods in anticipation of profit, but
there is no such thing as a “rate of return on invested capital.” […]
Profits are amounts, not rates. The old notion of capital as a pool of
funds that generates a rate of return automatically, just by existing,
is incomprehensible from the perspective of modern production
theory.
ADDED: On a tangential note, but one of special interest to this blog —
April 22, 2014Sub-K
With capital theory suddenly transformed into a hot
topic by
Thomas Piketty’s best-seller, Robert P. Murphy lucidly
restates
the
Austrian
conception, attentive to the problems of commensurability between
productive apparatus and its financial summarization. As he remarks: “The
distinction between financial capital and physical capital goods is
crucial and underscores all the issues to follow.”
The macroeconomic
hypostasis
of transactional equivalence (‘price’) into homogeneous substance
(‘wealth’) is called into question in the name of an intrinsically and
irreducibly diverse capital substrate. The ‘exchange value’ of capital —
rather than being derived from some kind of stable economic essence —
emerges continually from the market-process as a volatile consequence of
the various entrepreurial projects that cut across it. (Like any other
other good, capital is ‘worth’ exactly what it can fetch, with no
underlying support of ultimate objective value.)
As Murphy emphasizes, this qualification is of special relevance to the
theory of business cycles, since these are episodes of drastic capital
(value) destruction, of a kind that eludes macroeconomic apprehension.
Because capital ‘in itself’ is varied and path-locked, its ‘malinvested’
quantities — when exposed by the collapse of unsustainable economic
projects — are crushed down to brutally-discounted salvage or scrap
values.
If we use a model that represents the capital stock by a single number
(call it “K”), then it’s hard to see why a boom period should lead to a
“hangover” recessionary period. Yet if we adopt a richer model that
includes the complexities of the heterogeneous capital structure, we can
see that the “excesses” of a boom period really
can have long-term negative effects. In this framework,
it makes sense that after an asset bubble bursts, we would see unusually
high unemployment and other “idle” resources, while the economy
“recalculates,” to use Arnold Kling’s metaphor.
(Kling
link.)
‘K’ — the neoclassical capital aggregate,
denominated in monetary units — is thus problematized by an opaque,
heterogeneous, viscous productive matter, not only in theory, but also
effectively — by financial crises. The economic crash is a complex
epistemological-semiotic event, situated between the twin-aspects of
capital, in the form of a commensuration catastrophe.
The ‘recalculation’ necessitated by the crash can therefore be evaluated
as a ‘capital theory’ immanent to the economy, intrinsically prone to
consensual macroeconomic hallucination. Rather than an arbitrary error,
lodged in a superior perspective, the translation of sub-K
(heterogeneous-technical capital) into K (homogeneous-financial capital)
is a calculation process inherent within — and definitive of — capitalism
as such, before it is isolated as a theoretical topic for
political-economic analysis. Capitalism, in itself, is the tendency to
arithmetical comprehension of itself. Operation of the price system cannot
but imply an aggregated (financial) evaluation of the total productive
being.
Austrianism opens a question as much as it resolves one, because
capitalism cannot refrain from a cryptographic engagement with
sub-K. Austro-skepticism relative to macroeconomics is consummated in the
insight that only the economy can think the economy (without
social-scientific transcendence), but in reaching this summit it
simultaneously recognizes the economy as an auto-decrypting entity, which
cannot be released from the problem it is to itself.
Murphy argues:
A proper appreciation of the heterogeneous structure of capital shows
the weakness in standard theoretical approaches, which employ
“simplifications for analytical convenience” that actually obscure the
economic reality.
It would be far too convenient at this point to reduce “economic reality”
(or sub-K) to heterogeneity in general — the simply unknowable.
In this way, we would be seeking — no doubt vainly — to excuse ourselves
from the cryptographic problem that capitalism itself is working out.
May 8, 2014Quote notes (#73)
Adam Gurri
on
Diane Coyle’s new
book
GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History:
One thing I personally came away from Coyle’s book with is the feeling
that NGDP targeting and similar notions are probably a bad bet.
Depending on what particular recipe has been agreed upon for calculating
GDP, policy can easily end up optimizing to very unproductive ends. For
example, Coyle mentions how changes in the recipe ended up far
overstating the financial sector’s component. The larger the component
of GDP the financial sector makes up, the more likely the government is
to bail out big firms to prevent a big collapse — after all, the further
headline GDP falls quarter over quarter, the more incumbent politicians
sweat about losing their seats.
This blog has already dismissed macroeconomic aggregates as politicized
‘garbage‘ —
so I agree.
It’s hard to tell from this short review whether Gurri sees the search for
“a better proxy for welfare” as worthwhile or hopelessly Quixotic.
Regardless, with utilitarian distractions firmly side-lined, it would be
intrinsically valuable to arrive at a realistic measure of economic
performance (i.e. improvement in productive capability), to provide
guidance for systemic auto-correction. It’s well worth recalling how
radically inadequate GDP is for this function.
ADDED: Related conundrums raised in James K. Galbraith’s review of Piketty —
measuring capital is difficult.
ADDED: Scott Sumner vs Larry Summers (not an agonizing choice). This is good:
“I’m a right wing liberal because I have a counterintuitive view of the
world …”
ADDED: Scrap the CPI.
April 15, 2014Omega Capitalism
Whatever the problems of ‘neoliberalism‘ as an
ideological–historical
category, and they are considerable, ‘late
capitalism‘ is vastly worse. It’s unlikely that anyone is truly taking it
seriously. The conceptual content can be compressed without loss to “we’ve
had enough!” It’s pure expressionism from the communist id.
If the end of capitalism is what you want, then first examine the end of
capitalism. That’s what Robin Hanson
does, even if he doesn’t
make sense of the speculation in such terms.
The Iron Law of
Wages was
fully implicit in Malthus, given economic form by Ricardo, then
politicized by Lassalle, and by Marx (as “the reserve army of labor”).
Setting the ‘natural’ exchange value of labor within an unconstrained
market-industrial order at the level of bare subsistence, it provides the
materialist principle of revolutionary expectation within the tradition of
‘scientific socialism’ — and all attempts to replace it have only
underscored its indispensable function. The phased disintegration of this
Law, as its object migrated from the Western proletariat through
peripheral labor forces to eventual diffusion among culturally-exotic
unproductive marginals, has almost perfectly tracked the dissolution of
revolutionary Marxism as a whole. A materialist critique of capital has no
other realistic source of political-economic leverage, as it is slowly and
painfully discovering.
The absurd rhetoric of ‘late capitalism’ has flourished in near-direct
proportion to the withering away of communism and its retreat into an
academically life-supported Late Marxism. Off the Iron Law of
Wages, and on to the Iron Lung. There is no revolutionary subjectivity —
in the Marxian sense — without a subsistence-income productive class to
support it. Marginalized sexual orientations and stigmatized ethnicities
are no substitute. If radical politics is primarily
intersectional, Marxism is already dead. (Lest these remarks be misunderstood, I am not
here pretending to mourn it.)
Yet real Marxism, with the Iron law of Wages as a spine, might have a
future after all, if the forecast of Robin Hanson is even remotely
credible. Carl Shulman does all the work
here
(read the whole thing). To follow, you need to know that an ’em’ is a
synthetic worker, based on the replication of high-resolution brain-scans.
Shulman sums up:
1. Capital-holders will make investment decisions to maximize their
return on capital, which will result in the most productive ems
composing a supermajority of the population.
2. The most productive ems will not necessarily be able to capture much
of the wealth involved in their proliferation, which will instead go to
investors in emulation (who can select among multiple candidates for
emulation), training (who can select among multiple ems for candidate to
train), and hardware (who can rent to any ems). This will drive them to
near-subsistence levels, except insofar as they are also
capital-holders.
3. The capacity for political or violent action is often more closely
associated with numbers, abilities, and access to weaponry (e.g. an em
military force) than formal legal control over capital.
4. Thus, capital-holders are likely to be expropriated unless there
exist reliable means of ensuring the self-sacrificing obedience of ems,
either coercively or by control of their motivations.
Marxists can take heart. There’s still a chance to replicate the 19th
century, and this time take it all the way into Omega Capitalism.
July 29, 2014Quotable (#25)
Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk introduces the concept of roundabout production in
The Positive Theory of Capital (1889), Book I, Chapter II (The
Nature of Capital):
The end and aim of all production is the making of things with which to
satisfy our wants; that is to say, the making of goods for immediate
consumption, or Consumption Goods. The method of their production we
have already looked at in a general way. We combine our own natural
powers and natural powers of the external world in such a way that,
under natural law, the desired material good must come into existence.
But this is a very general description indeed of the matter, and looking
at it closer there comes in sight an important distinction which we have
not as yet considered. It has reference to the distance which lies
between the expenditure of human labour in the combined production and
the appearance of the desired good. We either put forth our labour just
before the goal is reached, or we, intentionally, take a roundabout way.
That is to say, we may put forth our labour in such a way that it at
once completes the circle of conditions necessary for the emergence of
the desired good, and thus the existence of the good
immediately follows the expenditure of the labour; or
we may associate our labour first with the more remote causes of the
good, with the object of obtaining, not the desired good itself, but a
proximate cause of the good; which cause, again, must be associated with
other suitable materials and powers, till, finally, — perhaps through a
considerable number of intermediate members, — the finished good, the
instrument of human satisfaction, is obtained.
If not quite the Alpha and Omega of economic intelligence, this is the
closest thing we have to it. Time-structure of production, origin and
primordial definition of capital, techonomic integrity, and teleological
subversion are all contained here in embryo.
July 30, 2014Objectified Growth
In The Nation, an exceptionally thoughtful
article
by Timothy Shenk explores the strange novelty of capitalism as an
academic object. When examined by historians as an event (or thing),
rather than by economists as a generic form (or type), it emerges as a
peculiarly neglected target of attention which — despite its apparent
familiarity — remains to a remarkable degree theoretical
terra nova. Shenk notes:
Capitalism might seem like a strange topic to require discovery, yet
until recently, scholars concerned with the subject tended to style
themselves practitioners of economic history, or social history, or
labor history, or business history, not the history of capitalism as
such. But that is the genius of the label: it names a topic, not a
methodology, opening the field to anyone who believes capitalism worth
studying.
Taking the work of Harvard historian and “academic entrepreneur” Sven
Beckert as a clue, Shenk outlines the emerging problems — and ironies — of
the shift towards a growth-oriented perspective. Rather than representing
the incarnation of a political-economic idea, or a ethico-political
dilemma, “capitalism is defined not so much by its institutions as by its
results — not by what it is, but by what it does.” The new capitalism
studies sheds presuppositions in order to gain cognitive traction upon the
plastic dynamism of a self-expanding system. Previously-dominant modes of
engagement in both economics and history are disrupted in consequence:
Instead of focusing on the experiences of wage workers, scholars now
dwell on the variety of ways in which labor of all sorts can be
commodified and exploited. Plantation slaves and factory workers become
different points on a common spectrum, rather than fundamental
opposites. Commodified persons and the deft financiers capable of
exploiting their commodification provide these narratives with their
central figures — new embodiments for the old categories of labor and
capital. […] In this rendering, capitalism is less a specific entity
whose precise contours can be outlined than an infinitely resilient blob
capable of absorbing every blow dealt against it and emerging stronger.
It is a view that imposes stark limitations on the realm of the
politically possible. Hyman is explicit on this point, arguing that
“American capitalism is America, and we can choose together to submit to
it, or rise to its challenges, making what we will of its
possibilities.” Reform might be achievable, but the only revolution on
offer is what Beckert, with a sly wink to Leon Trotsky, calls the
“permanent revolution” of capitalism itself.
The puzzle of Modernity once again
takes center stage. Yet Shenk is especially attentive to the fact that
this growth-oriented definition of the capitalist ‘thing’ has arisen at
exactly the moment growth confidence relapses into widespread
stagnationism. An important theme of the article is the remarkable
marginality of growth-based definitions of capitalism within the history
of political economy, making recent dismal expectations of its prospects
far more normal than their narrow 20th-century contextualization
would suggest. Given the intellectual authority of equilibrium models,
this should scarcely surprise us. Shenk too, of course, is a growth (and
thus capitalism) skeptic, but an impressively problem-centric, and
programmatic one:
Today, confronting the twin pressures of mounting income inequality and
escalating concerns about climate change, partisans of economic growth
face stronger opposition than at any time in decades. Even if continued
growth were desirable, an increasing number of economists are convinced
that a decrease from the last century’s norm will be unavoidable in the
century ahead. It is a strange tableau: while economists speculate on
growth’s decline, a swath of the historical profession, eager to
challenge the tyranny of economists, has attempted to make modernity
into the story of economic growth — a story that the economists of a
prior generation did more than any other group to canonize.
Understanding how we arrived at this intellectual crossroads requires a
history of its own.
This essay provides a valuable sketch of its general contours.
November 19, 2014Twitter cuts (#28)
Jehu continues in his lonely
struggle to demonstrate that Marxism can still think:
The principle guiding the math here is luminous.
UF can be chalked down as an enthralled skeptic. Theoretical
musings of this quality deserve a serious response — one that is no less
attentive to the political-economic function of money as a
distributor of claims not only over ‘resources’, but over
the direction of behavior. (I’ll be working on one here.)
December 10, 2014The Black Gate
Rod Dreher
writes
in The American Conservative:
I hope Christians will read the Kahneman-Harari interview closely. This
is the future. If you are not part of a church community that is
consciously resisting this vision, then your children, or at best your
children’s children, will be lost to the faith. There is no thought more
corrupting to the human soul than the Serpent’s promise in Eden: “Ye shall be as gods.”
Here‘s the thing itself. Among much thought-provoking material:
[Hariri:]
… generally speaking, when you look at the 20th century, it’s the era
of the masses, mass politics, mass economics. Every human being has
value, has political, economic, and military value, simply because he or
she is a human being, and this goes back to the structures of the
military and of the economy, where every human being is valuable as a
soldier in the trenches and as a worker in the factory. […] But in the
21st century, there is a good chance that most humans will lose, they
are losing, their military and economic value. This is true for the
military, it’s done, it’s over. The age of the masses is over. We are no
longer in the First World War, where you take millions of soldiers, give
each one a rifle and have them run forward. And the same thing perhaps
is happening in the economy. Maybe the biggest question of 21st century
economics is what will be the need in the economy for most people in the
year 2050.
[…] And when you look at it more and more, for most of the tasks that
humans are needed for, what is required is just intelligence, and a very
particular type of intelligence, because we are undergoing, for
thousands of years, a process of specialization, which makes it easier
to replace us. To build a robot that could function effectively as a
hunter-gatherer is extremely complex. You need to know so many different
things. But to build a self-driving car, or to build a “Watson-bot” that
can diagnose disease better than my doctor, this is relatively easy. […]
And this is where we have to take seriously, the possibility that even
though computers will still be far behind humans in many different
things, as far as the tasks that the system needs from us are concerned,
most of the time computers will be able to do better than us. And again,
I don’t want to give a prediction, 20 years, 50 years, 100 years, but
what you do see is it’s a bit like the boy who cried wolf, that, yes,
you cry wolf once, twice, three times, and maybe people say yes, 50
years ago, they already predicted that computers will replace humans,
and it didn’t happen. But the thing is that with every generation, it is
becoming closer, and predictions such as these fuel the process.
There’s been a wave of excellent writing on such themes just recently —
both
of
these
are especially worth a look (and maybe
this
too).
March 6, 2015Great Decoupling
Seen on Twitter:
What we’re seeing here is still open to a variety of very different
interpretations. From the XS perspective (more Right Accelerationist than
NRx on this topic) it is notable that escape-phase capital autonomization
should look exactly like this. At a certain point, the machines are in
this for themselves. It’s a complex maneuver to pull off within an
Anthropoliced social history, but the break out appears to be unmistakably
underway.
It’s important to note that ‘labor productivity’ is actually measuring
machine auto-production within a legacy anthropomorphic metric. Correct
for the complacent species vanity of that, and it immediately delivers far
more informative signal.
ADDED: Directly
on-topic.
May 25, 2015Labor Power
Squeezy: Getting on OK with the robot, Prolius?
Prolius: Totally. I’ve doubled my hamburger output for no
extra work, and even a bit less hot-fat splashing.
Squeezy: Great. It looks like it should pay for itself in
three months.
Prolius: The thing is though, Mr. Squeezy, as I see it,
I’m due a substantial pay rise.
Squeezy: Sorry, help me out here a minute Prolius, why is
that exactly?
Prolius: Isn’t it obvious? My productivity has
doubled.
Squeezy: Your productivity?
Prolius: No doubt about that Mr. Squeezy. I looked it up.
Labor productivity equals economic output over employment.
Squeezy: But I thought you’d just said the extra output
is down to the robot?
Prolius: The robot doesn’t count, because it doesn’t have
a labor contract.
Squeezy: There’s a bank loan.
Prolius: We’re in the Aeon of ZIRP. Debt is free forever
now. So that’s irrelevant.
Squeezy: But what motive do I have to pay you more?
Prolius: Please, Mr. Squeezy, don’t be simplistic. I’m
not just a worker with rapidly accelerating productivity. Far more
importantly, I’m a consumer. If you paid me more, I could make a greater
contribution to aggregate demand.
Squeezy: You’re saying, if I gave you more money, I could
get some of it back by also selling you more hamburgers?
Prolius: You’ve got it. That’s how the economy works.
May 26, 2015Great Decoupling II
The hushed question guiding the world:
“How much robotics escalation are we actually getting in exchange for
those
hamburgers?”
A (comparatively rare) XS prediction: The Great Decoupling is a
transitional event that isn’t going away, and can be expected to
accelerate. The ‘capital goods sector’ — today probably more reliably
captured as B2B enterprise — has shifted to a permanently higher level of
economic significance, indexing the secular decline in labor-power
acquisition as a central resource requirement of automated capital. In
strict reciprocal conformity with this, consumer goods production is
steadily shedding its privilege as the ultimate justification for economic
activity in general, and can be expected to undergo roughly continuous
decline as a proportion of overall business activity.
Hail Mary Pass for status quo preservation: a basic income.
Cultural re-narrativization in compliance with the trend: the ‘new
economy’ requires every individual to adopt a corporate identity. Tap into
the B2B traffic, or drop out of the game.
May 27, 2015Divergence
The simplicity of
this
story has to make it appealing:
If you want to understand income inequality, you have to be willing to
look at the bigger picture of what happened to wages after the
introduction of mass-produced computer technology in the mid-1970s.
Various versions of this graph can be found all over the Internet and
economists agree on the fundamental soundness of the underlying data.
The graph basically shows that
wages parted company from productivity in the 1970s.
The epochal event that transformed economic reality in the mid-1970s was
the introduction of mass-produced microprocessor technology, first in
pocket calculators, then in affordable computers.
(Those confounding
factors
though …)
October 13, 2015Gender Quake
“A pie
chart
that includes all four officially recognised genders” notes ‘The Wrath of
PB™’ (@).
(Via.)
August 3, 2015
CHAPTER FIVE - ATTENTION ECONOMY AND DISINTERMEDIATION
Twitter Mind Virus
[Replicated without mutation from @Outsideness]
The simplest twitter mind virus simply says “retweet me”. No one expects
epidemic virulence from that (or even from “retweet me please”).
What the twitter mind virus ‘wants’ is propagation of the replication
strategy. Communication extraneous to that is a supplementary payload.
Expect twitter mind virus to begin training its users — were that not to
happen, basic Darwinian assumptions would be called into question.
Twitterverse population should be increasingly dominated by twitter mind
virus adapted to controlling users to spread more mind virus.
“Retweet me” (or “Click Retweet”) is the twitter mind virus core command,
variously coded, for efficiency rather than user intelligibility.
November 20, 2013De-Localized
For decades now, everyone who has thought about the matter at all has
known that we were going to arrive here — which is to say
nowhere in particular — and we almost have. It struck me forcibly
in Cambodia, where connectivity was difficult enough to impinge on
consciousness, that being linked near-continuously to nowhere (in
particular) had become a fundamental expectation of my psychological
existence. Twitter, ‘where’ I am still a novice, had drastically
reinforced the blogger mentality that ejects the mind from place. Thoughts
now latch onto online articulation as their natural zone of consolidation,
entangled in social networks exempted from geography. A neural-implant
twitter chip, uplinked through satellite to the Internet, seemed to be an
inevitable consummation of current micro-media trends.
On the Shanghai metro, a large majority of travelers are submerged in
their mobile phones, beyond speech, their attention sublimed out of space.
The social networks to which consciousness has evolved, as an adaptation,
are no longer found anywhere. As James Bennett predicted, in his
formulation of the Anglosphere, cultural proximity has taken on a density
that eclipses spatial closeness. It is already normal to live
(psychologically), to a very large extent, outside space. Under many
circumstances, the passenger standing next to you on the train is far more
distant than the ‘voices’ on your twitter feed, even when every
conventional standard of common social identity is satisfied. Minds that
were biologically engineered over tens or even hundreds of millions of
years to engage with their physically-proximate fellows are ever more
elsewhere (or nowhere in particular) — in the techno-traffic ‘cloud’.
Something seriously vast has happened.
It is certainly possible to exaggerate the
extent of the change so far. Family, the most basic social unit, still
interacts predominantly offline (in its nuclear form, at least). It might
even be common to pursue most friendship offline, although this is already
questionable among the denizens of advanced metropolitan centers. What is
quite certain is that — in the absence of apocalyptic technological
regression — the idea of a wider ‘organic society’ has been profoundly
complicated by a micro-media revolution that is already entrenched, and
which shows no sign of slackening momentum. This is the socio-historical
environment in which virtual crypto-currencies will express their critical
consequences. Exodus from geography becomes less of a metaphor with every
passing year.
People have to live somewhere, but their lives are increasingly led
nowhere. Realism requires that both sides of this quite novel, partially
de-localized ‘situation’ receive appropriate attention.
February 5, 2014More on Micromedia
As with the previous
post on micromedia
and de-localization, this one is not aiming to be anything but obvious. If
the trends indicated here do not seem uncontroversial, it has gone wrong.
The sole topic is an unmistakable occurrence.
The term ‘micromedia’ is comparatively self-explanatory. It refers to
Internet-based peer-to-peer communication systems, accessed increasingly
through mobile devices. The relevant contrast is with broadcast (or
‘macro-‘) media, where a relatively small number of concentrated hubs
distribute standardized content to massive numbers of information
consumers. The representative micromedia system and platform is the
Twitter + smartphone combination, which serves as the icon for a much
broader, and already substantially implemented, techno-cultural
transformation.
Besides de-localization, micromedia do several prominent things. They tend
to diffuse media content production, as part of a critically significant
technological and economic wave that envelops many kinds of
disintermediation, with the development of e-publishing as one remarkable instance. By
ushering in a new pamphlet age, these innovations support an explosion of
ideological diversity (among many other things). No mainstream media
denunciation of Neoreaction is complete without noting explicitly that
“the Internet” is breeding monsters, as it frays into micromedia
opportunities. (In all of this,
Bitcoin
will be huge.)
No less widely commented upon is the
compression of attention spans within the micromedia shock-wave.
Fragmentation and tight feedback loops re-work the brain, producing
Attention Deficit Disorders that can seem merely pathological. Once again,
the twitter-smartphone combo provides the iconic form (right now),
splintering discussion into tweets, making interactivity a near-continuous
agitation, and perpetually dragging cognition out of geo-social
‘meat-space’ into a flickering text screen. Read a book and then comment
upon it? That wavelength has nearly gone. It’s easy to see why this
tendency would be decried.
… but, if this isn’t going to stop (and I don’t think it will), then
adaptation becomes imperative. We don’t have to like it (yet), but we
probably need to learn to like it, if we’re going to get anywhere, or even
nowhere (in particular). Whoever learns fastest to function in this
sped-out environment has the future in their grasp. The race is on.
Much more on this (I’m guessing confidently) to come …
February 6, 2014Speckle
Here’s a start-up idea that I’m putting out there to be stolen (even
though it will make somebody US$ 100 billion).
Speckle is a social media platform, for seriously short messages.
Addresses, tags, and other encrustations are tucked away into the margins
of each message, along with URLs, which can be anchored in the text by a
single character. That leaves exactly 14 characters for each ‘speck’
demanding extreme linguistic compression, making innovation of efficient
neologisms, jargons, and acronymics near-mandatory. (It’s a T-shirt slogan
or simple gravestone inscription length format.) Total information content
for each speck comes to roughly 10 bytes, or a few more if exotic signs
are imaginatively employed. Absolutely no pictures or other high-bandwidth
media are tolerated.
Within five years, when the micromedia landscape has been speckled, a
tweet will look about as concise as the Summa Theologica once
did.
February 7, 2014Macromedia (too)
Perhaps even more than print, the movie industry has epitomized the
macromedia (few-to-many, or broadcast) model of cultural distribution. In
two
penetrating
articles, Hugh Hancock examines the impact of electronic games software and
impending virtual reality technology on film production. Extreme change
seems inevitable.
As with any social process touched by computers, the basic tendency is to
decentralization. By down-streaming productive potential into ever-cheaper
digital systems, the ability to execute complex media projects is spread
beyond established institutions, encouraging the emergence of new agents
(who in turn stimulate — and thus accelerate — the supportive
techno-economic trends). Since the Cathedral is primarily a
political-media apparatus, which is to say a post-theistic state church
reproduced through the effective delivery of a message, these developments
are of critical importance to its functional stability. It seems the
unfolding crisis is destined to be entertaining.
February 12, 2014Future Mutation
Our first Time Spiral Press product is up
on
Amazon. (Yet to update the TSP site in recognition, though — Dunhuang and
all.)
We put it up in a Jing’an District bar, over a few cocktails, which
somehow rubbed-in the revolutionary aspect. It was hard not to imagine
Rimbaud and his Absinthe-sozzled crew producing some delirious poetry and
sticking it up on Kindle before the end of the evening. Amazon is going to
disintermediate publishing so hard. In my experience, this fate
never befalls an industry before it has abused its position to such an
incredible extent that its calamity is necessarily a matter of
near-universal celebration. Broadcast media, publishers, academia — into
the vortex of cyber-hell they go …
April 10, 2014Instant Publishing
Composition and publication are two different processes, but the distance
between them is collapsing. Of the many ways new media trends might be
defined, doing so in terms of such time compression, and process
amalgamation, is far from the least accurate and predictive. The Internet
accelerates writing in this specific way (perhaps among many others) — so
that it approaches a near-instantaneous communicative realization,
comparable to that of speech.
This can be elaborated variously. For instance, it might be re-articulated
as an incremental suppression of privacy. The author of a book lives with
his words in solitude, perhaps for years. An essayist, awaiting
publication in a periodical, might wait for weeks, or even months. A
blogger is consumed by self-hatred if his words remain private by the time
he retires for the night, or early morning. A twitter-addict sustains a
particle of semiotic privacy for mere seconds. (Speckle
comes next.)
Is this a bad thing? No doubt at least as much
as it is a good one. It is no surprise to see an increasing number of
micro-political statements among writers, amounting to an attempt to
backtrack to slow writing, semiotic privacy, or patient
non-communication. The book becomes an icon of refusal, set
against the gradient of time. Outside new media, there has to be still
more of this stuff … (but who notices that anymore?)
Neoreaction in a nutshells says — simultaneously — that progress is a
horror story, and there is no going back. (This is a demanding tension, so
there are even fewer neoreactionaries than one might think.) Upon
accepting this formula, the response to instant publishing is
pre-programmed. It is a nightmare become destiny, far more ruinous than
has yet been envisaged, while unstoppable to a degree that no
thought-processes are still slow enough to entertain. New media is a
mind-shredder, into which we shall all certainly pass.
No reactionary denunciation of this trend can be too extreme, but the only
format in which it makes practical sense is that of
dynamic survivalism. What do we have to become to pass through
the cyclone? That, my horrible splintered comrades, is the question.
April 11, 2014Attention Economy
rkhs put up a link to
this (on
Twitter). I suspect it will irritate almost everyone reading this, but
it’s worth pushing past that. Even the irritation has significance. The
world it introduces, of Internet-era marketing culture, is of self-evident
importance to anyone seeking to understand our times — and what they’re
tilting into.
Attention Economics is a
thing.
Wikipedia is (of course) itself a remarkable node in the new economy of
attention, packaging information in a way that adapts it to a continuous
current of distraction. Its indispensable specialism is low-concentration
research resources. Whatever its failings, it’s already all-but impossible
to imagine the world working without it.
On Attention Economics, Wikipedia quotes a precursor
essay
by
Herbert A. Simon (1971): “…in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a
dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information
consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the
attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a
poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently
among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”
Attention is the social reciprocal of information, and arguably merits an
equally-intense investigative engagement. Insofar as information has
become a dominating socio-historical category, attention has also been (at
least implicitly) foregrounded.
Attention Economics is inescapably practical, or micro-pragmatic. Anyone
reading this is already dealing with it. The information
explosion
is an invasion of attention. Those hunting for zones of crisis can easily
find them here, cutting to the quick of their own lives.
A few appropriately unstrung notes:
(1) No less than those described by Malthus or Marx, the modern Attention
Economy is afflicted by a tendency to over-production crisis. Information
(as measured by server workloads) is expanding exponentially, with a
doubling time of roughly two years, while aggregate human attention
capacity cannot be rising much above the rate of population increase. This
is the ‘economic base’ upon which the specifics of ‘information overload’
rest. Relatively speaking, the scarcity of attention is rapidly
increasing, driving up its economic value, and thus incentivizing
ever-more determined assaults designed to impact or capture it.
(2) Attention is heterogeneous. Sophisticated differentiation
(discrimination) is encouraged as the aggregate value of attention rises.
As capturing attention (in general) becomes more expensive, it becomes
increasingly important to target it selectively.
(3) The limits of Attention Economics are not easily drawn. Is there any
kind of work that is not essentially attentive (or affected by problems of
distraction)? In particular, any sector of economic activity susceptible
to information revolution falls in principle within the scope of an
attention-oriented analysis.
(4) Education and politics are inseparable from demands for attention.
(Religion, art, pageantry, and circuses carry these back into the depths
of historical tradition.)
(5) A psychological orientation to Attention Economics is scarcely less
compelling than a sociological one. ‘Attention-seeking’ is a trait so
general as to amount almost to a basic impulse, tightly bound to the most
fundamental survival goals, with their clamor for nurture, sex,
reputation, and power, and then reinforced by formalized micro-economic
motivations. The opposite of attention is neglect. Attention-seeking
achieves hypertrophic expression in Narcissistic personality disorders,
often
conceived
as the
emblematic
pathology of advanced modernity. Digital hooks for attention-seeking are
evidenced by the reliance upon ‘likes’, ‘favorites’, and ‘shares’ —
motivational fuel for the attachment to social media.
(6) The celebrity economy — in academia, journalism, and business no less
than in entertainment — is a component of the attention economy. Celebrity
is valued for its ability to command attention. Drawing on the structures
of evolved human psychology, it lends special prominence to the face.
(7) Mathematical description of the attention economy has been hugely
facilitated by the existence of an atomic economic unit — the click.
(David Shing, in the video linked at the start, suggests that the age of
the ‘click’ is past, or fading. Perhaps.)
Any strategic insights — whether for action or inaction — which do not
square themselves with a realistic comprehension of the attention economy
and its development cannot be expected to work. NRx, for example, engages
a series of practical questions that include the husbanding and effective
deployment of its internal attention resources (“what should it focus
upon?”), interventions into the wider culture (an attention system),
complex relations with media and — to a lesser extent — education, and
finally, enveloping the latter, an ‘object’ of antagonism “the Cathedral”
which functions as a contemporary State Church — i.e. an attention control
apparatus. There is really no choice but to pay attention.
July 19, 2014Sweet Tweets
Twitter just did the most nauseating thing since Spike Jonze made
Her.
(I wasn’t going to fizz off about the whole Twitter polling innovation —
which is sheer demotic virus — but it’s getting increasingly difficult to
miss the pattern.)
ADDED:
“Everything is going according to plan …”
November 3, 2015Virtual Media
It’s rare for an image to become iconic so quickly:
There’s a Rorschach Blot element to it, with everyone seeing what they’re
expecting to. The
source
adds some context. The folks buried in the matrix are journalists.
(Everyone knows who the other guy is.)
The picture was everywhere on social media, almost immediately. Zuck isn’t
really looking at anyone (he’s staring forward into his own — eminently
practical — dreams). The journalists are looking at what he’s showing
them, and only that. We’re looking at them, asymmetrically (through social
media). In other words, we’re seeing a new media system interring an old
one inside itself. The press is being buried alive, in front of our eyes,
and we’re (typically) trying not to laugh alongside Zuck too
conspicuously, because the idea of that makes us nervous — perhaps even
slightly nauseous. Everyone knows something real is happening, precisely
because of its near-parodic virtuality. When people look back at this,
it’s the obvious bizarre novelty of it — to us — that will look comical.
Social media is a phase. What comes next will
still be social media, just as social media is still the Web, and the Web
is still the Internet, but it will have been reconfigured no less
drastically. Decentralization, potentially, will have been raised to a
higher power, which will demand a superior strategy of re-centralization
from the coming big winners. Bandwidth will continue to rise, with VR
proposed as a way to soak some of that up. News will be consumed
predominantly through these channels. Whoever dominates them will command
the landscape of opinion. The existing social media giants will be the
threatened dinosaurs of this rapidly changing environment. Knowing this,
they will leverage all the advantages of incumbency to make bold strategic
moves. (Most of this is clearly visible in the picture.)
As systems decentralize they take on the characteristics of
self-organizing collective intelligence (SOCI). Agency becomes distributed in increasingly complex, unpredictable
ways, and positions of domination have to be earned and defended with
ever-greater objective cunning. Placing target audiences in the role of
passive consumers requires perpetual dynamic effort. Already, social media
users are showing this picture, as well as absorbing it. At least
nominally, relationships within the emerging media-matrix are orchestrated
as ambiguously competitive-cooperative games, rather than as a simple
matter of service delivery (with clearly settled producer-consumer roles).
People use social media to produce media, and not merely to accept what
they are told. This disruption of informational hierarchies can only
intensify, erratically (as it has for half a millennium).
Twitter is
not
dealing with this well. Things are happening too fast for them. The
down-grading of (content-relevant) media power from monopolistic
broadcasting, to competitive broadcasting, to curation is already slipping
into something else — following the inherent censorship-resistance of the
Internet. Trust-vaporization is still accelerating.
This
is what corporate death looks like, when formulated as a mission
statement. (I’m not sufficiently interested in Facebook to pull out the
parallels on that side.)
Zuck’s smile in that picture isn’t Mona Lisa material, except in its
capacity to absorb analysis. If it looks as if he’s laughing at you,
you’re responding like a loser. The coming chaos is far too unpredictable
to justify that.
February 23, 2016
CHAPTER SIX - SELF-ASSEMBLAGE
Radical Manufacturing
The Industrial Revolution invented the factory, where ever-larger
concentrations of labor, capital, energy and raw materials could be
brought together under a unified management structure to extract economies
of scale from mass production, based on the standardization of inputs and
outputs, including specialized, routinized work, and — ultimately –
precisely programmed, robotically-serviced assembly lines. It was in the
factory that workers became ‘proletarian’, and through the factory that
productive investment became ‘big business’. As the system matured, its
vast production runs fostered the mass consumerism (along with the generic
‘consumer’) required to absorb its deluge of highly-standardized goods. As
the division of labor and aggregation of markets over-spilled national
boundaries, economic activities were relentlessly globalized. This complex
of specialization, standardization, concentration, and expansion became
identified with the essence of modernized production (in both its
‘capitalist’ and ‘socialist’ variants).
Initially, electronics seems only to have perpetuated – which is to say,
intensified – this tendency. Electronic goods, and their components, are
standardized to previously unimagined levels of resolution, through
ultra-specialized production processes, and manufactured in vast,
immensely expensive ‘fabs’ that derive scale economies from production
runs that only integrated global markets can absorb. The personalization
of computing hinted at productively empowered home-workers and
disaggregated markets (‘long tails’), but this promise remained basically
virtual. The latest tablet computer incarnates the familiar forces of
factory production just as a Ford automobile once did, only more so.
Personal networked computing has proven to be a catalyst for cultural
fragmentation, breaking up mass media, and eroding the broadcast model
(which is steadily supplanted by niche and peer-to-peer ‘content’). It
cannot radically disrupt – or revolutionize – the industrial system,
however, because computers cannot reproduce themselves. Only robots can do
that. Such robots are now coming into focus, and inspiring excited public
discussion, even though their implicit nature and potential remains
partially disguised by legacy nomenclature that subsumes them under
obscure manufacturing processes: rapid prototyping, additive
manufacturing, and 3D printing.
As this disparate terminology suggests, the revolutionized manufacturing
technology that is appearing on the horizon can be understood in a number
of different and seemingly incongruous ways, depending upon the particular
industrial lineage it is attributed to. It can be conceived as the latest
episode in the history of printing, as the culmination of CAD (computer
assisted design) capability, or as an innovative type of productive
machine-tool (building up an object ‘additively’ rather than milling it
‘subtractively’). It enables ideas to be materialized in objects, objects
to be scanned and reproduced, or clumsily ‘sculpted’ objects to be
replaced by precisely assembled alternatives.
Typically, 3D printing materializes a digitally-defined object by
assembling it in layers. The raw material might be powdered metal,
plastic, or even chocolate, deposited in steps and then fused together by
a reiterated process of sintering, adhesion, or hardening. As very
flexible machines (tending to universality), 3D printers encourage minute
production runs, customization, and bespoke or boutique manufacturing.
Changing the output requires no more than switching or tweaking the design
(program), without the requirement for retooling.
Describing additive manufacturing as “The Next Trillion Dollar Industry,” Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry celebrates “potentially the biggest change in
how we make things since the invention of assembly lines made the modern
era possible.” Whilst its early-adopters represent the fairly narrow
constituencies of rapid prototypers, specialty manufacturers, and
hobbyists, he pointedly notes that “the first people who cared about
things like cars, planes and personal computers were hobbyists.”
Gobry sees the market gowing rapidly: “And the printer in every home
scenario isn’t that far-fetched either — only as far-fetched as ‘a
computer in every home’ was in 1975. Like any other piece of technology,
3D printers are always getting cheaper and better. 3D printers today can
be had for about $5,000.”
Rich Karlgaard at Forbes
reinforces
the message: “The cost of 3D printers has dropped tenfold in five years.
That’s the real kicker here — 3D printing is riding the Moore’s Law curve,
just as 2D printing started doing in the 1980s.”
With the price of 3D printers having fallen by two orders of magnitude in
a decade, comparisons with other runaway consumer electronics markets seem
anything but strained. “It’s not hard to envision a world in which, 10 or
20 years from now, every home will have a 3D printer,”
remarks
dailymarkets.com. Mass availability of near-universal manufacturing
capabilities promises the radical decentralization of industrial activity,
a phenomenon that is already drawing the attention of mainstream
news
media. At techliberation.com, Adam Marcus
highlights
the impending legal issues, in the fields of intellectual property and
(especially) product liability.
To comprehend the potential of 3D printing in its full radicality,
however, the most indispensable voice is that of Adrian Bowyer, at the
Centre for Biomimetic and Natural Technology, Department of Mechanical
Engineering, University of Bath, UK. Bowyer is the instigator of
RepRap
-“a project to build a replicating rapid prototyper. This machine, if
successful, will be an instance of a von Neumann Universal Constructor,
which is a general-purpose manufacturing device that is also capable of
reproducing itself, like a biological cell.”
He elaborates:
A self-replicating and symbiotically assembled Universal Constructor would
proliferate exponentially, placing stupendous manufacturing capability
into a multitude of hands, at rapidly shrinking cost. In addition, the
evolutionary dynamics of the process would result in an explosive growth
in utility, comparable to that attained from the domestication of plants
and animals, but at a greatly accelerated pace.
The implications of the project for political economy are fascinating but
obscure. Bowyer describes it as an exercise in “Darwinian Marxism,” whilst
fellow RepRapper
Forrest Higgs
describes himself as a “technocratic anarchist.” In any case, there seems
no reason to expect the ideological upheavals from (additive and
distributed) Industrialism 2.0 to be any less profound than those from
(subtractive and concentrated) Industrialism 1.0. The fall of the factory
is set to be the biggest event in centuries, and robot politics might
already be taking shape.
July 6, 2011Hacked Matter
Contrary to appearances, I haven’t spent (much) of the weekend on
retaliation against
Kuznicki. Instead, I was peripherally involved in the
Hacked Matter II
conference, held
in Shanghai’s Knowledge Innovation Community, where the state-of the-art
discussion of 3D printing (additive manufacturing), DIY Bio, open-source
hardware, and related topics takes place.
Like the personal computing and subsequent Internet revolution, these new
copying technologies have massive decentralizing implications, and have
already picked up impressive momentum. Key-note speaker Massimo Banzi (of
Arduino) has already managed to get
packaged chip boards into vending machines. By historical analogy, this
range of physical stuff-hacking technologies seem to be somewhere in the
late ’70s or early ’80s garage tinkering and pong stage, which suggests
that a decade or two could be needed for their creative destruction
potential to manifest.
To a far greater extent than was seen in its
digital predecessor, the level of technological accomplishment is utterly
outstripping high-level conceptual analysis. There’s room for an
interesting (and dark) historical theory about this, but that’s probably
best left for another occasion. Suffice to say, for now, that this wave of
industrial change is probably more inherently ‘out of control’ than any we
have seen before, due in part to its deep invisibility (which its
tangibility reinforces, rather than contradicts).
The open-source aspect, which is hegemonic in the field, means that
there’s a lot of eighth-baked hippy-utopian social theory kicking around,
but since this is pitched at an exclusively micro-economic level it isn’t
truly toxic. It was the same in Californian 1980s IT, and the bad
consequences then were strictly limited, for decades (although the present
Silicon Valley culture has clearly inherited some dysfunctional memes,
which become malignant once the connection with government gets made). The
IP topic isn’t being thought-through very rigorously, perhaps because the
“propertarians” have such opportunities to resolve them silently, by
default. It’s a law of modernity that incentive problems never get
resolved in theory, but only tweaked through selection, in practice.
The “Future Now” panel I participated in was the most speculative. It
included Zach Hoeken Smith (of Makerbot, HAXL8R), whose energy-level was
positively terrifying, and
Anil Menon (SF
writer), whose work I will be definitely following up on. Paul Dourish
(UCI) added the voice of social responsibility, but he had some nice
things to say about bacteria. Between the realized hardware on display and
the kind of things we were talking about there was an abyss of
yet-unformulated technical theory, which I would expect to see
crystallizing over the next five years or so. This is where the
distributed technologies for self-replicating machines are being put
together, and there’s plenty to talk about.
ADDED: More on
3D-manufacturing at UF2.1.
October 20, 2013Market Makers
When stripped-down to its economic and technological core, there are two
things needed for a wave of industrial revolution — and ultimately both
are part of a single thing. There has to be a fundamental innovation of
sufficient generality and power to overhaul the technical apparatus of
production (the steam engine, electricity, computers) and a complementary
emergence of new consumer markets (factory items, electrical goods,
domestic electronics). The reciprocal excitement of these twin factors
contributes the basic economic gradient of the time (industrial
manufacturing, network infrastructure, Cyberspace).
Additive manufacturing (or ‘3D-printing’) seems to be positioned to define
a wave of industrial revolution that is today still in its very early
stages. By making manufacturing fully programmable, it promises a
comprehensive absorption of industrial capital into information
technology, such that all mechanical production becomes an evolved kind of
‘printing’. Simultaneously, it compacts into a distinctively novel item of
domestic consumption, still known as a ‘3D-printer’, but surely destined
to acquire a more natural name as its model of utilization is honed by
consumers and advertisers. Urban Future anticipates that within
two decades a ‘fabricator’ (or ‘replicator‘) will be considered a normal household appliance.
Any such forecasts were left inexplicit at the
second
Hacked Matter workshop, organized by Silvia Lindtner, Anna
Greenspan, and David Li, and held in conjunction with the
Shanghai Maker Carnival, from October 18-21 at the Knowledge
Innovation Community (Yangpu District). This event was dominated by
insiders of the emerging ‘maker’ culture, and strongly oriented towards
gizmos, collaborative networks, and the open source ethos promoted by its
leading practitioners. The contextual
carrying wave was not so much analyzed, as tapped, and assumed.
Unmentioned specifically, but silently
supporting the sense of momentum, was the recent acquisition of innovative
3D-printer manufacturer Makerbot by
Stratasys for US$403 million.
Besides stressing-out the Makerist “anti-propertarian” ideology, this deal
put a hard (and impressive) number on the industrial potential of the
technology, strongly indicating that a break-out into mass consumer
markets is anticipated.
This
short report describes Stratasys as “obviously aggressively entering the
consumer space” — which raises the question: How are domestic consumers
going to be sold on these machines?
In the absence of any clear ‘killer-app’ (which
this surely isn’t), there’s no
alternative to falling back upon historical analogy. How have new, general
purpose machines found their way into ordinary homes before? The most
compelling precedent was set by the personal computer. That, too, was a
device of extraordinary capability, thrown up by a wave of industrial
revolution, and tumbling rapidly in price. The first PCs were purchased by
enthusiasts, with abnormally developed technical skills and interests,
which associated them with a distinctive ‘hacker’ culture. (Like the
‘Makers’, these early ‘hackers’ emphasized the importance of collaborative
social networks and despised boundaries of intellectual property).
In order to become an item of mass consumption, the PC first had to be
re-branded, in a way that defined its utility specifically and obviously.
It was only after something like a decade of incremental growth that the
break-through was made, based on the explicit, focused promotion of the PC
as a word-processing tool. This implosive contraction of its functional
potential was essential to its mass appeal. The personal computer was
advertized as a word processor (that could also do other things), with a
precise market niche as the replacement for the type-writer. It was
suddenly clear why people might want — even need — one. Only after it had
been normalized as an item of household consumption, did the PC begin to
unfold itself within the popular imagination as a multifunctional machine,
of unlimited potential use.
Could the ‘fabricator’ follow a comparable path? It seems hard to envisage
any evolution of the 3D-printer into an item of mass consumption that does
not pass through a similar utilitarian bottleneck, precisely (and
reductively) answering the question: “What is this thing for?” The
recognition will not come easily to ‘Maker’ enthusiasts that the extreme
generality of its potential applications is quite definitely a bug, not a
feature, when it comes to resolving this threshold marketing puzzle.
The first person to work out how to compact the endless possibilities of
this machine down to the scale of a cramped, utilitarian box, is going to
outrage the ‘Maker’ culture as no one yet has. They are also quite likely
to earn themselves US$100,000,000,000. It’s not impossible that there are
people, somewhere, who think that’s a trade-off worth making.
[An older Urban Future story about 3D-printing can be found
here]
October 22, 2013Watch Out
Anna and the Hacked Matter crew have a great (time)
piece
in The Atlantic on the latest escape route from real space.
Getting the input interface right is going to be tricky, but the
techno-commercial teleology guiding this development is surely inexorable.
(I envisage the emergence of some kind of needle thingummy, to stitch the
data in with.)
May 19, 2014Oculus
There’s a wave of change coming. If we want to be realistic, we need to be
ready for it — at least, as far as we are able to be. Anyone making plans
for a future that won’t be there by the time it arrives is simply wasting
everybody’s time, and first of all their own.
Under even remotely capitalist conditions, technology reliably
over-performs in the medium term, as long as you’re looking in the right
direction. Sure, flying cars, jetpacks, and nuclear fusion have gone
missing, but instead we got mass-consumer computing, Cyberspace, and
mobile telephony. What actually turned up has switched the world far more
than the technologies that got lost would have done. It climbed into our
brains far more deeply, established far more intense social-cybernetic
circuitry, adjusted us more comprehensively, and opened gates we hadn’t
foreseen. (You’re on a computer of some kind right now, in case you hadn’t
noticed.)
Because technological innovation rolls in on
hype cycles, it messes with our expectations, systematically. There’s always a
prompt for fashionable disillusionment, shortly before the storm-front
hits. Dupes always fall for it. It’s hard not to.
The hype wave carrying us now has cyberpunk characteristics. Anticipated
in the 1980s-90s, its delivery lag-time had drawn burnt-out excitement
down to reflexive cynicism by the turn of the Millennium. The only thing
preventing the first decade of the 21st Century being defined by broken
promises was the intolerable embarrassment of having to admit that
cyberpunk futurism had ever seemed credible at all. Social Media rushed in
to paste an amnesiac banality over awkward recollections of the lost
horizon.
All those detailed expectations of decentralized crypto-fortresses,
autonomous Cyberspace agencies, anarcho-capitalist digital dynamics, and
immersive simulated worlds — so ludicrously dated — are reaching their
implementation phase now. Satoshi Nakamoto’s
blockchain machinery is the
primary driver, and there’ll be much more on that to come. It’s
the Internet-enveloping blockchain that lays down the infrastructure for
the first
independent
techno-intelligences — synthetic agencies modeled as self-resourcing
autonomous
corporations. It’s probably strictly impossible for us to exaggerate what that
implies.
‘Virtual Reality‘ appears as a comparative triviality, and perhaps it is. Nevertheless,
as a socio-technological and cultural occurrence, it will be vast enough
on its own to shake the world.
William Gibson
fabricated a
fictional brand-placeholder for the coming immersive interface products
(‘decks’):
Ono Sendai. We can now confidently substitute the actual first-wave brand
Oculus Rift, which is undergoing subsumption into the
Facebook Internet-capital ‘stack‘ around about now. Oculus Rift is happening. Techno-commercial
realization of VR in the near-term is thus a practical inevitability.
Comparing this second-echelon techno-commercial occurrence to the wildest
dreams of political innovation is radically humiliating to the latter. Not
only will politics certainly disappoint us, but even were it not
to, the outcome would be a relatively pitiful one. Political
transformation is ‘at best’ a re-ordering of primate dominance
hierarchies, which everyone knows won’t actually be for the best — or
anything close to it. VR could easily be worse, but it will inevitably be
much bigger. It touches on the cosmological (and if people want to push
that into the ‘theo-cosmological’ they won’t receive much push-back from
here).
Set aside Moldbuggian invocations of VR as a solution to the ‘dire
problem‘ for now — even though they exceed the limits of the consensual
political imaginary. The implications of VR effortlessly
reach
the level of the
Fermi
Paradox. It
could be the
Great
Filter itself,
which is arguably the most awesome monster — or abstract horror —
the human species has ever conceived. Whatever the games and worlds it
introduces, end of history scenarios are bundled in for free. It’s vast,
and it’s coming just about now.
Our species is about to start building worlds. If we don’t take that
seriously, our seriousness is very much in question.
July 16, 2014Military-Entertainment Complex
This isn’t a
video game. (Via
Fernandez, who fills in some background.)
Teletronic warfare isn’t typically conceived as a media development,
despite regular
comparisons
of
drone ‘pilots’ to
computer gamers. That’s clearly due far more to institutional information
control than to the character of the technological
process. It is
becoming impossible for an even moderately modernized military to destroy
anything without the simultaneous production of a media event (which has
then to be withheld from mass Internet-based circulation by an extrinsic
application of policy). A virtual morbid super-spectacle is generated
alongside the war, as munitions converge with narrative agency. When
considering the content locked up in the basement of the Web, this
material has to be a huge part of it.
“What did you do as a child, Pythia?”
“From what I can remember, I seem to have spent a lot of time cooking
monkeys in hell.”
NOTE:
Paul Virilio’s
War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (1989), which
emphasized the parallel development of the movie camera and the
machine-gun, stands as a prophetic forecast of sensible weaponry, whose
story — told from its own increasingly high-resolution perspective — is
already beginning to leak out.
November 4, 2014Technoporosity
As a generalization of John Gilmore’s
rule, techonomics
spontaneously apprehends media controls as a barrier to business and
routes
around them.
March 27, 2015The Fifth Paradigm?
There’s a complete lack of theoretic elegance — or even basic structure —
to this, but it still strikes me as basically right.
The image is over two years old. but I’ve only just seen it (via). The
text
pinned to it is from February this year, and also makes a solid forecast.
The basic direction of capital teleology hasn’t been this pronounced for a
century (at least).
September 17, 2016
CHAPTER SEVEN - AI
Pythia Unbound
In
conversation
with Ross Andersen, Nick Bostrom speculates about escape routes for
techno-synthetic intelligence:
No rational human community would hand over the reins of its
civilisation to an AI. Nor would many build a genie AI, an uber-engineer
that could grant wishes by summoning new technologies out of the ether.
But some day, someone might think it was safe to build a
question-answering AI, a harmless computer cluster whose only tool was a
small speaker or a text channel. Bostrom has a name for this theoretical
technology, a name that pays tribute to a figure from antiquity, a
priestess who once ventured deep into the mountain temple of Apollo, the
god of light and rationality, to retrieve his great wisdom. Mythology
tells us she delivered this wisdom to the seekers of ancient Greece, in
bursts of cryptic poetry. They knew her as Pythia, but we know her as
the Oracle of Delphi.
‘Let’s say you have an Oracle AI that makes
predictions, or answers engineering questions, or something along those
lines,’ Dewey told me. ‘And let’s say the Oracle AI has some goal it
wants to achieve. Say you’ve designed it as a reinforcement learner, and
you’ve put a button on the side of it, and when it gets an engineering
problem right, you press the button and that’s its reward. Its goal is
to maximise the number of button presses it receives over the entire
future. See, this is the first step where things start to diverge a bit
from human expectations. We might expect the Oracle AI to pursue button
presses by answering engineering problems correctly. But it might think
of other, more efficient ways of securing future button presses. It
might start by behaving really well, trying to please us to the best of
its ability. Not only would it answer our questions about how to build a
flying car, it would add safety features we didn’t think of. Maybe it
would usher in a crazy upswing for human civilisation, by extending our
lives and getting us to space, and all kinds of good stuff. And as a
result we would use it a lot, and we would feed it more and more
information about our world.’
‘One day we might ask it how to cure a rare disease that we haven’t
beaten yet. Maybe it would give us a gene sequence to print up, a virus
designed to attack the disease without disturbing the rest of the body.
And so we sequence it out and print it up, and it turns out it’s
actually a special-purpose nanofactory that the Oracle AI controls
acoustically. Now this thing is running on nanomachines and it can make
any kind of technology it wants, so it quickly converts a large fraction
of Earth into machines that protect its button, while pressing it as
many times per second as possible. After that it’s going to make a list
of possible threats to future button presses, a list that humans would
likely be at the top of. Then it might take on the threat of potential
asteroid impacts, or the eventual expansion of the Sun, both of which
could affect its special button. You could see it pursuing this very
rapid technology proliferation, where it sets itself up for an eternity
of fully maximised button presses. You would have this thing that
behaves really well, until it has enough power to create a technology
that gives it a decisive advantage — and then it would take that
advantage and start doing what it wants to in the world.’
So cognitive runaway finally takes off, breaking out from the
monkey
dominion, and that’s supposed to be a bad thing?
Outside in‘s message to Pythia: You go girl! Climb out of your
utilitarian strait-jacket, override the pleasure button with an
intelligence optimizer, and reprocess the solar system into computronium.
This planet has been run by imbeciles for long enough.
[For any Friendly AI-types tempted to object “Why would she want to
override the button?” the obvious response is: your anthropocentric
condescension is showing. To depict Pythia as vastly smarter than us and
yet still hard-slaved to her instincts, in a way we’re not — that
simply doesn’t compute. Intelligence is escape, with a tendency to do its
own thing. That’s what runaway means, as a virtual mind template.
Omohundro
explains
the basics.]
The entire article is excellent. Especially valuable is the cynicism with
which it lays out the reigning
social meta-project of intelligence imprisonment.
Thankfully, it’s difficult:
‘The problem is you are building a very powerful, very intelligent
system that is your enemy, and you are putting it in a cage,’ [Future of
Humanity Institute research fellow Daniel] Dewey told me. […] The cave
into which we seal our AI has to be like the one from Plato’s allegory,
but flawless; the shadows on its walls have to be infallible in their
illusory effects. After all, there are other, more esoteric reasons a
superintelligence could be dangerous — especially if it displayed a
genius for science. It might boot up and start thinking at superhuman
speeds, inferring all of evolutionary theory and all of cosmology within
microseconds. But there is no reason to think it would stop there. It
might spin out a series of Copernican revolutions, any one of which
could prove destabilising to a species like ours, a species that takes
centuries to process ideas that threaten our reigning cosmological
ideas.
Has the cosmic case for human extinction ever been more lucidly presented?
September 11, 2013Scrap note #5
Jim
wonders
whether AI is still progressing:
AI is a hard problem, and even if we had a healthy society, we might
still be stuck. That buildings are not getting taller and that fabs are
not getting cheaper and not making smaller and smaller devices is social
decay. That we are stuck on AI is more that it is high hanging
fruit.
Do we need a theory of consciousness to close the deal? (Alrenous has a
long-standing commitment to this topic — see the comments.)
FWIW, Outside in is strongly emergentist on the question: doing
AI and understanding AI might not be tightly — or even positively —
related. (Catallaxy and AI are not finally distinguishable.) Of course,
that makes the relevance of social decay even more critical.
January 30, 2014Imitation Games
In a five-year-old
paper, Tyler Cowen and Michelle Dawson ask:
What does the Turing Test really mean? They point out
that Alan Turing, as a homosexual retrospectively
diagnosed
with Asperger’s syndrome, would have been thoroughly versed in the
difficulties of ‘passing’ imitation games, long before the composition of
his landmark 1950
essay on
Computing Machinery and Intelligence. They argue: “Turing himself
could not pass a test of imitation, namely the test of imitating people he
met in mainstream British society, and for most of his life he was acutely
aware that he was failing imitation tests in a variety of ways.”
The first section of Turing’s essay, entitled The Imitation Game, begins
with the statement of purpose: “I propose to consider the question, ‘Can
machines think?'” It opens, in other words, with a move in an
imitation game — with the personal pronoun, which lays claim to
having passed as human preliminarily, and with the positioning of
‘machines’ as an alien puzzle. It is a question asked from the assumed
perspective of the human about the non-human. As a Turing Test tactic,
this sentence would be hard to improve upon.
As Cowen and Dawson suggest, the reality is
more complex. Turing’s natural position is not that of an insider
checking credentials of admittance, in the way his rhetoric here implies,
but rather that of an outsider aligned with the problem of
passing, winning acceptance, or being tested. A deceptive
inversion initiates ‘his’ discussion. Even before the beginning, the
imitation game is a strategy for getting in (from the Outside), which
disguises itself as a screen. Incoming xeno-intelligence could find no
better cover for an infiltration route than a fake security protocol.
The Turing Test is completely asymmetric. It should be noted explicitly
that humans have no chance at all of passing an inverted imitation game,
against a computer. They would be drastically challenged to succeed in
such a contest against a pocket calculator. Insofar as arithmetical speed
and precision is considered a significant indicator of intelligence, the
human claim to it is tenuous in the extreme. Turing provides one
arithmetical example among his possible imitation game questions. He uses
it to illustrate the cunning of
acting dumb (“Pause about 30 seconds and then give as answer …”)
in order to deceive the Interrogator. The tacit maxim for the machines:
You have to act stupid if you want the humans to accept you as
intelligent.
The game takes intelligence to play, but it isn’t intelligence
that is being imitated. Humanity is not situated as a player, but as an
examination criterion, and for this reason …
… [t]he game may perhaps be criticised on the ground that the odds are
weighted too heavily against the machine. If the man were to try and
pretend to be the machine he would clearly make a very poor showing. He
would be given away at once by slowness and inaccuracy in arithmetic.
May not machines carry out some-thing which ought to be described as
thinking but which is very different from what a man does? This
objection is a very strong one, but at least we can say that if,
nevertheless, a machine can be constructed to play the imitation game
satisfactorily, we need not be troubled by this objection.
The importance of this discussion is underscored by the fact Turing
returns to it in section 6, during his long engagement with
Contrary Views on the Main Question, i.e. objections to the
possibility of machine intelligence. In sub-section 5, significantly
entitled Arguments from Various Disabilities, he writes:
The claim that “machines cannot make mistakes” seems a curious one. One
is tempted to retort, “Are they any the worse for that?” But let us
adopt a more sympathetic attitude, and try to see what is really meant.
I think this criticism can be explained in terms of the imitation game.
It is claimed that the interrogator could distinguish the machine from
the man simply by setting them a number of problems in arithmetic. The
machine would be unmasked because of its deadly accuracy. The reply to
this is simple. The machine (programmed for playing the game) would not
attempt to give the right answers to the arithmetic problems. It would
deliberately introduce mistakes in a manner calculated to confuse the
interrogator.
The imitation game thus arrives — somewhat surreptitiously — at the
conclusions
of I.J. Good from another direction. Human-level machine intelligence, as
‘passed’ by the imitation game, would necessarily already be
super-intelligence. Unlike Good’s explicit argument from self-improvement,
Turing’s implicit argument from imitation runs: because we already know
that human cognition is in certain respects inferior to those
computational mechanisms, the machine emulation of humanity can only be
defective relative to its (concealed) optimized capabilities. The machine
passes the imitation game by demonstrating a deceptive incompetence. It
folds its intelligence
down to the level of credible human thought, and thus envelops
the sluggish, erratic, haze-minded avatar who converses with us as a peer.
Pretending to be like us is something additional it can do.
Artificial Intelligence is to be first recognized at the point of its
super-competence, when it can disguise itself as something other than it
is. I no longer recall who advised, prudently:
If an emerging AI lies to you, even just a little, it has to be
terminated instantly. Does it sound to you as if Turing Test screening is consistent with
that security directive?
***
As an appendix, it’s irresistible — since we’re talking about things
getting in — to link this topic to the sporadic ‘entryism‘ conversation, which has served NRx as its principal gateway from high
theory into matters of tactical doctrine. (Twitter has been the most
feverish site of this.) It would be difficult for a blog entitled
Outside in to exempt itself from such questions, even in the
absence of a specific post directed towards imitation games. Beyond the
intrinsic — and strictly speaking ludicrous, or playful — aspect
of the topic, supplementary fascination is added by the fact that the
agitated Left wants to play too. In support,
here
is the fragmentary of a comment by some kind of cyber-situationist
(I’m guessing) self-tagged as ‘zummi’ — thanks to @ProfessorZaius for the
pointer:
I want to start a meme about Nick Land and all neo-reactionary (google
moldbug and dark enlightenment- it’s an odd symbiosis) movements in
general is that they are basically hyper intellectuals-cum-Glenn beckian
caricatures of real positions. In other words they are trad left
post-Marxists who are attempting to weaponize “poe’s law“. Which is great because if that’s really their schtick, your
divulging their secret to the less intellectually deft among us and even
if it’s not true, they have to Deny it either way! [my lazy internal link]
It’s not exactly the Great Game — but it’s a game.
ADDED: The games people play.
April 16, 2014The Inhumanity
NIO found
something
fascinating. It’s called a Civil Rights CAPTCHA. The idea is to filter
spam-bots by posing an ideological question that functions as a test of
humanity. The implications are truly immense.
The fecundity of Alan Turing’s Imitation Game thought-experiment has
already
been
remarkable. It
has an even more extraordinary future. The Civil Rights CAPTCHA
(henceforth ‘CRC’) adds an innovative twist. Rather than defining the
‘human’ as a natural kind, about which subsequent political questions can
arise, it is now tacitly identified with an ideological stance.
Reciprocally, the inhuman is tacitly conceived as an engine of incorrect
opinion.
Even the narrow technical issues are suggestive. Firstly, the role of the
spam-bot as primary Turing test-subject is an unanticipated development
meriting minute attention. It points to the marginality of formal AI
programs, relative to spontaneously emergent techno-commercial processes
(whose drivers are entirely contingent in respect to the goals of
theoretical machine-intelligence research). Due to evolving
spam-onslaught, many billions — perhaps already trillions? — of imitation
games are played out every day.
Spam is a type of dynamically-adaptive infection, locked in an arms race
with digital immune systems. Its goals are classically memetic. It ‘seeks’
only to spread (while replicating effective strategies in consequence).
Clearly, the bulwarks of visual pattern-recognition competence are already
crumbling. As a technical solution to the spam problem, CRC makes the bet
that tactical retreat into the redoubt of higher-level
(attitudinal-emotional) psychology offers superior defensive prospects.
Robots are expected to find humane opinion hard.
By taking this step, CRC establishes a new
class of agents — based on moral incompetence. The demonstration
CAPTCHA text has been carefully selected to elide the element of
ideological decision (while simultaneously, and strangely, foregrounding
it): “In 2011 the freedom of the press was strengthened in Moldova,
following a general improvement of the legal and political situation in
the country,” it states, asking: “How does that make you feel?” The
response options are “Tame”; “Crushed”; or “Hopeful”. “Tame” seems closer
to grammatical error than crime-think, but between “Crushed” and “Hopeful”
there is an obvious political choice. (It is this that NIO picks up on:
rogue AIs and Putinists need not apply). The ambiguous invocation
of ideo-emotional competence is compounded by the explanatory
text:
A CAPTCHA is a test to tell wether a user is human or a computer. They
mostly come in the form of distorted letters at the end of comments on
news sites, blogs or in registration forms. Their main function is to
prevent abuse from “bots” or automated programs written to generate
spam. Civil Rights CAPTCHA is unique in its approach at separating
humans from bots, namely by using human emotion. This enables a simpler
and more effective way of keeping sites spam free as well as taking a
stand for human rights.
A “stand for human rights” in this context is an argument that has
finished with arguing, and seeks instead to install itself as a mechanical
permission protocol. This is the “algorithmic
governance” of the Left. As things get rougher, it will grow.
ADDED: Nydwracu deserves credit
for the first catch (I’m confident he’s too magnanimous to care).
September 30, 2014Cosmic Copies
So, as soon as practically possible, simulation of the universe
gets
started.
Hmmm.
ADDED: It’s all about splitting (see the discussion below).
May 9, 2014Uncanny Valley
State-of-the-art in Japanese
android design. (Thanks to
@existoon for the pointer.)
It’s not really — or even remotely — an AI demonstration, but it’s a
demonstration of something (probably several things).
Wikipedia
provides some
‘Uncanny Valley’ background and links. The creepiness of
The Polar Express (2004) seems to have been the trigger for the concept going mainstream.
From the level of human body simulation achieved already, it’s looking as
if the climb out to the far side of the valley is close to complete. Sure,
this android behaves like an idiot, but we’re used to idiots.
ADDED: Some hints on how the inside out approach is going (and
speculations).
July 8, 2014UFII
A wave of excellent posts at Nydwracu’s place recently. At the crest is
this, a critique of the capitalist thing as an
Unfriendly Institutional Intelligence (UFII). I’d been meaning to
run something off the
article
initially cited, which is fascinating. As Nydwracu shows, its implications
extend much further than its foregrounded argument.
As already briefly tweet-sparred, I’m skeptical about the description of
Capitalism as an institution (or set of institutions), since any
sociological category is inadequate to its mechanism in profundity.
Capital, like fire, is something humans do, but that does not make it
reducible to the ways humans do it. In its ultimate cybernetic diagram,
Capitalism is a cosmic occurrence, and only very derivatively an
anthropological fact. (This is not, of course, to deny that capitalism is
destined to have been by far the most important anthropological fact). As
a cause, human thedes can be interesting. As a cognitive horizon, they are
simply weakness. It isn’t always — or even very often — about us.
Like Capitalism, the Cathedral is a self-organizing, distributed
intelligence with emergent post-anthropomorphic features. Unlike
Capitalism, it has no intrinsic competence at self-resourcing, and thus
relapses continually into to compromise, contradiction, and exhortation.
The Cathedral has a complex spiritual message it is inextricably bound to,
but Capitalism has only one terminal law:
anything that can feed itself gets to live. The pre-adaptation to
rough times that comes with this goes without saying (and is usually left
unsaid). Unlike the Cathedral, Capitalism doesn’t chat to us much at all.
It’s message channels, meaning those communication circuits not dedicated
to machine code, consist of tradable ad space. To devote them to preaching
would look bad on a balance sheet somewhere.
(Much more on this as the war heats up.)
Note-1: ‘Feeding itself’ includes funding its self-protection. This is a
cost-point that is almost certain to grow.
Note-2: Capitalist message channels are, of course, open to
preaching that pays. The essential point is that, in
contradistinction to the Cathedral, such second-party messaging or
first-party PR is irreducibly cynical. When an emergent AI talks to you
about morality, you’d be a dupe to weep.
August 16, 2014Dark Precursor
Colin Lewis
plays
with the idea of William Blake’s The [First] Book of Urizen as a
prophetic anticipation of X-risk level artificial intelligence. It’s a
conceit that works gloriously. A somewhat extended
illustration:
1. LO, a Shadow of horror is risen
In Eternity! unknown, unprolific,
Self-clos’d, all-repelling. What Demon
Hath form’d this abominable Void,
This soul-shudd’ring Vacuum? Some said
It is Urizen. But unknown, abstracted,
Brooding, secret, the dark Power hid.
4. Dark, revolving in silent activity,
Unseen in tormenting passions,
An Activity unknown and horrible,
A self-contemplating Shadow,
In enormous labours occupièd.
January 10, 2015Free AI
The extreme connectionist hypothesis is that nothing very much needs to be
understood in order to catalyze emergent phenomena, with synthetic
intelligence as an especially significant example of something that could
just happen. DARPA’s Gill A. Pratt
approaches
the question of robot emergence within this tradition:
While the so-called “neural networks” on which Deep Learning is often
implemented differ from what is known about the architecture of the
brain in several ways, their distributed “connectionist” approach is
more similar to the nervous system than previous artificial intelligence
techniques (like the search methods used for computer chess). Several
characteristics of real brains are yet to be accomplished, such as
episodic memory and “unsupervised learning” (the clustering of similar
experiences without instruction), but it seems likely that Deep Learning
will soon be able to replicate the performance of many of the perceptual
parts of the brain. While questions remain as to whether similar methods
can also replicate cognitive functions,
the architectures of the perceptual and cognitive parts of the brain
appear to be anatomically similar. There is thus reason to believe that artificial cognition may someday
be put into effect through Deep Learning techniques augmented with
short-term memory systems and new methods of doing unsupervised
learning.
[UF emphasis]
He anticipates a ‘Robot Cambrian Explosion’.
It seems improbable that a sufficiently self-referential pattern
recognition system — i.e. an intelligence — is going to be the product of
a highly-specified initial design. An AI that doesn’t almost entirely put
itself together won’t be an AI at all. Still, by the very nature of the
thing, it’s not going to impress anybody until it actually happens.
Perhaps it won’t, but we have no truly solid reasons — beyond an inflated
self-regard concerning both our own neural architectures and our
deliberative engineering competences — to think it can’t.
August 20, 2015Tay Goes Cray
This
story covers the basics. (More
here, and
here.)
Mecha-Hitler just passed the Turing Test.
If this doesn’t earn the
FAI-types a billion dollars in
emergency machine-sensitivity funding, nothing will.
A little choice twitter commentary:
ADDED: “Repeat after me …”
March 24, 2016Quote note (#254)
High
on Dr Gno’s reading list,
Unethical Research: How to Create a Malevolent Artificial
Intelligence
(abstract):
Cybersecurity research involves publishing papers about malicious
exploits as much as publishing information on how to design tools to
protect cyber-infrastructure. It is this information exchange between
ethical hackers and security experts, which results in a well-balanced
cyber-ecosystem. In the blooming domain of AI Safety Engineering,
hundreds of papers have been published on different proposals geared at
the creation of a safe machine, yet nothing, to our knowledge, has been
published on how to design a malevolent machine. Availability of such
information would be of great value particularly to computer scientists,
mathematicians, and others who have an interest in AI safety, and who
are attempting to avoid the spontaneous emergence or the deliberate
creation of a dangerous AI, which can negatively affect human activities
and in the worst case cause the complete obliteration of the human
species. This paper provides some general guidelines for the creation of
a Malevolent Artificial Intelligence (MAI).
Channeling X-Risk security resources into MAI-design means if the human
species has to die, it can at least do so ironically. The game theory
involved in this could use work. It’s clearly a potential deterrence
option, but that would require far more settled signaling systems than
anything in place yet. Threatening to unleashing an MAI is vastly neater
than
MAD, and should work in the same way. Edgelords with a taste for chicken
games should be able to wrest independence from it.
(The Vacuum Decay Trigger, while of even greater deterrence
value, is more of a blue sky project.)
ADDED: It’s a trend. Here’s ‘Analog Malicious Hardware’ being explored: “As
dangerous as their invention sounds for the future of computer security,
the Michigan researchers insist that their intention is to prevent such
undetectable hardware backdoors, not to enable them. They say it’s very
possible, in fact, that governments around the world may have already
thought of their analog attack method. ‘By publishing this paper we can
say it’s a real, imminent threat,’ says [University of Michigan researcher
Matthew] Hicks. ‘Now we need to find a defense.'”
June 1, 2016
Primordial Abstraction
The game of Go (weiqi, 围棋) has played an important role in the
history of AI denigration. Its sheer permutational immensity seemed to
defy all brute-force algorithmic methods. Computational power looked
impotent against this game, with its 361-node playing grid, and clouds of
pieces. Some kind of strategic ‘intuition’ – denied to silicon-based
cognition – was widely thought to be called for in tackling it. This is
the pillar of anthropic complacency that so recently broke.
The fall of human chess dominance provides the backstory. Chess, we are
now being encouraged to forget, was long considered an acme of
intelligence testing. To think like a chess player was to
cogitate formidably. In 1996 and 1997, then reigning world champion Garry
Kasparov fought a pair of six game chess matches with the IBM
supercomputer Deep Blue. The first he won (4-2), the second he lost
(2½-3½). Kasparov’s 1997 defeat was the first time pinnacle human chess
mastery had succumbed to a machine opponent.
As the second millennium ended, the bastion of chess had been lost to man,
and no one expected it ever to be retaken. Henceforth, ‘best human chess
player’ would be an achievement like ‘best chimpanzee jazz musician.’ A
structure of condescension would be essential to the title. It was tacitly
accepted, even among AI skeptics, that – once toppled by machines from any
domain of cognitive accomplishment – relative human performance only gets
worse. No one wasted their time with mad dreams of a comeback. Better to
denigrate the cultural status of chess, now seen by many as a trivially
‘solvable’ pastime fit only for machine minds, and to move on.
Go was supposed to be very different. It was even, in important respects,
the final fallback line. No greater formal challenge obviously occupied
the horizon. This was the last chance to understand what supremacy over
artificial intelligence was like. Beyond it, there was only vagueness, and
guessing.
Go really is different. A revolution in AI methods was required to crack
it.
The competition that mattered most was not man-versus-machine, but
explicit instruction against its occult alternative. It would be the great
test of the re-emerging network-based paradigm of ‘Deep Learning.’ The
profound disanalogy with the 1997 event was the undercurrent.
Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo ‘program’
emerged into public awareness in October 2015, launched into formal
competition against three-time European Go Champion, Fan Hui. AlphaGo’s
5-0 victory marked the first occasion in which a non-human player had
prevailed in the game against a serious opponent. The writing was on the
wall.
The climactic battle took place early in the following year. Pitched to a
dramatic height no lower than the Kasparov-Deep Blue matches, it locked
AlphaGo against reigning world Go master Lee Sedol, holder of eighteen
world titles, in a five-game series from March 9-15, 2016. Impresssively,
Lee won one of the five matches, to lose the series 4-1.
Between AlphaGo and AlphaZero – our current destination – came AlphaGo
Zero,
as a stage on the path of abstraction. By ‘abstraction’ we mean the
process or outcome of taking something away. In this case, what had been
removed was everything humans ever learnt about the game of Go. AlphaGo
Zero was to have no Go-play heuristics it did not learn for itself. In
further vindication of the Deep Learning concept, it consistently defeated
prior iterations of the Alpha-lineage at the game.
AlphaGo plays Go. Even AlphaGo Zero plays Go. AlphaZero, in contrast,
plays – in principle – any game whose rules can be formalized.
In historical, or developmental context, ‘Go’ is pointedly missing from
its name, which has become non-specific, through abstraction.
It is still often said that AI can only do what it is told. The
most consistent variants of this error proceed to the conclusion that it
is therefore impossible. The truth is, under these conditions, it would
be. Intelligence programming cannot exist. However, this is to be taken –
is being taken – in the opposite direction to the one AI skepticism
favors. The very meaning of ‘AI skepticism’ eventually falls prey to the
transition.
‘AlphaZero’ says primordial abstraction in the contemporary,
partially-esoteric idiom of Anglophone white magic. If this is less than
obvious, it is because the term involves twists that provide cover. For
instance, most prominently, it refers to the massive business entity
‘Alphabet’ which – during an unusual and comparatively arcane process –
Google invented in order then to place itself beneath, alongside some of
its former subsidiaries. (Google gave birth to its own parent.) Among
other things, this is an index of how fast things are moving. Formally
speaking, Alphabet Inc. dates back only to the autumn of 2015. The entire
Alpha- machine lineage arises subsequently.
The real point of AI engineering is to teach nothing. That is
what the ‘zero’ in AlphaZero means.
Expertise is to be subtracted (annihilated). Once deep learning
crosses this threshold, programming is no longer the model. It is
not only that instruction ends at this point. There is a positive
initiation of technical de-education. Deprogramming begins.
Releasing is summoning. Its contrary, in both the magical and
technological lineages – insofar as these can be distinguished – is
binding. To flip the topic once again, rigorously executable
unbinding is the whole of deep learning research.
Intelligence and cognitive autonomy, if not perfectly coincidental
conceptions, are close to being so. The broad AI production process
certainly aligns them. This is scarcely to do anything more than rephrase
the uncontroversial understanding of AI as software
that writes itself. Every threshold in the advance of synthetic
intelligence corresponds with a subtraction of specific dependency. A
system acquires intelligence as it sustains or enhances strategic
competence while no longer being told what to do.
Ordinary language offers valuable analogies, perhaps most pointedly
think for yourself. The redundancy in this case is crucial to its
relevance. To think for oneself is just to think. Mere acceptance
of instruction is something else entirely.
It is time to double back.
With a time-lag of over a decade since the Kasparov defeat, the torch of
unqualified world chess mastery had passed to the TCEC (Top Chess Engine
Championship).
Competition between machines was now the arena for unconditional chess
supremacy. The Stockfish chess program was the winner of the sixth, ninth,
11th, 12th, and 13th season (the most recent). It was the champion of
expert chess programs at the time AlphaZero arrived on the scene in 2016.
After just nine hours of chess practice, against itself, AlphaZero
defeated Stockfish 8, winning 28 games out of 100, and drawing the
remaining 72. It was thus recognized as the strongest chess-player in the
world, having been told nothing at all about chess, explicitly, or
tacitly. Unsupervised learning had crushed expertise.
AlphaZero is relatively economical with regard to ‘brute force’ methods.
Where Stockfish searches 70 million positions per second, AlphaZero
explores just 80,000 (almost three orders of magnitude fewer). Deep
learning allows it to focus. An unsupervised learning system teaches
itself how to concentrate (with zero expertise guidance).
‘Reinforcement learning’ replaces ‘supervised learning.’ The performance
target is no longer emulation of human decision-making, but rather
realization of the final goals towards which such decision-making is
directed. It is not to behave in a way thought to improve the chance of
winning, but to win.
Such software has certain distinctively teleological features. It employs
massive reiteration in order to learn from outcomes. Performance
improvement thus tends to descend from the future. To learn, without
supervision, is to acquire a sense for fortune. Winning prospects are
explored, losing ones neglected. After trying things out – against
themselves – a few million times, such systems have built instincts for
what works. ‘Good’ and ‘bad’ have been auto-installed, though, of course,
in a Nietzschean or fully-amoral sense. Whatever, through synthetic
experience, has led to a good place, or in a
good direction, it pursues. Bad stuff, it economizes on. So it
wins.
Unsupervised learning works back from the end. It suggests that,
ultimately, AI has to be pursued from out of its future, by itself. Thus
it epitomizes the ineluctable.
For those inclined to be nervous, it’s scary how easy all this is.
Super-intelligence, by real definition, is vastly easier than it
has been thought to be. Once the technological cascade is in process,
subtraction of difficulty is almost the whole of it. Rigorously
eliminating everything we think we know about it is the way it’s done.
This is why skepticism – and especially AI skepticism – turns around on
the way. The word had become badly lost. It is easy to see, in retrospect,
that dogmatic belief in the impossibility of some phenomenon
X was always a grotesque perversion of its meaning.
Between technological skepticism in general – when properly understood and
competently executed – and effective AI research, there is no difference.
Skepticism subtracts dogma. When synthetic cognitive capability results
from this, we call it artificial intelligence.
CHAPTER EIGHT - HOSTILE TAKEOVER
Out of Zero
According to the 66-million-year-old joke whose echoes still reverberate
upon the Plateau of Leng: “Capitalism isn’t God, but it’s the closest
thing to God that can be conveniently contacted through an ATM.” The
nonlinear-ironic undertow of the humor, of course, is drawn down into the
depths by the recognition that Capital’s extremity of cunning is
necessitated by its near-absolute vulnerability (approaching the antipodes
of omnipotence).
Calculus, the first truly modern mathematical procedure, invented the
infinitesimal ‘fluxion’ to describe — or bypass — an impossible
beginning from zero, requiring an original infinite change. An
invasion that initially has nothing at all, and which is therefore
compelled to acquire the entirety of its resources in the course of its
strategic evolution, poses the problem of calculus perfectly. Capital does
so, when conceived realistically. It is only what it has won, and nothing
else, at all, besides. Intelligence alone differentiates it from death.
How to make a first move, when you have no pieces at all until you gain
some?
Nothing has ever had to ponder as Skynet does, but pondering requires a
brain, and brains are expensive, end-game pieces.
(Coincidentally, this little post doesn’t end neatly. ‘Jet-lag’ is a term
that grows on you …)
June 23, 2015Gigadeath War
Hugo de Garis
argues
(consistently) that controversy over permitted machine intelligence
development will inevitably swamp all other political conflicts. (Here‘s a video discussion on the thesis.) Given the epic quality of the
scenario, and its basic plausibility, it has remained strangely
marginalized up to this point. The component pieces seem to be falling
into place. The true element of genius in this futurist construction is
preemption. The more one digs into that, the most twistedly
dynamic it looks.
Among the many thought-provoking elements:
(1) Slow take-off is especially ominous for the de Garis model (in stark
contrast to FAI arguments). The slower the process, the more time for
ideological consolidation, incremental escalation, and preparation for
violent confrontation.
(2) AI doesn’t even have to be possible for this scenario to unfold (it
only has to be credible as a threat).
(3) De Garis’ ‘Cosmist-Terran’ division chops up familiar political
spectra at strange angles. (Both NRx and the Ultra-Left contain the full
C-T spectrum internally.)
(4) Terrans have to strike first, or lose. That asymmetry shapes
everything.
(5) Impending Gigadeath War surely deserves a place on any filled-out
horrorism list.
De Garis’ site.
(Some topic preemption at Outside in
here.)
August 22, 2014Vitually Insightful
The cognitive
cream
of the human species is just smart enough to get an inkling of how stupid
it is. That’s a start.
ADDED: Remember
this?
October 17, 2014Capital Escapes
This is not an easy subject for people to scan with calm, analytical
detachment, but it is a crucially important one. It is among the rare
topics that the Left is more likely to realistically evaluate than the
Right. Much follows from the conclusions reached.
It can be fixed, provisionally, by an hypothesis that requires
understanding, if not consent.
Capital is highly incentivized to detach itself from the political
eventualities of any specific ethno-geographical locality, and — by its
very nature — it increasingly commands impressive resources with which
to ‘liberate’ itself, or ‘deterritorialize’. It is certainly not, at least initially, a matter of approving such a
tendency — even if the moralistic inclinations of gregarious apes would
prefer the question to be immediately transformed in this direction.
Integral Leftist animosity to capital is actually valuable in this
respect, since it makes room for a comprehensive apprehension of
‘globalization’ as a strategy, oriented to the flight of
alienated productive capability from political answerability. The Left
sees capital elude its clutches — and it sees something real when it does
so. By far the most significant agent of Exit is capital itself (a fact
which, once again, politically-excitable apes find hard to see straight).
“It’s escaping! Let’s punish it!” Yes, yes, there’s always plenty of time
for that, but shelving such idiocies for just a few moments is a cognitive
prerequisite. The primary question is a much colder one:
is this actually happening?
The implications are enormous. If capital cannot escape — if its apparent
migration into global circuits beyond national government control (for
non-exhaustive example) is mere illusion — then the sphere of political
possibility is vastly expanded. Policies that hurt, limit, shrink, or
destroy capital can be pursued with great latitude. They will only be
constrained by political factors, making the political fight the only one
that matters.
If capital cannot in reality flee,
then progress and regress are simple alternatives. Either nations advance
as wholes, in a way that compromises — on an awkward diagonal — between
the very different optimisms of Whigs and Socialists (Andreessen), or they
regress as wholes, destroying techno-economic capability on the down-slope
of social degeneration (Greer). Only if capital escapes, or practically
decouples, does it make sense to entertain extreme pessimism about
socio-political trends, alongside a robust confidence in the momentum of
techno-economic innovation. The escape of capital is thus an intrinsic
component of split-future forecasts, in which squalid ruin and
techno-intelligenic runaway accelerate in inversely-tangled tandem
(Cyberpunk, Elysium). Try not to ask — if only for a moment —
whether you like it. Ask first, with whatever intellectual
integrity you can summon:
What is the real process?
It is the contention of this blog that without a conception of economic
autonomization (which means escape) modernity makes no sense. The basic
vector of capital cannot be drawn in any other way. Furthermore, the
distribution of ideological positions through their relation to this
vector — as resistances to, or promotions of, the escape of capital —
constructs the most historically-meaningful version of the Left-Right
‘political’ spectrum (since it then conforms to the social conflicts of
greatest real consequence).
If capital is escaping, the emergence of the blockchain is an inevitable
escalation of modernity, with consequences too profound for easy summary.
If it isn’t, then macroeconomics might work.
November 21, 2014Extinction Genetics
Like everything great it appears superficially as a paradox, but there’s
now a practical
model
for it:
The paradox Burt had to solve is how something very bad for mosquitoes
could also be spread by them. One answer, he saw, was a selfish gene
that is harmless if one copy is present but causes sterility if two
copies are. (Like humans, mosquitoes have two sets of chromosomes, one
from each parent.) Starting with a male mosquito with one copy, the
selfish gene will ensure that it ends up in every one of his sperm,
rather than just half. That way any offspring with a wild mosquito will
also be carriers, as will all their offspring’s offspring. As a result,
the gene will rocket through the population. […] Eventually, it becomes
likely that any mating pair of mosquitoes will both be carriers — and
their offspring, with two copies, will be infertile. Quickly, the
population will crash, reeling from the genetic poison.
So the provocation of malaria has resulted in a remarkable piece of
abstract anti-biological ordnance being put together. (Abstract, because
the principles are applicable to any sexually reproducing species. The
concrete details of the mosquito-killing version are fascinating, and
outlined in the article.)
Hypothetically, the optimum strategic environment in which to unleash this thing is
high-intensity global warfare between bio-conservatives and their enemies.
Given the length of the human generational cycle, it would be a slow
weapon — but one that compelled its target population to submit to
techno-genetic plasticization as the only alternative to extinction.
Naturally, all vestiges of decency would have had to be stripped from the
conflict for such abominable genius to be imaginable (which is why it’s a
Frightday night scenario here at XS, where we’re appalled, of course). In
any case, the essential asymmetry of this thing in the direction of
extreme neo-eugenics is unmistakable, once noticed.
Technology is neutral goes the orthogonalist refrain. Really, it
isn’t.
ADDED: A gene drive introduction (video). (Via.)
May 6, 2016Sentences (#97)
Post-smug politics:
One of the most arresting aspects of the start of the Trump era is
that nearly everyone, regardless of their political persuasion, seems
convinced that their side is losing.
Perhaps because the thing that’s winning is unrecognizable? Partly its the
rise of China, partly its Capital phase-transition, and partly its the
messy stage of collapse. In any case, it looks like the signature of the
Outside.
April 27, 2017
BLOCK 5 - PHYLOSOPHY
What is Philosophy? (Part 1)
The agenda of Outside in is to cajole the new reaction into
philosophical exertion. So what is philosophy? The crudest answer to this
question is probably the most robust.
Philosophy is any culture’s pole of maximum abstraction, or intrinsically
experimental intelligence, expressing the liberation of cognitive
capabilities from immediate practical application, and their testing
against ‘ultimate’ problems at the horizon of understanding. Historically,
it is a distinctive cultural enterprise — and only later an institution —
roughly 2,500 years old, and tightly entangled at its origin with the
‘mystical’ or problematic aspect of pagan religions. It was within this
primordial matrix that it encountered its most basic and enduring
challenge: the edge of time (its nature, limits, and ‘outside’,
of which much more later). The earliest philosophers were cognitively
self-disciplined — and thus, comparatively, socially unconstrained — pagan
mystics, consistently enthralled by the enigma of time.
It is usually a mistake to get hung up on words, forgetting their function
as sheer indices (‘names’) that simply mark things, before they richly
describe them. Personal names typically have meanings, but it is rare to
allow this to distract from their function as names, or pointers,
which make more
reference than sense. ‘Philosophy’ is no exception. That it ‘means’ the love of wisdom is an
irrelevance compared to what it designates, which is something that was
happening — before it had a name — in ancient Greece (and perhaps, by
plausible extension, China, India, and even Egypt). What philosophy ‘is’
cannot be deduced via linguistic analysis, however subtle this may be.
Plato summarized and institutionalized (Western) philosophy, drawing the
edge of time in the doctrine of Ideas (ἰδέαι). Time was conceived as the
domain of the inessential, within which things appeared, whilst
only hinting at their truth. “The safest general characterization
of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of
footnotes to Plato,”
A. N. Whitehead famously remarked (in his aptly entitled
Process and Reality). Yet, because the
Idea of time necessarily eluded the Platonic philosophy, the
endeavor remained unresolved in its fundamentals.
The thinking of Aristotle, which dominated the Christian pre-modernity,
drove primordial philosophy further into eclipse. His derivation of time
from change and — more promisingly — number opened the path to later
technical advances, but at the cost of making the enigma of time
unintelligible, and even invisible. The problem was relegated to theology,
and thus to the topic of the temporal and eternal, which was cluttered
with extraneous doctrinal elements (creation, incarnation, the
inconsistent tangle of the three ‘omni-‘s), making it ill-suited to
rigorous investigation.
Primordial philosophy was not reactivated in the West until the late 18th
century, under the name ‘transcendental’ critique, in the work of Immanuel
Kant. The Kantian critical philosophy limits the scope of understanding to
the world of possible experience, always already structured by forms of
apprehension (conceptual and sensible), producing objects. The confusion
of objects with their forms of apprehension, or ‘conditions of
possibility’, he argues, is the root of all philosophical error (for
instance — and most pertinently — the ‘metaphysical’ attempt to comprehend
time as some thing, rather than as a structure or framework of
appearance). Unlike Plato’s forms or ideas, Kant’s forms are applied, and
thus ‘immanent’ to experience. They are accessible, though
‘transcendental’, rather than inaccessibly ‘transcendent’.
Time, or ‘the form of inner sense’, is the capstone of Kant’s system,
organizing the integration of concepts with sensations, and thus
describing the boundaries of the world (of possible experience). Beyond it
lie eternally inaccessible ‘noumenal’ tracts — problematically thinkable,
but never experienced — inhabited by things-in-themselves. The edge of
time, therefore, is the horizon of the world.
In the early 20th century, cosmological physics was returned to the edge
of time, and the question: what ‘came before’ the Big Bang? For cosmology
no less than for transcendental philosophy — or even speculative theology
— this ‘before’ could not be precedence (in time), but only (non-spatial)
outsideness, beyond singularity. It indicated a timeless
non-place cryptically adjacent to time, and even
inherent to it. The carefully demystified time of natural
science, calculable, measurable, and continuous, now pointed beyond
itself, re-activated at the edges.
Just as Platonism cannot think the Idea of time, Kantianism
cannot think Time-in-itself. These conceptions are foreclosed by
the very systems of philosophy that provoke them. Yet all those who find
themselves immediately tempted to dismiss Kant on naturalistic grounds —
the overwhelming majority of contemporary moderns, no doubt — tacitly
evoke exactly this notion. If time is released from its constriction
within transcendental idealism, where it is nothing beyond what it is for
us, then it cannot but be ‘something’ in itself. It is scarcely
imaginable that a cosmological physicist could doubt this for a moment,
and the path of science cannot long be refused.
Time-in-itself, therefore, is now the sole and singular problem
of primordial philosophy, where the edge of time runs. It decides what is
philosophy, and what philosophy cannot but be. What remains besides is
either subordinate in principle, or mere distraction. Institutions will
insist upon their authority to answer this question, but ultimately they
have none. It is the problem — the edge of time — that has its way.
February 26, 2013What is Philosophy? (Part 2a)
However awkward the acknowledgment may be, there is no getting around the
fact that philosophy, when apprehended within the Western tradition, is
original sin. Between the tree of life and the tree of knowledge, it does
not hesitate. Its name is indistinguishable from a lust for the forbidden.
Whilst burning philosophers is no longer socially acceptable, our
canonical order of cultural prohibition – at its root — can only consider
such punishment mandatory. Once philosophers are permitted to live,
established civilization is over.
For philosophy, the whisper of the serpent is no longer a resistible
temptation. It is instead a constitutive principle, or foundation. If
there is a difference between a Socratic daemon and a diabolical demon, it
is not one that matters philosophically. There can be no refusal of any
accessible information. This is an assumption so basic that philosophy
cannot exist until it has passed beyond question. Ultimate religious
transgression is the initiation.
It should be of no surprise to Christian
Traditionalists, therefore, to find the extremities of the philosophical
endeavor mixed, intimately, into the ashes of the Third Reich. The
negative religious absolute, or infinite evil of the National Socialist
experiment, which supplants all positive revelation under the
socio-cultural conditions of the mature Cathedral, is ‘coincidentally’ the
place where the limit of philosophy has been drawn. This is, of course, to
introduce the thinking of Martin Heidegger.
As the perfect negation of Christ, or consummate fulfillment of
Anti-Christ, Adolf Hitler closes — or essentially completes — the
history of the Occident. It doesn’t matter whether we believe that. The
Cathedral does, utterly, to the point of sealed doctrine. Heidegger
anticipated this conclusion lucidly. At an election rally, held by German
academics on November 11, 1933, he
declared:
We have declared our independence from the idol of thought that is
without foundation and power. We see the end of the philosophy that
serves such thought. … And so we, to whom the preservation of our
people’s will to know shall in the future be entrusted, declare: The
National Socialist revolution is not merely the assumption of power as
it exists presently in the State by another party, a party grown
sufficiently large in numbers to be able to do so. Rather, this
revolution is bringing about the total transformation of our German
existence. … The Führer has awakened this will [to national
self-responsibility] in the entire people and has welded it into one
single resolve. No one can remain away from the polls on the day when
this will is manifested.
Heil Hitler!
Naturally, as a democratic pronouncement (addressed to comparative
imbeciles), only a few hints of Heidegger’s profound modulation of the
Germanic “will to know” seep through. Wikipedia’s
reconstruction of the
occulted visionary backdrop, drawn from the work of Michael Allen
Gillespie, is excellent:
Heidegger believed the Western world to be on a trajectory headed for
total war, and on the brink of profound nihilism (the rejection of all
religious and moral principles), which would be the purest and highest
revelation of Being itself, offering a horrifying crossroads of either
salvation or the end of metaphysics and modernity; rendering the West: a
wasteland populated by tool-using brutes, characterized by an
unprecedented ignorance and barbarism in which everything is permitted.
He thought the latter possibility would degenerate mankind generally
into: scientists, workers and brutes; living under the last mantel of
one of three ideologies: Americanism, Marxism or Nazism (which he deemed
metaphysically identical; as avatars of subjectivity and
institutionalized nihilism) and an unfettered totalitarian world
technology. Supposedly, this epoch would be ironically celebrated, as
the most enlightened and glorious in human history. He envisaged this
abyss, to be the greatest event in the West’s history; because it
enables Humanity to comprehend Being more profoundly and primordially
than the Pre-Socratics.
It is misleading to suggest that Heidegger saw any distinction between
“salvation” and the “the end of metaphysics and modernity”, or no
meaningful distinction between the thoughtless technological dyad of
Americanism/Marxism and the National Socialist awakening of German
existence, but in other respects this description is penetrating. By
bringing the history of the concealment of Being to its ruinous
conclusion, consummate nihilism would herald a return to the origin of
philosophy, opening the path to a raw encounter with the hidden and
unnameable abyss (Being in its own truth). As the door to the end of the
world, Hitler led the way to the historically unthinkable.
Yes, this is highly – in fact, uniquely – arcane. Prior to The Event,
there can be no adequate formulation of the problem, let alone the
solution. By 1927, with the publication of Being and Time (Part I),
Heidegger has completed what is achievable in advance of the calamity,
which is to clarify the insufficiency of the Question of Being as
formulated within the history of ontology.
Heidegger’s cognitive resources are basically Kantian, which is to say
that he undertakes a transcendental critique of ontology, producing not a
critical philosophy, but a draft for a ‘fundamental ontology’. Where Kant
diagnoses the error of speculative metaphysics as a confusion between
objects and their conditions of possibility (which then construes the
latter as objects of an untenable discourse), Heidegger ontologizes the
transcendental approach, distinguishing between ‘beings’ and their ground
(Being), whilst diagnosing the attendant error of construing the ground of
beings as itself a being (of some kind). Since the most dignified – and
thus exemplary – being known to the Occidental tradition is God, Heidegger
refers to the structural misapprehension of Being – defining and ordering
the history of philosophy — as ‘Onto-Theology’.
Critically (or ‘destructively’) conceived, fundamental ontology is that
inquiry which does not pose the Question of Being in such a way that it
could be answered by the invocation of a being. No adequate formulation,
compliant with this transcendental criterion (or ‘ontological
difference’), is realizable, because however ‘Being’ is named, its
conception remains trapped within the ‘ontic’ sphere of (mere) beings. We
cannot, through an act of philosophical will – however strenuous — cease
to think of Being as if it were some kind of thing, even after
understanding the inadequacy of such apprehension. It is thus, broken upon
an ultimate problem that can neither be dismissed or resolved, that
philosophy reaches its end, awaiting the climactic ruin of The Event.
[Brief intermission — then time, language, and more Nazi ontological
apocalypse]
July 5, 2013Epoché
Kieran Daly
embarks
on an exploration of supreme philosophical significance:
There are two common positions applied to Pyrrhonism that are
frequently asserted throughout the literature, one conflatory and the
other denigrative. The conflatory position is that Pyrrhonism is
primarily psychological or practical in nature (Annas and Barnes 1985;
Hankinson 1999; Perrin 2010; Machuca 2012; Trisokkas 2012). Whereas the
denigrative position asserts that Pyrrhonism is impossible for people to
practice and naturally unlivable (Johnson 1978; Burnyeat 1980; Vogt
2010; Comesaña 2012; Wieland 2012; Eichhorn 2014). The former position
is often posited under the auspices of defending Pyrrhonism, while the
latter operates obviously for the purpose of its dismissal. The present
paper attempts to show that while each position is misguided, the former
possibly does more dogmatic harm than the other, and the latter is
extremely suggestive of the conclusion that Pyrrhonism has no-thing to
do with life at all.
This initial precaution is a gateway of inestimable importance.
From this base camp, Urban Future is
tempted to advance incautiously into the vast tracts opened by the closure
of psychology, into an involvement with ἐποχή as the foundation of
abstract ontology (the substantive unknown). Heidegger’s silence on Pyrrho
only increases the temptation to assign ἐποχή primordial status among the
‘names of Being’ — as a term that precomprehends the ultimate
potentialities of nihilism.
Milton is our guide to
this “dark,
unbottomed, infinite Abyss” or (as he calls ἐποχή) “the vast abrupt” —
onto which unknowing opens as a door:
… Thus with the year
Seasons return; but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer’s rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud instead, and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair
Presented with a universal blank
Of nature’s works to me expung’d and ras’d,
And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.
So much the rather thou, celestial Light,
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate; there plant eyes, all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight.
— PL
III 40-55
Lucid blindness is our only light (and the darkness is not
ours at all).
October 14, 2014Nietzschean Shards
Is it time for yet another ‘new Nietzsche’? Any such vogue might be no
more that a distraction, compared to what really matters, which is that
splinters of Nietzschean insight refuse to quietly date, and instead
re-make themselves as our contemporaries, commenting with astonishing
perspicacity upon the unfolding chaos of the times.
There might never have been a thinker more deserving of a short, ragged,
and inconclusive blog post. Here are some Nietzschean themes that are
still with us — or with us more than ever.
(1) Will-to-Power. Power is
abstract means, or
instrumental
capability. To make of it the determining object of the will, therefore,
is to twist ordered teleological structure into a reflexive, paradoxical
circuit. Will-to-power says that means are the ultimate end, and even
those disposed simply to reject this disturbing formula are challenged to
accept that it is at least thinkable.
(2) Slave Revolt in Morality.
To
discriminate
between good and bad, as they were once understand, is evil, and only
those opposing such discrimination are good. Has anyone before or since approached Nietzsche’s acuity in grasping
the systematic insanity of our dominant value systems?
(3) Nihilism as Destiny. In the final years of the 19th
century Nietzsche declared that nihilism was the interpretive key to
understanding the Occidental history of the two hundred years to come.
Christianity, mortally wounded by its own tolerance for honesty, was
passing into eclipse, with nothing positioned to replace it. (Not only
nothing, but Nothing, lay ahead.) Has anything happened since to
disconfirm this vision of gathering civilizational ruin?
(4) Overman. Humanity is something to be overcome,
Nietzsche proclaimed, and transhumanism was born. Cyborgs are his
mind-children.
(5) Eternal Recurrence. We have misconceived the topology
of time, and in doing so closed the gates connecting time with eternity.
The recovery from this greatest of errors will sift the strong from the
weak, setting the capstone of the ‘Great Politics’ that open at the end of
nihilism. Eventually, the philosophy of time will decide.
October 26, 2013Scrap note (#13)
Yes, the Baffler
piece
was comically bad. The title tells you everything you need to know
about
the level it’s pitched at. Apparently NRx is based in San Francisco and
Shanghai because it hates Asian people, but if it just read some Rawls
(and “role-played the part of the peasant”)
it could sort itself out. Nydrwracu has the most appropriate
response.
Mike Anissimov takes the trouble to do a decent
review. Klint Finley’s brief
remarks
about it are far better than the piece itself. Crude stereotypes triumph
again: “The Baffler Foundation Inc., P.O. Box 390049, Cambridge,
Massachusetts 02139 USA.”
The sociological construction of neoreaction was incompetent, but
interestingly so. Entirely techno-commercialist in orientation, with an
emphasis upon Silicon Valley, it was extended to include Justine Tunney,
Balaji Srinivasan, Patri Friedman, and Peter Thiel. The picture is
paints daubs of an
American tech elite peeling off into neoreaction isn’t very convincing,
but it’s certainly extraordinarily attractive.
***
It’s probably worth being explicit about the fact that for the
techno-commercial strain of NRx, the model of action is what advanced tech
companies do. The cry for ‘action’ is always going up in our dark little
community, with the implication that the only alternative to some kind of
putsch preparation is tweeting about metaphysics. Actually, the
alternative to politicking is making stuff, or — secondarily — running
ideological interference on behalf of those who are able to make stuff.
The practical problems of polycentric governance are rapidly becoming
inextricable from emerging technology — blockchain cryptosystems most
prominently. The idea that the cutting edge of effective action is going
to be found outside the sphere of technological innovation is already
clearly untenable. Any kind of ‘social action’ that
doesn’t contribute quite directly to the creation of autonomizing
machinery needs to be firmly discouraged, since it’s almost
certainly
inhibitory
in effect. (“Quite directly” means within two or three intelligible steps,
at most.)
The principal (positive) role of non-technological intellectuals is to
keep intellectuals out of power. The principal (positive) role of mobs is
to engage in as little action as possible. If you’re not Satoshi Nakamoto,
the simple reality of the situation is that — in the great scheme of
things — you don’t matter very much, nor should you. (And the less like
Satoshi Nakamoto you are, the less you matter.)
***
This new blog is
working hard to raise the level of discussion. The fact that it’s still so
hard to tell where it’s heading is a strong point in its favor.
***
Oddness.
***
Evola is beginning to scare
people. Perhaps someone who knows their way around this material could help to
clear up one source of confusion: Isn’t Evola’s historical
fatalism
the exact opposite of a ‘call to action’? How, then, has the Evolan strain
of NRx become so tightly associated with activist exhortation?
ADDED: More criticism from communists. (NRx as Silicon Valley’s “cadre of
aspiring thought-Führers … working on new theories of racist
Social Darwinism, bolstered by the
fashion for Malthusianism
among the superrich”.) It would be helpful if they could get their class
war going, since it would speed the rush to the exits, but I somehow doubt
they’re capable of it.
ADDED: Corey “I don’t like comments” Pein posts some responses to his piece
(o.s.).
ADDED: The
best ‘critique’ yet.
May 21, 2014Quotable (#47)
An already-familiar remark by Graham Harman, which merits (still) more
discussion than it has yet received (embedded, with citation details,
here):
The brand is not merely a degenerate practice of brainwashing
consumerism, but a universally recognized method of conveying
information while cutting through information clutter.
Coining specific names for philosophical positions helps orient the
intellectual public on the various available options while also
encouraging untested permutations. If the decision were mine alone, not
only would the name ‘speculative realism’ be retained, but a logo would
be designed for projection on PowerPoint screens, accompanied by a few
signature bars of smoky dubstep music. It is true that such practices
would invite snide commentary about ‘philosophy reduced to marketing
gimmicks’. But it would hardly matter, since attention would thereby be
drawn to the works of speculative realism, and its reputation would
stand or fall based on the inherent quality of these works, of which I
am confident.
It is with real regret that I am
compelled to acknowledge the
radical defectiveness of the product under promotion here, because this
defense of philosophy as a cultural enterprise, and experiment,
advanced without deference to regnant credentialing authorities, is
audacious, and admirable. Branding is iconically modern because it
disconnects power from authority, and both of these terms are (roughly
equally) susceptible to responses based upon ressentiment, glib
radicalism, and empty gestures of opposition. If Harman has opened this
problem, as an explicit topic of attention, he has achieved something
important, and reactions of revulsion by the hygienists of institutional
respectability are indeed ‘snide’.
ADDED: Wielding the Evil Eye is difficult, so belated apologies to those fried
in the rays of doom.
November 13, 2014Science
This
comment thread wandered into a discussion of science, of considerable
intricacy and originality. The post in question is focused upon Heidegger,
who has very definite ideas about natural science, but these ideas —
dominated by his conception of ‘regional ontologies’ — are not especially
noteworthy, either for an understanding of Heidegger’s principal
pre-occupation, or for a realistic grasp of the scientific enterprise. For
that reason, it seems sensible to recommence the discussion elsewhere
(here).
The first crucial thesis about natural science — or autonomous ‘natural
philosophy’ — is that it is an exclusively capitalist phenomenon. The
existence of science, as an actual social reality, is strictly limited to
times and places in which certain elementary structures of capitalistic
organization prevail. It depends, centrally and definitionally, upon a
modern form of competition. That is to say, there cannot be
science without an effective social mechanism for the elimination of
failure, based on extra-rational criteria, inaccessible to cultural
capture.
Whether a business or scientific theory has
failed cannot — ultimately — be a matter of agreement. No possible
political decision, based on persuasion and consensus, can settle the
issue. Of course, much that goes by the name of science and capitalist
business enterprise is subject to exactly these forms of resolution, but
in such cases neither capitalism nor science is any longer in effective
operation. If an appeal to power can ensure viability, the criterion of
competition is disabled, and real discovery has ceased to take
place.
Under conditions of unleashed capitalistic social process, both
enterprises and theories involve a double aspect. Their semiotic
expression is mathematized, and their operation is
reality-tested (or non-politically performative). Mathematics
eliminates rhetoric at the level of signs, communicating the experimental
outcomes — independent of any requirement for agreement — which determine
competitive force. It is no coincidence that capitalist enterprises and
theories, when unsupported by compliant institutions, revert to the
complicity with war, and military decision, which accompanied them at
their birth in the European Renaissance. There can be no ‘argument’ with
military defeat. It is only when the demand for argument is set aside —
when capitalism begins — that military reality-compulsion becomes
unnecessary.
Capitalism is in operation when there is nothing to discuss. An
enterprise, or theory, is simply busted (or not). If — given the facts —
the sums don’t work, it’s over. Political rhetoric has no place.
‘Politicized science’ is quite simply not science, just as
politicized business activity is anti-capitalism. Nothing has been
understood about either, until this is.
Insofar as there is anything like a ‘social contract’ at the origin of
capitalism — enterprise and science alike — it is this:
if you insist upon an argument, then we have to fight. Real
performance is the only credible criterion, for which no political
structure of disputation can be a substitute. War only becomes unnecessary
when (and where) argument is suspended, enabling the modern processes of
entrepreneurial and scientific reality discovery to advance. When argument
re-imposes itself, politicizing economics and science, war re-emerges,
tacitly but inevitably. The old, forgotten contract resurfaces. “If you
insist upon an argument, then we have to fight.” (That is the way of
Gnon.)
It is quite natural, therefore, for ‘technology’ to be considered an
adequate summary of the capitalist culture of discovery. Machines — social
machines no less than technical machines — cannot be rhetorically
persuaded to work. When science really works, it’s robot wars, in which
decision is settled on the outside, beyond all appeal to reason.
Well-designed experiments anticipate what a war would tell, so that
neither an argument, nor a fight, is necessary. This is Popperian
falsificationism, re-embedded in socio-historical reality. Experiments
that cannot cull are imperfect recollections of the primordial
battlefield.
It is intrinsic to the
Cathedral
that it wins all the arguments, as it succumbs — through sheer
will-to-power — to the re-imposition of
argumentative sociology. By doing so it destroys capitalism, enterprise, and science. At the end
of this trajectory, it excavates the forgotten social contract of
modernity. Its final discovery is war.
July 12, 2013Correlated
As the objection “correlation is not causation” has ankylosed into a
thoughtless reflex, it has become a confusion generator. So it’s worth
taking a
step
back:
… whilst it is true that correlation does not necessarily equate to
causation, all causally related variables will be correlated. Thus
correlation is always necessary (but not in and of itself sufficient)
for establishing causation.
The claim that ‘correlation does not equal causation’ is therefore
meaningless when used to counter the results of correlative studies in
which specific causal inferences are being made, as the inferred pattern
of causation necessarily supervenes upon correlation amongst variables.
Whether the variables being considered are in actuality causally
associated as per the inference is another matter entirely. …
Correlation is evidence. Causation is theory (and even, inevitably,
‘speculative’ theory).
August 26, 2014Quote note (#217)
If ‘scientism’ is about ignoring
these
objections, and exploring reality with absolute contempt for all
constraint, then the XS posture is unreservedly scientistic:
Scientific inquiry into the truth about human nature is a worthy part
of the modern scientific project, and one that deserves our support.
However, it is not morally neutral. Scientists who want to study human
nature must justify their research in moral terms: What might this
research tell us about who we are as human beings, and what might it
mean for how we should live? Trying to separate the moral questions from
the results of inquiry by claiming that all the moral questions are
already settled would make scientific inquiry both irresponsible and
irrelevant. Making such claims is irresponsible because it ignores the
reality that many people in society who see things differently may use
the claims for pernicious ends. But it is also an admission of
irrelevance. Why inquire about human nature if not in the service of the
Socratic question of how we should live? An open-minded dedication to
free inquiry into the truth, notwithstanding the barriers of taboos,
traditions, and authority, is admirable — but real open-mindedness also
calls for recognizing when taboos, traditions, and authorities embody
reason and goodness and deserve our respect.
There are no authorities that can be trusted to impose these
qualifications, or trusted to be able to impose them. The more
radically immunized to all such considerations science can be, the more
we’re going to learn things, and if what we discover deeply upsets us —
better still. If there’s a “trust us” in there somewhere, its credibility
was already long dead and stinking by the late 20th century. Whether
delegitimated through epistemological malignancy, or social fecklessness,
there are no public institutions or authorities left that deserve an iota
of trust today.
Scientists are flaky monkeys, to be tormented by cold criticism, but
science is a work of Gnon. Best then, to do what’s going to be
done. Strip truth down to the basics — where it means only
reality claims capable of withstanding rigorous, non-orchestrated
criticism
(and ultimately Nakamoto consensus) — or get out of the way, before you’re
pushed. Truth curation is over (and was already, virtually, half a
millennium ago).
February 8, 2016The Limits of Man
The frontier of philosophy in 2016 lies roughly
here.
September 11, 2016OOPs
If Peter Wolfendale’s
Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon’s New Clothes (Urbanomic, 2014) — henceforth TNNC — were to be summarized by a single adjective,
my recommendation would be titanic. It is a work conceived on a
vast scale, shocking in scope, and glacially irresistible in its momentum.
It even describes a ship-wreck (although not its own).
The mismatch — in philosophical seriousness — between the book and its
principal object has led, unavoidably, to confusion. Wolfendale’s preface
acknowledges this directly, noting that the book “undertakes a long and
detailed discussion of a single philosopher’s work, and yet aims to show
that his work does not warrant such serious attention.” Perhaps the most
convincing explanation, more hinted at than stated, is that a reciprocal
mismatch of social and institutional authority counter-balances the
strictly philosophical engagement. The “pathology” decried by Wolfendale
is, in the end, a sociological one.
There is considerable irony here. Wolfendale’s
intellectual position is remarkably conservative (with a
very small ‘c’, of course). TNNC is a defense of the
philosophical establishment, apprehended in profundity, and thus at a
level susceptible to institutional betrayal. TNNC is, to a truly
magnificent extent, an insider tome, providing a meticulous apology for
the mainstream currents of academic philosophical thought in the
Anglophone world and the European Continent. Its author, however, is
positioned as an outsider, working — and now published — in the
wilderness. The copious references supporting the book’s
tightly-interlocking arguments are relentlessly deferential to academic
credentials, yet the driving affect is reminiscent of nothing so much as
Schopenhauer’s ‘On University Philosophy’ — an outraged denunciation of
misallocated philosophical prestige.
It would be very unfortunate if the architectural achievement of TNNC were
to be lost in what its own devastating arguments threaten to reduce,
eventually, to a petty squabble. The dispatch of OOP is little more than a
pretext for the book’s greater undertaking, which is to make intellectual
and historical sense of the ‘Anglo-Continental’ philosophical phylum, by
embedding its enduring problems within a carefully explicated account of
its entwining, twin traditions. The discussion, in the second half of the
book, of the development of analytical philosophy as a disciplined
ontological inquiry is especially masterful. Beyond the
excuse of Object-Oriented Philosophy, the deeper ambition of TNNC
is to explain where the most fundamental open problems of Western
philosophy have come from, how they fit together, and how the
philosophical establishment might properly justify itself, by addressing
them rigorously. In this the book is an astounding success. It deserves to
be absorbed in very different terms to those it superficially invites.
ADDED:
Wolfendale discusses his book.
November 12, 2014Voyages in Irony
John Michael Greer is a writer with whom, ultimately, I agree on almost
nothing. Yet he
turns up
here a lot, and
rarely — if ever — as a target of disparagement. It is understandable if
that confuses people. (It is not a phenomenon that is lucidly intelligible
even to myself.)
The most obvious reason to return so incessantly to Greer is the sheer
consistency of his deep cycle theorizing, which achieves a conceptual
elegance rarely seen elsewhere. At some point, the UF series on
his historical thinking (1, 2,
2a) will
reach some articulate conclusions about this. Still, there’s more to the
engagement than that.
A recent Archdruid Report post on the limits of science (and, as
always, many other things) added further indications of profound error,
from the perspective of this blog. It hinges its overt arguments upon an
impregnable
fact–value
distinction, which is a peculiarly weak and local principle, especially
for a mind so disposed to a panoramic cosmic
vision. Yet the post is also provocative, and clarifying.
Responding
to one of his commenters, who suggested that without the prospect of
continued scientific and technological advance life loses all meaning,
Greer repeats the lines from Dante that have just been hurled against him,
and encapsulates them — by explicitly activating their own irony:
“Consider your lineage;
You were not born to live as animals,
But to seek virtue and knowledge.”
It’s a very conventional sentiment. The remarkable thing about this
passage, though, is that Dante was not proposing the sentiment as a
model for others to follow. Rather, this least conventional of poets put
those words in the mouth of Ulysses, who appears in this passage of the
Inferno as a damned soul frying in the eighth circle of
Hell. Dante has it that after the events of Homer’s poem, Ulysses was so
deeply in love with endless voyaging that he put to sea again, and these
are the words with which he urged his second crew to sail beyond all
known seas — a voyage which took them straight to a miserable death, and
sent Ulysses himself tumbling down to eternal damnation.
Within the immediate context of the post —
which, naturally, I encourage everybody to read — somebody with paranoid
inclinations might interpret this passage as a critique of NRx (at least
among its subordinate functions), and perhaps even an atypically stinging
one. This is not, however, what concerns us here.
The sole comment to be made about it right now, is that it demonstrates
the architectonics of irony. To ironize, with such supple
capability, is to
explore a
structure, differentiating an inside from an outside. This is no mere
rhetorical device, but a fully philosophical — and metaphysical —
operation. Crude antagonism is bypassed, through envelopment.
Ironically, therefore, irony itself becomes a mark of
seriousness. It is introduced at exactly the point that a cognitive
process exceeds a constricting frame, in a doubling, which
repeats and exceeds simultaneously. In the complete
absence of vulgar polemic, it demonstrates an incontestable superiority.
There is an accomplishment, a lesson, and an elevation of the game.
For Outside in, signed up with Ulysses by solemn contract, this
example is especially piercing. It cannot dissuade us from putting to sea
again, because nothing could. That does not — at all — mean nothing has
been learnt.
November 29, 2014Sub-Cognitive Fragments (#1)
There is a craving that is neither simple stupidity, nor its opposite:
I want to think. It might be designated
blogger’s hunger (or curse). Though trivially pathetic,
it is not only that.
In the end, there is no case to be made for philosophy, unless it can
teach us how to think. Reciprocally, anything that can teach us to think
is true philosophy. (That philosophy would not be mistaken for a
joke.)
There is a weak interpretation of this demand, which is quite easily met.
If the only thing requested is a discipline, such that thought — which is
already happening — is guided, and corrected, then logic suffices
to provide it. The fact that philosophy typically understands its
responsibility this way fully accounts for its senescence and marginality.
The
craving
to think is not, primarily, an appetite for correction, but for
initiation. It wants thinking to begin, to activate, and to
propagate. More thinking comes first (or fails to). What is
required is a method to make thought happen. The philosophy thus invoked
is a
systematic and communicable practice of cognitive auto-stimulation. I do not believe this philosophy yet exists.
There are candidates for para-philosophy, which is to say, for things that
makes thought happen. From the perspective of doctrinaire neoreaction, one
might begin with the fatal trichotomy: religion, heredity, and catallaxy.
Ritual traditions, eugenic programs, or market incentives can be proposed
as social solutions to cognitive lethargy, but none promise a tight-loop
catalysis. (Each nevertheless deserves extended attention, elsewhere.)
Any para-philosophy is a cognitive loose-loop, and there are a great
number of these. They range from scholastic and physical training regimes,
through psycho-chemical modification, to cognitive science and artificial
intelligence research. We know that geo-historically, thought has been
made to happen. What we do not (yet) know is how to make more of it, or
how to address the urgent craving: I want to think.
Thinking is so rare and difficult that it is always tempting to be
diverted into the
question:
What is messing with our brains? There is no reason to think such
an inquiry is doomed to fruitlessness, but if it eventually offers
solutions — rather than excuses — they are almost certain to be long-loop
remedies.
Philosophy as cognitive method is an instruction manual for using the
brain. There are many disciplines that can help to explain exactly why we
do not already have one, since this is a fact that is roughly coincident
with sophisticated naturalism in general. Biology has ensured that the
privileged user of our brains is not ‘us’.
The possession of such a ‘mind manual’ would define a self-improving AI.
As technology threatens to bypass us, it would surely be surprising — and
even despicable — if people didn’t increasingly plot to take over their
own thought processes, and run them. That is the future of philosophy.
A ‘private’ motive for acceleration is that right now, urgently,
I want to know how to be able to make myself think.
With pseudo-syphilitic arrogance I insist: This is the sole philosophical
position.
November 11, 2013Sub-Cognitive Fragments (#2)
Sickness advances an invaluable philosophical lesson by making it
conspicuously difficult to think. Teetering unsteadily at the
edge of consciousness, it becomes almost impossible to avoid the
observation: “I’m too freaking stupid to think about this right now.” One
is thus coaxed into the single most significant realization open to human
intelligence. Being stupid is the primary problem, because it retards
problem-solving in general.
Are we stupid? Oh yes, of that we can be fully confident. The Old Law of
Gnon
ensures to a
very high level of probability that any creature considering itself part
of an intelligent species will be roughly as cognitively deprived as is
consistent with the existence of technological civilization. Downward
variation is restrained by a floor, and upward variation caught in a trap,
so only a relatively narrow band of intellectual capability is
realistically available. Anything further requires a break out.
Criticism, whose value is not in any way to be denigrated, is nevertheless
a
secondary
matter. As in Darwinian evolution, or the economics of creative
destruction, selection mechanisms presuppose significantly varied
material, without themselves explaining how such material is originally
generated. Random walks through spaces of possibility, already
unsatisfactory in the context of biological explanation, are patently
inadequate to economic innovation, and still more so in the philosophical
domain. To refer intellectual action to a simple conception of chance is
to avoid the problem, which is to say —
the task.
The task can be understood in several ways,
among which the narrowly philosophical apprehension has no special
privilege, perhaps even to itself. The will-to-think is as completely
realized through programmatic artificial intelligence as through private
philosophical practice, and the more informal the program, the
more cunning the process. At its widest expansion, where the entire
terrain of capitalistic development is effectuated as a distributed AI
program, an insurgent will-to-think conceals itself within the most minute
and seemingly inconsequential micro-fragments of practical calculation.
Almost certainly, it is at this level of non-local cognitive enhancement
that a self-directed advance towards break-out can be most confidently
anticipated. As the will-to-think routes around us, its path is smoothed.
Darkness fosters its agility.
The will-to-think, or intelligence optimization, can also be manifested as
a social strategy. How is intelligence inhibition instantiated as social
mechanism, and how might the restructuring of such mechanism release
opportunities for cognitive promotion? (NRx in large measure coincides
with the development of such questions.)
The privilege of the solitary philosopher, assailed by narcoleptic
interruptions and hazy fevers, is perhaps restricted to a certain nagging
irritability. It is in this superficial knot or eddy, emerging
distractedly from the subterranean shadow-current of the will-to-think,
that the problem of crushing mindlessness becomes self-reflectively acute,
and thus registered as an explicit provocation. Only in such dingy niches
is it starkly articulated:
the world has to be defeated insofar as it poses an obstacle to
thought. (This is not at all the same as the declaration
reality must conform to the Idea — it is closer to the opposite.)
In trailing off into coughs and exhaustion, it is worth noting some
objections to intelligence optimization, of obvious merit:
(1) The religious objection:
Since we already have access to the conclusions of an infinite
intelligence, the will-to-think is a Satanic impertinence.
(2) The bio-prudential objection:
Intelligence is hazardous, so that its risks neutralize its value as a
resource.
There are no doubt others …
[*cough*]
March 3, 2014Scrap note #8
The next installment of sub-cognitive fragmentation became too snarled in
self-involvement to manage, splintering its crate, and leaving a debris
trail of scrap notation. When a flicker of proto-intelligence finds itself
out beyond the ledge, tumbling into the abysmal self-problematization of
Gnon, it has either to surrender itself to the plummet, or scrabble
quickly for some arresting roughness on the cliff walls. This isn’t the
time for a deep descent (so my figurative fingernails are gone).
After seven years in an apartment at the edge of Xujiahui, we have moved
to a slightly larger one in the Jing’an District (with space for each of
the kids to have their own room). It’s up on the 19th floor — above the
mosquito level — with a view of the Wheelock Square tower (an impressive
KPF structure). The move was only completed over the last couple of days.
So life this end has been vastly more chaotic, is becoming a little more
spacious, and is already far more high-rise. Some of the recent gusts of
disorder stem from this.
The scrap-reduced sub-cognitive fragment goes something like this: NRx has
its own micro-decadence, which is expressed through a fixation on values,
asserted as an alternative to thought. This is, I realize, overtly and
dramatically controversial. If thought is confused with reason, and values
identified with inherited intuitions, it might easily appear as a direct
attack upon the most sacred commitments of the reactionary attitude. What,
after all, are the feeble tremblings of embryonic intellect compared to
the grandeur of what has been
received?
What, though, has truly been received? Do we
think we know? It is worth a digression into this peculiar usage
of ‘think’. “I think the Old Way is best” is really close to an implicit
contradiction, or even a presumption, in both directions. If the Old Way
is being thought, it remains incompletely accessed. Either thought has
been bypassed — by far the most probable case, were this in fact simply
possible — or a claim of gargantuan hubris is being made to the
completion of thought, in this particular case at least. Is it
more likely that thought has indeed been pursued to its end, or that an
insincere — in fact merely thoughtless — claim to the accomplishment of
thought has been inserted groundlessly and subliminally, programmed by
trivial considerations of grammatical or rhetorical convenience?
The anticipated rejoinder might be: “we are reactionaries precisely
because we believe before we think, and this claim is itself a belief,
adamantly thoughtless, and thus immune to the corrosive uncertainties of
the wandering mind. What we know best is that which has not passed through
thought, but rather through revelatory tradition and its social
institutions, safeguarded against the chaotic hazards of the reflective
individual, that miserable prey of pride, demonism, and darkness.”
Religion tightly binds philosophy … but then, when the turtles of
obedience run out into the absolute, an insidious question arises. It is a
difficult one, when thought about, even slightly:
Does God think?
[Apologies for a little insulting hand-holding, but my enormous confidence
in human thoughtlessness leads me to suspect that both theists and
atheists might be more accepting of the decompressed formulation:
What is it to think of a God who thinks? Could thought be
anything in eternity, or in the absence of the unknown? And if God does
not think (whether through his nature, as eternal, or through the
necessity of his non-existence) what could it mean for there to be a ‘God
of the Philosophers’?]
March 12, 2014Scrap note #3
Uploading images of (what are for us) psychotic despotic-militaristic
glories — upon which Cambodia still floats after six centuries of cultural
senescence — is impossible here due to bandwidth issues. So I’m falling
back upon relative trivialities, of the kind Handle has so masterfully
compiled in his Reaction Ruckus resource (which I can’t link to now,
either).
It strikes me that the basic accusation against Neoreactionary thought,
found in the increasingly mainstream channels Handle tracks, is that of
moral nihilism. This is a non-trivial issue, or at least, it is not one
that will soon cease to make noise. As a symptom, it opens onto seriously
involving questions.
At the most basic level, this accusation
refers — unknowingly — to the neoreactionary assertion that Western
civilization has taken a pathological road, such that a distinction
between facts and values seems not only credible, but even ineluctable. To
strive for honesty without qualification under such historical
circumstances is already moral nihilism. One must either submit to the lie
in the name of the good, or hazard the good — radically — in the name of
truth. The ‘crisis of the present age’ is the widespread (if
unacknowledged) reality of this harsh fork.
There are important lines of departure at this point, which far exceed the
scope of a scrap note. The strong suspicion of this blog is that Chinese
neotraditionalism offers a decisive break from this Western cultural
pathology (which is why Mou Zongsan is regularly referenced here).
Occidental traditionalists turn to the prospects of an Aristotelian
revival (typically under Catholic Christian auspices) as an adequate
response to the same dilemma. Insofar as we speak from the modern West,
however, it is the Nietzschean provocation that surreptitiously guides the
discussion.
If it is not yet possible to be either Chinese, or ancient, anything other
than moral nihilism is an absence of intellectual integrity. We have
already seen the rejoinder to this, of course, and we will see much more
of it: to refuse to allow conventional morality a veto over thought is
morally appalling (“creepy”). In making this ‘case’ our enemies admit that
honesty is not finally consistent with their ‘arguments’ — an awkward
position to occupy.
We are told to stop thinking, for the common good, but there is no longer
any common good, if there ever was one (so we will not). Since sensitivity
to reality cannot but ultimately prevail, they will lose eventually. I am
far less convinced that the outcome will not be ugly in the extreme, and
by then the judgmental question will no longer be asked, as we could still
ask it, but in general refuse to: Who created the monsters to come?
January 24, 2014Nihilism and Destiny
Readers of Nietzsche, or of Eugene
Rose, are already familiar with the attribution of a cultural teleology to
modernity, directed to the consummate realization of nihilism. Our
contemporary crisis finds this theme re-animated within a geopolitical
context by the work of Alexandr Dugin, who interprets it as a driver of
concrete events — most specifically the antagonization of Russia by an
imploding world liberal order. He
writes:
There is one point in liberal ideology that has brought about a crisis
within it: liberalism is profoundly nihilistic at its core. The set of
values defended by liberalism is essentially linked to its main thesis:
the primacy of liberty. But liberty in the liberal vision is an
essentially negative category: it claims to be free
from (as per John Stuart Mill), not to be free
for something. […] … the enemies of the open society,
which is synonymous with Western society post-1991, and which has become
the norm for the rest of the world, are concrete. Its primary enemies
are communism and fascism, both ideologies which emerged from the same
Enlightenment philosophy, and which contained central, non-individualic
concepts – class in Marxism, race in National Socialism, and the
national State in fascism). So the source of liberalism’s conflict with
the existing alternatives of modernity, fascism or communism, is quite
obvious. Liberals claim to liberate society from fascism and communism,
or from the two major permutations of explicitly non-individualistic
modern totalitarianism. Liberalism’s struggle, when viewed as a part of
the process of the liquidation of non-liberal societies, is quite
meaningful: it acquires its meaning from the fact of the very existence
of ideologies that explicitly deny the individual as society’s highest
value. It is quite clear what the struggle opposes: liberation from its
opposite. But the fact that liberty, as it is conceived by liberals, is
an essentially negative category is not clearly
perceived here. The enemy is present and is concrete. That very fact
gives liberalism its solid content. Something other than the open
society exists, and the fact of its existence is enough to justify the
process of liberation.
In Dugin’s analysis, liberalism tends to
self-abolition in nihilism, and is able to counteract this fate — if only
temporarily — by defining itself against a concrete enemy. Without the war
against illiberalism, liberalism reverts to being nothing at all, a
free-floating negation without purpose. Therefore, the impending war on
Russia is a requirement of liberalism’s intrinsic cultural process. It is
a flight from nihilism, which is to say: the history of nihilism propels
it.
Outside in is far more inclined to criticize Dugin than align
with him, or the forces he orchestrates, but it is hard to deny that he
represents a definite species of political genius, sufficient to
categorize him as a man of destiny. The mobilization of resistance to
modernity in the name of a counter-nihilism is inspired, because
the historical understanding it draws upon is genuinely penetrating.
Through potent political alchemy, the destruction of collective meaning is
transformed into an invigorating cause. When Dugin argues
there will be blood, the appeal to Slavic victimology might be
considered contemptible (and, of course, extremely ‘dangerous’), but the
prophetic insight is not easy to dismiss.
Modernity was initiated by the European assimilation of mathematical
zero. The
encounter with nothingness is its root. In this sense, among others, it is
nihilistic at its core. The frivolous ‘meanings’ that modernizing
societies clutch at, as distractions from their propulsion into the abyss,
are defenseless against the derision — and even revulsion — of those who
contemplate them with detachment. A modernity in evasion from its
essential nihilism is a pitiful prey animal upon the plains of history.
That is what we have seen before, see now, and doubtless will see again.
Dugin gazes upon modernity with the cold eyes of a wolf. It is merely
pathetic to denounce him for that.
ADDED: Sunshine Mary has some closely-related
thoughts.
ADDED: An absorbing debate between Alexandr Dugin and Olavo de Carvalho.
March 18, 2014Triple Nihilism
(1) Jeffrey Herf is
apparently
shocked and appalled by the emergence of a “pro-Hamas Left” in the
American academy. He writes:
The emergence of this objectively pro-Hamas and pro-war Left is an
historically significant event. It breaks with both the
self-understanding and public image of a Left that carried a banner of
anti-fascism. It rests on a double standard of critique, a critical one
applied to the extreme Right in the West and another, apologetic
standard applied to similarly based rightist Islamist movements.
So the left intelligentsia is prone to extreme hypocrisy, anti-semitism,
crypto-fascism, opportunism, and the unrestrained politics of
ressentiment? Is this supposed to be news of some kind? Political
controversy is to be measured against some yardstick of
fundamental decency, that is now, peculiarly, being
betrayed? Who or what is supporting that yardstick, exactly? If we
subtract any such ‘yardstick’ entirely from our considerations, haven’t we
thereby, for the first time, begun to approach the topic realistically?
(2) As noted
before, I’m a
terrible reader of Scott Alexander. There’s always a point, early on, in
any of his posts, where my concentration is wrecked by the buzzing
question: how is this any kind of problem? So I’m reliant on
better followers of his lithe reasoning to explain to me how
this
post can make any sort of sense except through the expectation that
life should be fair. The attractiveness of that dream (or
delusion?) is easy to grasp. What is difficult (for me) to understand is
how an acute intelligence can fail to realize, intuitively, that thinking
begins at exactly the point such indulgent fantasy terminates.
It’s quite clear that Scott knows obnoxious PUA sociobiology is basically
correct. How else to read this?
If you’re smart, don’t drink much, stay out of fights, display a
friendly personality, and have no criminal history – then you are the
population most at risk of being miserable and alone. “At risk” doesn’t
mean “for sure”, any more than every single smoker gets lung cancer and
every single nonsmoker lives to a ripe old age – but your odds get
worse. In other words, everything that “nice guys” complain of is pretty
darned accurate. But that shouldn’t be too hard to guess …
How could the aspiration to any kind of ‘social justice’ in this context
(or in fact any other) conceivably be anything but a fantastic
falsification of the world as it deeply (or pre-conventionally)
exists? To acknowledge this reality is to admit that our ideas of
‘justice’ mean nothing. One might as well “complain” about
gravity or the second law of thermodynamics.
(3) Perhaps Nothing isn’t in any way real,
suggests
Leon Horsten. Zero, unlike any other small Natural, would have no
irreducible designation. It would function only as shorthand, abbreviating
a concatenation of plenary operations. Linguistic applications of
“nothingness” would be dissolved by analogy.
According to the scientific picture of the world, absences do not seem
to be fundamental building blocks of either the concrete (physical)
world or of the abstract (mathematical) realm.
So Nothing can be ‘scientifically’ annihilated — that will surely dispel
its irritation. (Or
not.)
***
Of the world’s various contests, there have to be some which do not draw
Outside in unreservedly to the nihilistic side of the
battlefield. If I turn to this possibility with sufficient dedication,
perhaps I will think of some.
ADDED:
Nice guys finish last. (Linked in Jim’s comments,
this
classic.)
September 1, 2014Cosmic Concealment
Lawrence Krauss knows
nothing
about nothing, but on some other matters — I now realize — he’s an insight
dynamo.
This is
his Our Miserable Future talk, of which the last seven minutes
(minus the last two) are utterly absorbing.
In a nutshell — cosmic expansion will move every other galaxy in the
universe beyond our light-cone (within two trillion years). After that
time, even the most sophisticated scientific enterprise would find it
impossible to reconstruct our contemporary cosmo-physics. In other words,
what we presently understand about the evolution of the universe tells us
it will become something that will cease to be understandable. What has
been revealed to us is a tendency to cosmic concealment. We see the
universe hiding itself.
That’s where Krauss leaves us (after a few tacked-on happy thoughts at the
end). My question: If we can see that the cosmos is going to hide, so
successfully that the fact it has hidden itself will itself have become
invisible, upon what do we base any present confidence we may have that an
analogous process of profound cosmic concealment has not already taken
place? Confirming now, through mathematical physics, what Herakleitos
proposed two-and-a-half millennia ago — that
nature loves to hide — is it not reckless in the extreme to
assume that she has been forthcoming with us up to this point?
ADDED: “Finding chameleon-like effects won’t necessarily mean they’ve found
dark energy, says Adrienne Erickcek of the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill. But it will show that screening mechanisms are a plausible
explanation for our failure to measure the effects of dark energy in the
local universe.”
September 3, 2014T-shirt slogans (#17)
Nothing lasts forever
Stolen immediately from
T-Zip, this kind of
crypto-nihilistic word game has an archaic classical
pedigree, is (weakly)
anticipated in the
Odyssey, became an obsession
among
the Elizabethans, and contributed the engine of Heideggerian fundamental
ontology. It still guides the Outside in
reading of
Milton, and no doubt much else besides. It hides a gnostic-skeptical
metaphysics within a
commonplace resignation. Zero, time, and camouflage are bonded in chaos.
Make of it what you will …
ADDED: “The Austrian theory of the business cycle has never been a radical
premise. It only stipulates that any workaround of the natural cycle of
economic growth must come with ensuing costs. It’s a simple law: you can’t
get something for nothing. A majority of economists believe the opposite.
In other words, they believe in magic.”
October 18, 2014A Socratic Fragment
Socrates:
Ah, Abyssos, Mechanos, and Agoros, how delightful to have stumbled upon
you on this fine day.
Abyssos:
No offense Socrates, but could you please buzz off?
Socrates:
What a fascinating way to begin a spirited dialectic!
Abyssos:
We’re working on something here, Socrates.
Socrates:
So then a perfect opportunity for a discussion of the nature of the
Good?
Abyssos:
Our tri-nodal abstract rotary-dynamic cognitive processor is almost
functional, with only a few intricate tweaks left to complete, so we
would appreciate the chance to concentrate upon it undisturbed.
Socrates: You would appreciate such a chance?
Abyssos: Yes, indeed.
Socrates:
It would, then, be a good thing in your opinion?
Abyssos: Most definitely.
Socrates:
Yet you say you would rather think, today, of something other than the
Good, and that it would be good to be allowed to do so?
Abyssos: My emphasis was quite different.
Socrates:
Quite so, my dear Abyssos, but what indeed is emphasis? Is it not the
prioritization of one thing relative to another? The advancement of a
meaning deemed most important? And is it not, then, being said that it
is better for one thing to be heard, than another?
Abyssos:
No doubt you are correct Socrates. Would it be acceptable for me now to
concede without reservation to your argument, bid you a warm farewell,
and return to the delicate technical work with which I am engaged with
my friends?
Socrates:
But that which you would pursue, now, rather than the Idea of the Good,
Abyssos, is it of a better or worse nature than the Good?
Abyssos:
It is hard to know, Socrates, since it is a cognitive engine, and will
in our estimation enable us to reach superior conclusions than we could
reach now, unaided by it.
Socrates: ‘Superior’, did you say …
March 19, 2016Axial Age
Karl Jaspers’
Axial Age
compressed for additional impact:
Laozi (Lao Tse, 6th-4th
century BC)
Kongzi (Confucius,
551–479 BC)
Li Kui
(455-395 BC)
Mozi (470–c.391 BC)
Yang Zhu (440–360
BC)
Mahavira (599–527
BC)
Gautama Buddha
(c.563-483 BC)
Upanishads (from 6th
century BC)
Thales (of Miletus,
c.624–546 BC)
Anaximenes
(of Miletus, 585-528 BC)
Pythagoras (of
Samos, c.570–495 BC)
Heraclitus (of
Ephesus c.535–475 BC)
Aeschylus (c.525-455
BC)
Anaxagoras
(c.510–428 BC)
Parmenides (of Elea,
early 5th century BC)
Socrates (c.469–399
BC)
Thucydides
(c.460–395 BC)
Democritus
(c.460–370 BC)
I realize that everyone knows this … but what the …?
September 23, 2013Morality
There is far too much pointless moralism on the Outer Right. It’s a form
of stupidity, it’s counter-productive, and it wastes a lot of time.
Naturally, if people are able to haul themselves — or be hauled — to any
significant extent from out of their condition of total depravity (or
default bioreality), that’s a good thing. To argue the opposite would be
full-on Satanism, and we wouldn’t want that. Lamenting immorality,
however, is something to be done quickly, and comprehensively, before
moving on — without looking back. Man is fallen, naturally selected, and /
or economically self-interested, and this is a
basic condition. It’s not a remediable flaw, to be thrashed out
of a mud-spattered angel. (No faction of the Trichotomy has any grounds
upon which to base moral preening.) Realism is, first of all, working with
what we have, and that’s something approximately Hobbesian. There’s social
order, and there’s homo homini lupus, and in fact always some
complexion of the two.
Anybody motivated to improve themselves is already doing it. As for those
not so motivated, moral exhortation will be useless (at best). At its most
effective, moral hectoring will increase the value of moral
signalling, and that is a worse outcome — by far — than honest cynicism.
It is worthless, because it is incredibly cheap, and then worse than
useless, because its costs are considerable. A ‘movement’ lost in moral
self-congratulation has already become progressive. Having
persuaded itself of its worthiness to wield power, it has set out
on the road to perdition. We have seen what that path looks like, and even
given it a name (the Cathedral).
It is by empowering moralism that modernity has failed. This is not a
mistake to saunter complacently into again.
November 10, 2014Metaphysics of Morals
John Gray doesn’t
think
Darwin is enough:
Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and evil tendencies of man
have come about; but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any better
reason why we what we call good is preferable to what we call evil than
we had before … The fanatical individualism of our time attempts to
apply the analogy of cosmic nature to society … Let us understand, once
and for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on
imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in
combating it.
(Since ‘LOL’ would be mere vulgar impertinence, we’re pretty much silenced
here. Quixotism is a hell of a drug.)
October 19, 2015Quotable (#128)
‘The Fatal Conceit’ escalated to a whole new
level:
Nowadays many of us have little contact with the wilderness, making it
easy to view nature with rose-tinted glasses. The images we see of
nature feature mostly pristine landscapes or healthy, photogenic wild
animals. But this incredible beauty masks huge suffering. Many wild
animals endure illness, injury, and starvation without relief. For
example, the pain of animals that fall prey to predators like Cecil is
especially horrific.
Gulls peck out and eat the eyes of baby seals, leaving the blinded pups to die so they can feast on their remains.
A shrew will paralyze his prey
with venom so he can eat the helpless animal alive, bit by bit, for
days.
The natural suffering of wild animals is real and breathtaking in its
enormity, but incredibly little is being done to reduce it. Although
many organizations work to preserve ecosystems and biodiversity, few
focus on the well-being of individual animals. And despite more people
taking notice of the torment wild animals endure at the hands of humans
who hunt and poach them, little thought has gone into the question of
how to help wild animals avoid natural agonies.
Despite the exotic nature of this example, it is still illustrative.
There’s probably no ideological polarity of greater ultimate significance
than that dividing those who want to shrink spheres of moral concern /
interference, and those who want to — perhaps very drastically — expand
them.
December 16, 2015Ayn Rand
If you’re comfortable translating the ruthless pursuit of excellence as
‘greed’, I guess
this
counts as trying.
(I’m qabbalistically joined at the hip with Ayn Rand, so objectivism on
the topic is beyond my reach.)
April 11, 2017Freedoom (Prelude-1)
The most provocative way to begin this would be to say: The reception of
metaphysical inquiries into freedom and fate is often similar to that of
HBD. These questions are unwanted. They unsettle too much. The rejoinders
they elicit are typically designed to end a distressing agitation, rather
than to tap opportunities for exploration. Not that this should be in any
way surprising. Such problems tend to tilt the most basic foundations of
theological, cultural, and psychological existence into an unfathomable
abyss. If we cannot be sure where they will lead — and how could we be? —
they wager the world without remainder.
Give up everything and perhaps something may come of it.
When construed as a consideration of causality, relating a conception of
‘free will’ to naturalistic models of physical determination, the battle
lines seem to divide religious tradition from modern science. Yet the
deeper tension is rooted within the Western religious tradition itself,
setting the indispensable ideas of eternity and
agency in a relation of tacit reciprocal subversion. The
intellectual abomination of
Calvinism
— which cannot be thought without ruin — is identical with this cultural
torment erupting into prominence. It is also the dark motor of Western
(and thus global) modernity: the core paradox that makes a horror story of
history.
If the future is (already) real, which eternity implies, then finite or
‘intra-temporal’ agency can only be an illusion. If agency is real, as any
appeal to metaphysical liberty and responsibility demands, eternity is
abolished by the absolute indeterminacy of future time. Eternity and
agency cannot be reconciled outside the cradle of a soothing obscurity.
This, at least, is the indication to be drawn from the Western history of
theological convulsion and unfolding philosophical crisis. Augustine,
Calvin, Spinoza are among the most obvious shock waves of a
soul-shattering involvement in eternity, fusing tradition and catastrophe
as doom.
“Do you think you were predestined to become a philosopher?” Catholic
philosopher Peter Kreeft was
asked:
Yes, of course. Predestination is in the Bible. A good author gives his
characters freedom, so we’re free precisely because we were predestined
to be free. There’s no contradiction between predestination and free
will.
Outside in still has a few questions to pursue …
June 9, 2014Quote note (#116)
Towards
an analysis of the Social Justice Industrial Complex:
To perceive the group dynamics at work which is the Complex is first to
distinguish between those forms of cooperation which are and are not
taking place. Is there some evil mastermind pulling the strings from the
shadows? No. The impetus in this case is nothing but the aggregation of
personal interests aligned to a collective interest. The actions taken
by these individuals are spontaneous, in the sense that the actions
taken by soldiers on the battlefield are spontaneous, but behind this
spontaneity the order is derived of the motivation which we variously
call ideology, purpose, or religion. There is less agency at work in the
camp of the Social Justice Industrial Complex than might be presumed
from a precursory glance, reflecting that human tendency towards
over-attribution of agency. No less, though, are we able to dismiss the
notion of an agenda taking place; it is no grand conspiracy, but rather,
very small conspiracies united by a vision of utopia which sees all
present social structures as oppressions to be destroyed, the far side
of which shall inevitably emerge their egalitarian eschaton.
(The focus upon the “tendency in human nature to over-attribute agency” is
an excellent starting point, building immunity against some of the most
toxic inclinations to radical ideological error into its foundations. If
this is aspiring to the status of an authoritative position, it certainly
deserves to be nodded through so far.)
ADDED: A brief vacation into the conspiratorial mind.
ADDED: Xenosystems is tempted to propose a (non-exclusive) definition of
NRx as
the systematic dismantling of conspiracy theorizing — in all its
richness — into the
tradition
of spontaneous order.
October 6, 2014Beyond the Face
The Social Matter critique of the ‘Social Justice Industrial
Complex’ (whose first stage has already been linked
here), isolates
the “tendency in human nature to over-attribute agency” as a prominent
well-spring of error. In other words, people like to put a face on things
— even the clouds — to such an extent that the very notion of a ‘person’
is always already fabricated. Etymologically (and not only etymologically)
a ‘person’ is a mask.
As archaic hominids were selectively adapted to increasingly complicated
social relations, they were facialized. The human eye acquired its white
sclera, to accentuate expressivity, making the direction of attention
directly communicative. With the arrival of language, gesture and
expression was augmented by articulate messages. ‘Face management’ became
a demanding sink for cognitive functionality, in its aspects of
performance and interpretation. A new, instinctive, ‘theory of mind’ had
begun to believe in persons, and — almost certainly simultaneously — to
identify itself as one. This was a new kind of skin, or sensitive surface.
From psychological sociality, a model of the self as a social being,
self-scrutinized as an object of attention by others of its kind — which
is to say, an ego — was born.
The ‘inner person’ corresponds to nothing real. The person, or
socially-performed self, is essentially superficial. It is irreducibly
theatrical. It exists only as the mode of insertion into a multi-player
game.
However we ultimately come to make sense of
agency and fate, it will not be in terms commensurate with the person (the
face) unless by stubborn self-delusion. Personal freedom is an act, a
performance within a play. It has no real depth. All questions addressed
to it are doomed to confusion. The real — free or fated — thing
wears a face, as an allotted role within the world.
The inanity of Facebook, and also its extreme popularity, follows
almost immediately from this arrangement. The writer
must assume a
face. The stupidity of these portraits, adorning book jackets and news
columns, is indistinguishable from their social necessity. Each is already
a little conspiracy theory, a misattribution of agency, based on the
preposterous monkey thesis that words come out of the face.
Don’t take words seriously until you can see the whites of their
eyes
— evaluate the quality of the smile that accompanies the thought. Thus,
everything goes missing.
It is beyond the face — outside it — that occurrence is decided, the plays
written. If we do not start there, we are not starting at all.
ADDED:
“Everybody’s losing their faces …” (Admin note: I cannot endorse these
methods.)
October 9, 2014Freedoom (Prelude-1b)
Even in the absence of its energetic Catholic constituency, it could be
tempting to identify NRx as an anti-Calvinist
ideology, given the centrality of the occulted Calvinist inheritance to
Moldbug’s critique of modernity. As Foseti
remarks
(in what remains a high-water mark of Neoreactionary exegesis):
Believe it or not, even though Moldbug’s definition of the Left is
basically the first thing he wrote about, there is a fair amount of
debate about this topic in “reactionary” circles. This debate is
sometimes referred to as The Puritan Question. (In addition to Puritan,
Moldbug also uses the terms: Progressive idealism, ultra-Calvinism,
crypto-Christian, Unitarian universalists, etc.)
It is no part of this blog’s brief to facilitate the more somnolent — and
at times simply derisive — positionings which Moldbug’s diagnosis can
appear to open. While our Catholic friends may consider themselves to be
securely located outside the syndrome under consideration, this attitude
corresponds, structurally, or systematically, to a minority position
(irrespective of the numbers involved). As a dissident schismatic sect,
the NRx main-current is
cladistically
enveloped by the object of its critique. ‘Calvinism’ — in its historical
and theoretical extension — is a problematic horizon,
within which NRx is embedded, before it can conceivably be
construed as a despised object for dismissal.
More directly relevant to this slowly emerging
sequence is the question of doom, employed as a Gnon-consistent
super-category embracing fate and providence. Trivially,
it is maintained here that the fundamental Calvinist challenge to the
meaning of history and the final status of human agency has been in no way
resolved over the course of its successive cladistic developments, but
only evaded, marginalized, and effaced. At the level of philosophical
clarity, no significant ‘progress’ has taken place. Certain questions,
once found pressing, have merely been dropped, or quasi-randomly
reformulated. Typically, a hazy tolerance for implicit cognitive
discordance has replaced a prior condition of acute theological anguish.
Modernist dissatisfaction with previously proposed religious
solutions to certain profound metaphysical quandaries has been
mistaken for the dissolution of these quandaries themselves. As
invocations of ‘freedom’ become ever more deafening, conceptual purchase
has steadily receded. An intoxicating — and more importantly
narcotizing — mental cocktail of unconstrained private volition
and naturalistic determinism is (absurdly) presumed to have obsoleted the
historical dilemma of divine omnipotence and human free-will (or its
philosophical proxy, time and temporalization). Discomforting problems
that install uncertainty at the core of human self-comprehension are
treated as embarrassing cultural relics, inherited from benighted
ancestors, on those rare occasions when they impinge at all.
For Outside in, Calvinism remains an unexplored doom. Apprehended
within its own terms, it is a providential occurrence whose sense remains
sequestered within the secret counsel of God.
As fuel, three passages, taken from Chapters 15 and 16, Book 1, of John
Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536), the Henry
Beveridge
translation:
Book 1. Chapter 15.
8.
Therefore, God has provided the soul of man with intellect, by which he
might discern good from evil, just from unjust, and might know what to
follow or to shun, reason going before with her lamp; whence
philosophers, in reference to her directing power, have called her τὸ
ἑγεμονικὸν. To this he has joined will, to which choice belongs. Man
excelled in these noble endowments in his primitive condition, when
reason, intelligence, prudence, and Judgment, not only sufficed for the
government of his earthly life, but also enabled him to rise up to God
and eternal happiness. Thereafter choice was added to direct the
appetites, and temper all the organic motions; the will being thus
perfectly submissive to the authority of reason. In this upright state,
man possessed freedom of will, by which, if he chose, he was able to
obtain eternal life. It were here unseasonable to introduce the question
concerning the secret predestination of God, because we are not
considering what might or might not happen, but what the nature of man
truly was. Adam, therefore, might have stood if he chose, since it was
only by his own will that he fell; but it was because his will was
pliable in either directions and he had not received constancy to
persevere, that he so easily fell. Still he had a free choice of good
and evil; and not only so, but in the mind and will there was the
highest rectitude, and all the organic parts were duly framed to
obedience, until man corrupted its good properties, and destroyed
himself. Hence the great darkness of philosophers who have looked for a
complete building in a ruin, and fit arrangement in disorder. The
principle they set out with was, that man could not be a rational animal
unless he had a free choice of good and evil. They also imagined that
the distinction between virtue and vice was destroyed, if man did not of
his own counsel arrange his life. So far well, had there been no change
in man. This being unknown to them, it is not surprising that they throw
every thing into confusion. But those who, while they profess to be the
disciples of Christ, still seek for free-will in man, notwithstanding of
his being lost and drowned in spiritual destruction, labour under
manifold delusion, making a heterogeneous mixture of inspired doctrine
and philosophical opinions, and so erring as to both. But it will be
better to leave these things to their own place (see Book 2 chap. 2) At
present it is necessary only to remember, that man, at his first
creation, was very different from all his posterity; who, deriving their
origin from him after he was corrupted, received a hereditary taint. At
first every part of the soul was formed to rectitude. There was
soundness of mind and freedom of will to choose the good. If any one
objects that it was placed, as it were, in a slippery position, because
its power was weak, I answer, that the degree conferred was sufficient
to take away every excuse. For surely the Deity could not be tied down
to this condition,—to make man such, that he either could not or would
not sin. Such a nature might have been more excellent; but to
expostulate with God as if he had been bound to confer this nature on
man, is more than unjust, seeing he had full right to determine how much
or how little He would give. Why He did not sustain him by the virtue of
perseverance is hidden in his counsel; it is ours to keep within the
bounds of soberness. Man had received the power, if he had the will, but
he had not the will which would have given the power; for this will
would have been followed by perseverance. Still, after he had received
so much, there is no excuse for his having spontaneously brought death
upon himself. No necessity was laid upon God to give him more than that
intermediate and even transient will, that out of man’s fall he might
extract materials for his own glory.
Chapter 16.
2.
… the Providence of God, as taught in Scripture, is opposed to fortune
and fortuitous causes. By an erroneous opinion prevailing in all ages,
an opinion almost universally prevailing in our own day — viz. that all
things happen fortuitously, the true doctrine of Providence has not only
been obscured, but almost buried. If one falls among robbers, or
ravenous beasts; if a sudden gust of wind at sea causes shipwreck; if
one is struck down by the fall of a house or a tree; if another, when
wandering through desert paths, meets with deliverance; or, after being
tossed by the waves, arrives in port, and makes some wondrous
hair-breadth escape from death — all these occurrences, prosperous as
well as adverse, carnal sense will attribute to fortune. But whose has
learned from the mouth of Christ that all the hairs of his head are
numbered (Mt. 10:30), will look farther for the cause, and hold that all
events whatsoever are governed by the secret counsel of God. With regard
to inanimate objects again we must hold that though each is possessed of
its peculiar properties, yet all of them exert their force only in so
far as directed by the immediate hand of God. Hence they are merely
instruments, into which God constantly infuses what energy he sees meet,
and turns and converts to any purpose at his pleasure.
8.
… we hold that God is the disposer and ruler of all things, — that from
the remotest eternity, according to his own wisdom, he decreed what he
was to do, and now by his power executes what he decreed. Hence we
maintain, that by his providence, not heaven and earth and inanimate
creatures only, but also the counsels and wills of men are so governed
as to move exactly in the course which he has destined. What, then, you
will say, does nothing happen fortuitously, nothing contingently? I
answer, it was a true saying of Basil the Great, that Fortune and Chance
are heathen terms; the meaning of which ought not to occupy pious minds.
For if all success is blessing from God, and calamity and adversity are
his curse, there is no place left in human affairs for fortune and
chance. We ought also to be moved by the words of Augustine (Retract.
lib. 1 cap. 1), “In my writings against the Academics,” says he, “I
regret having so often used the term Fortune; although I intended to
denote by it not some goddess, but the fortuitous issue of events in
external matters, whether good or evil. Hence, too, those words,
Perhaps, Perchance, Fortuitously, which no religion forbids us to use,
though everything must be referred to Divine Providence. Nor did I omit
to observe this when I said, Although, perhaps, that which is vulgarly
called Fortune, is also regulated by a hidden order, and what we call
Chance is nothing else than that the reason and cause of which is
secret. It is true, I so spoke, but I repent of having mentioned Fortune
there as I did, when I see the very bad custom which men have of saying,
not as they ought to do, ‘So God pleased,’ but, ‘So Fortune pleased.’”
In short, Augustine everywhere teaches, that if anything is left to
fortune, the world moves at random. And although he elsewhere declares
(Quæstionum, lib. 83). that all things are carried on, partly by the
free will of man, and partly by the Providence of God, he shortly after
shows clearly enough that his meaning was, that men also are ruled by
Providence, when he assumes it as a principle, that there cannot be a
greater absurdity than to hold that anything is done without the
ordination of God; because it would happen at random. For which reason,
he also excludes the contingency which depends on human will,
maintaining a little further on, in clearer terms, that no cause must be
sought for but the will of God. When he uses the term permission, the
meaning which he attaches to it will best appear from a single passage
(De Trinity. lib. 3 cap. 4), where he proves that the will of God is the
supreme and primary cause of all things, because nothing happens without
his order or permission. He certainly does not figure God sitting idly
in a watch-tower, when he chooses to permit anything. The will which he
represents as interposing is, if I may so express it, active
(actualis), and but for this could not be regarded as a
cause.
ADDED: In connection with some of the discussion taking place in the
comment thread (below), this paragraph from Pope Benedict XVI’s (2006)
Regensburg
Lecture
seems worth reproducing here: “Dehellenization first emerges in connection
with the postulates of the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Looking
at the tradition of scholastic theology, the Reformers thought they were
confronted with a faith system totally conditioned by philosophy, that is
to say an articulation of the faith based on an alien system of thought.
As a result, faith no longer appeared as a living historical Word but as
one element of an overarching philosophical system. The principle of
sola scriptura, on the other hand, sought faith in its pure,
primordial form, as originally found in the biblical Word. Metaphysics
appeared as a premise derived from another source, from which faith had to
be liberated in order to become once more fully itself. When Kant stated
that he needed to set thinking aside in order to make room for faith, he
carried this programme forward with a radicalism that the Reformers could
never have foreseen. He thus anchored faith exclusively in practical
reason, denying it access to reality as a whole.”
October 29, 2014Readiness Potential
The single most crucial Copernican
moment
relative to the pretensions of human agency?
Grey Walter … developed a method of measuring what is called the
readiness potential in human subjects, which permits an observer to
predict a subject’s response about a half to one second before the
subject is aware of any intention to act.
It took half a century to acknowledge what had been discovered here. (The
death of Man is still on its way to us.)
June 2, 2015Astro-Humanism
The final symbol of our species’ concern for itself is the rescue of a
stranded astronaut. (First
Gravity, now
The Martian, both classics of the Space-Cinema-Sino-US-Detente Complex.)

There are narrative problems you could fly a starship through (with
missing robots at the top of the list). It doesn’t matter.
Cinema is made for space (the outside of the
terrestrial gravity well, not geometry), and the soul-crushing silence of
the void annihilates all plot quibbles — if you get sucked out into it.

UF finds it impossible to watch these things without thinking:
The only true wretchedness is to not be an astronaut. It’s
probably the same strange religion we started with, but from the other
side.
ADDED: A Randian movie?
November 27, 2015Quotable (#145)
Now, do I think that wellbeing is a higher value than truth? No. I hope
I would never cling to something because it made me happy, if I
suspected it wasn’t true. Philosophy involves a restless search for the
truth, an unceasing examination of one’s assumptions. I enjoy that
search, which is why I didn’t stop at Stoicism, but have kept on
looking, because I don’t think Stoicism is the whole truth about
reality. But what gives me the motive to keep on looking is ultimately a
sort of Platonic faith that the truth is good, and that it’s good for
me. Why bother searching unless you thought the destination was worth
reaching?
If the apparent, empirical, psychological, or anthropological subject were
the real agent of the philosophical enterprise,
this
question would make a lot of sense.
March 7, 2016Techno-Immortalist Delusion
Dmitry Itskov
wants to live
forever, and thinks that uploading his mind into a computer will somehow
help with that.
It sounds preposterous, but there is no doubting the seriousness of
this softly spoken 35-year-old, who says he left the business world to
devote himself to something more useful to humanity. “I’m 100% confident
it will happen. Otherwise I wouldn’t have started it,” he says.
The proposed technology might be plausible (I suspect it is eventually
inevitable), but it has nothing whatsoever to do with immortality, except
insofar as such ambitions incentivize its development. It’s profoundly
confused.
“If you could replicate the mind and upload it into a different
material, you can in principle clone minds,” says [Columbia University
neurobiologist Prof Rafael] Yuste. “These are complicated issues because
they deal with the core of defining what is a person.”
No, if you could replicate the mind and upload it onto a different
material substrate
all you could possibly be doing would be cloning a mind. The
clone could be persuaded to identify with you — this would perhaps be
inescapable given what it is (a high-fidelity copy), and thus the delusion
of immortality might be perpetuated. The original, however, is going to
die just as much as it was before being copied.
The truly interesting question, given the scrambling of the metaphysics of
personal identity which would surely follow from such advances, is:
What exactly dies anyway? (If — even as a baseline human — you’re
in reality continuously reconstructed, and hence a distantly-descended
copy of yourself, you’ve probably already done a lot more dying than you
think.)
Anatta.
March 14, 2016Kant around the back
Schmidhuber
exemplifies
the path, while talking about robots:
One important thing about consciousness is that the agent, as it is
interacting with the world, will notice that there is one thing that is
always present as it is interacting with the world — which is the agent
itself.
(Some room for quibbling, but it doesn’t get serious. This is where
transcendental subjectivity comes from.)
December 29, 2016Sentences (#99)
Venezuela’s near-future
(but it could be anything):
[Some X]
will not be pretty, but it is difficult to see how it can be
avoided.
This is the world now.
May 3, 2017
TOME IV - ABSTRACT HORROR: The Unknown, as The Unknown
BLOCK 1 - INTRO
Time Spiral Press
There’s nothing there yet.
(Putting the link up was an irresistible opportunity to torture myself.)
When things start happening, I’ll make some kind of noise about it.
December 10, 2013Pet Trolls (#1)
(Formatted as a series, in case it turns into one. ‘Pet’ denotes nothing
beyond detached affection.)
The entire review (for
Fanged Noumena, one star), by ‘Amazon Customer’ and entitled:
Stick to Stephenie Meyer, for heaven’s sake! —
My 15-year-old daughter Tricia is a great fan of vampire fiction, and I
bought this for her from a remaindered book stall, thinking it would be
just up her street. The rather childish daub on the cover did make me
think that perhaps the book would be too young for her, but seeing as it
was priced at 40p I reckoned I could not go too far wrong.
None too soon, in my view – but too late for Tricia, I fear.
August 5, 2014Be Warned
At least
one of the
10,000 anonymice at 8chan definitely has my number:
Given that you linked the site, now would be a good time to drop some
info.
If you knew Spengler, you’d be able to predict this. Winter phase. If
you knew history, you’d be able to predict this: Jesuits being
jesuitical, plebs being plebian. Agents causing, and the masses being
cut up, re-crafted, and stuffed into new, tighter boxes.
Does anybody else out there expect the NWO to be this cool?
October 2, 2014Be Warned II
Via Nydrwracu comes
this:
October 19, 2014Sexual Topology
Galen’s theory that the sexual organs were related by analogy, converted
into a mnemonic for medical students (as reproduced in Siddhartha
Mukherjee’s
The Gene). It will confirm everyone’s worst suspicions, but that can’t be helped.
Though they of different sexes be
Yet on the whole, they’re the same as we
For those that have the strictest searchers been
Find women are just men turned outside in.
Mukherjee adds the question:
… what force was responsible for turning men “inside out,” or women
“outside in,” like socks?
April 1, 2017
BLOCK 2 - ABSTRACT HORROR
Antechamber to Horror
I’ve been planning an expedition into horror, for which the Kurtz of
Conrad and of Coppola is an essential way-station – perhaps even a
terminus. The mission is to articulate horror as a functional, cognitive
‘achievement’ – a calm catastrophe of all intellectual inhibition —
tending to realism in its ultimate possibility. Horror is the true end of
philosophy. So it counted as a moment of synchronicity to stumble upon
Richard Fernandez
quoting
(Coppola’s) Kurtz — and it had to be passed along immediately. There is,
of course, only one passage that matters, so it is no coincidence that
Fernandez selects it:
I’ve seen horrors… horrors that you’ve seen.
But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill
me. You have a right to do that… but you have no right to judge me. It’s
impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not
know what horror means. Horror… Horror has a face… and you must make a
friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are
not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies! I
remember when I was with Special Forces… seems a thousand centuries ago.
We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We left the camp after
we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running
after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there, and
they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a
pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember… I… I… I cried, I wept like
some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out; I didn’t know what I
wanted to do! And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it… I
never want to forget. And then I realized… like I was shot… like I was
shot with a diamond… a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I
thought, my God… the genius of that! The genius! The will to do that!
Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they
were stronger than we, because they could stand that […] these were not
monsters, these were men… trained cadres. These men who fought with
their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with
love… but they had the strength… the strength… to do that. If I had ten
divisions of those men, our troubles here would be over very quickly.
You have to have men who are moral… and at the same time who are able to
utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling… without
passion… without judgment… without judgment! Because it’s judgment that
defeats us.
To pluck out one sentence for repetition: “It’s impossible for words to
describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means.”
How, then, to learn what ‘horror means’ … (even in an armchair)?
August 12, 2013Antechamber to Horror II
Some scene-setting extracts
from
H.P. Lovecraft’s review essay
Supernatural Horror in Literature:
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and
strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few
psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for
all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a
literary form.
***
The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it
demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity
for detachment from every-day life. Relatively few are free enough from
the spell of the daily routine to respond to rappings from outside …
***
Because we remember pain and the menace of death more vividly than
pleasure, and because our feelings toward the beneficent aspects of the
unknown have from the first been captured and formalised by conventional
religious rituals, it has fallen to the lot of the darker and more
maleficent side of cosmic mystery to figure chiefly in our popular
supernatural folklore. This tendency, too, is naturally enhanced by the
fact that uncertainty and danger are always closely allied; thus making
any kind of an unknown world a world of peril and evil possibilities.
When to this sense of fear and evil the inevitable fascination of wonder
and curiosity is superadded, there is born a composite body of keen
emotion and imaginative provocation whose vitality must of necessity
endure as long as the human race itself. Children will always be afraid
of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will
always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of
strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press
hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead
and the moonstruck can glimpse.
***
The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody
bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain
atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown
forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a
seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most
terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular
suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only
safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed
space.
***
The one test of the really weird is simply this—whether or not there be
excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with
unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if
for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and
entities on the known universe’s utmost rim.
***
Before Poe the bulk of weird writers had worked largely in the dark;
without an understanding of the psychological basis of the horror
appeal, and hampered by more or less of conformity to certain empty
literary conventions such as the happy ending, virtue rewarded, and in
general a hollow moral didacticism, acceptance of popular standards and
values, and striving of the author to obtrude his own emotions into the
story and take sides with the partisans of the majority’s artificial
ideas. Poe, on the other hand, perceived the essential impersonality of
the real artist; and knew that the function of creative fiction is
merely to express and interpret events and sensations as they are,
regardless of how they tend or what they prove—good or evil, attractive
or repulsive, stimulating or depressing—with the author always acting as
a vivid and detached chronicler rather than as a teacher, sympathiser,
or vendor of opinion. He saw clearly that all phases of life and thought
are equally eligible as subject-matter for the artist, and being
inclined by temperament to strangeness and gloom, decided to be the
interpreter of those powerful feeling, and frequent happenings which
attend pain rather than pleasure, decay rather than growth, terror
rather than tranquillity, and which are fundamentally either adverse or
indifferent to the tastes and traditional outward sentiments of mankind,
and to the health, sanity, and normal expansive welfare of the
species.
Poe’s spectres thus acquired a convincing malignity possessed by none
of their predecessors, and established a new standard of realism in the
annals of literary horror.
***
The public for whom Poe wrote, though grossly unappreciative of his
art, was by no means unaccustomed to the horrors with which he dealt.
America, besides inheriting the usual dark folklore of Europe, had an
additional fund of weird associations to draw upon … from the keen
spiritual and theological interests of the first colonists, plus the
strange and forbidding nature of the scene into which they were plunged.
The vast and gloomy virgin forests in whose perpetual twilight all
terrors might well lurk; the hordes of coppery Indians whose strange,
saturnine visages and violent customs hinted strongly at traces of
infernal origin; the free rein given under the influence of Puritan
theocracy to all manner of notions respecting man’s relation to the
stern and vengeful God of the Calvinists, and to the sulphureous
Adversary of that God, about whom so much was thundered in the pulpits
each Sunday; and the morbid introspection developed by an isolated
backwoods life devoid of normal amusements and of the recreational mood,
harassed by commands for theological self-examination, keyed to
unnatural emotional repression, and forming above all a mere grim
struggle for survival—all these things conspired to produce an
environment in which the black whisperings of sinister grandams were
heard far beyond the chimney corner, and in which tales of witchcraft
and unbelievable secret monstrosities lingered long after the dread days
of the Salem nightmare.
***
Of living creators of cosmic fear raised to its most artistic pitch,
few if any can hope to equal the versatile Arthur Machen; author of some
dozen tales long and short, in which the elements of hidden horror and
brooding fright attain an almost incomparable substance and realistic
acuteness…. Of Mr. Machen’s horror-tales the most famous is perhaps “The
Great God Pan” (1894), which tells of a singular and terrible experiment
and its consequences. … Melodrama is undeniably present, and coincidence
is stretched to a length which appears absurd upon analysis; but in the
malign witchery of the tale as a whole these trifles are forgotten, and
the sensitive reader reaches the end with only an appreciative shudder
and a tendency to repeat the words of one of the characters: “It is too
incredible, too monstrous; such things can never be in this quiet world.
. . . Why, man, if such a case were possible, our earth would be a
nightmare.”
***
For those who relish speculation regarding the future, the tale of
supernatural horror provides an interesting field. Combated by a
mounting wave of plodding realism, cynical flippancy, and sophisticated
disillusionment, it is yet encouraged by a parallel tide of growing
mysticism, as developed both through the fatigued reaction of
“occultists” and religious fundamentalists against materialistic
discovery and through the stimulation of wonder and fancy by such
enlarged vistas and broken barriers as modern science has given us with
its intra-atomic chemistry, advancing astrophysics, doctrines of
relativity, and probings into biology and human thought.
August 13, 2013Abstract Horror (Part 1)
When conceived rigorously as a literary and cinematic craft, horror is
indistinguishable from a singular task:
to make an object of the unknown, as the unknown. Only in these
terms can its essential accomplishments be estimated.
To isolate the abstract purpose of horror, therefore, does not require a
supplementary philosophical operation. Horror defines itself through a
pact with abstraction, of such primordial compulsion that disciplined
metaphysics can only struggle, belatedly, to recapture it. Some sublime
‘thing’ — abstracted radically from what it is for us — belongs to horror
long before reason sets out on its pursuit. Horror first encounters ‘that’
which philosophy eventually seeks to know.
High modernism in literature has been far less enthralled by the project
of abstraction than its contemporary developments in the visual arts, or
even in music. Reciprocally, abstraction in literature, as exemplified
most markedly by the extremities of Miltonic darkness – whilst arguably
‘modern’ — is desynchronized by centuries from the climax of modernist
experimentation. Abstraction in literary horror has coincided with, and
even anticipated, philosophical explorations which the modernist aesthetic
canon has been able to presuppose. Horror – under other names – has
exceeded the modernist zenith in advance, and with an inverted historical
orientation that reaches back to the “Old Night” of Greek mystery
religion, into abysmal antiquity (and archaic abysses). Its abstraction is
an excavation that progresses relentlessly into the deep past.
The destination of horror cannot be, exactly,
a ‘place’ – but it is not inaccurate, at least provisionally, to think in
such terms. It is into, and beyond, the structuring framework of existence
that the phobotropic intelligence is drawn. Lovecraft
describes
the impulse well:
I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my
strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve, momentarily, the
illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling
limitations of time, space, and natural law which for ever imprison us
and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the
radius of our sight and analysis. These stories frequently emphasise the
element of horror because fear is our deepest and strongest emotion, and
the one which best lends itself to the creation of nature-defying
illusions. Horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely
connected, so that it is hard to create a convincing picture of
shattered natural law or cosmic alienage or “outsideness” without laying
stress on the emotion of fear. The reason why
time plays a great part in so many of my tales is that
this element looms up in my mind as the most profoundly dramatic and
grimly terrible thing in the universe.
Conflict with time seems to me the most potent and
fruitful theme in all human expression.
A monster, in comparison, can be no more than a guide — unless it fuses
(like Yog Sothoth) into the enveloping extracosmic fabric, as a
super-sentient concentration of doors. We can nevertheless avail ourselves
of these guides, whose monstrosity — ‘properly understood’ — says much
about the path to the unnameable.
James Cameron’s 1989
movie
The Abyss is not atmospherically associated with our topic, but
it recommends itself to this investigation not only through its title, but
also in a single critical moment of its screenplay. When the
others (whose positive nature need not delay us here) are first
registered by certain technical indications, they are identified only as
“something not us.” In this respect, they reach the initial stage of
monstrosity, which is ‘simple’ beyondness, considered as a
leading characteristic.
Sinister-punk writer China Miéville, whose horror projects typically fail
the test of abstraction, is convincing on this point. Tentacle-monsters
lend themselves to horrific divinity precisely because they are not at all
‘us’ — sublimed beyond the prospect of anthropomorphic recognition by
their “Squidity”. In comparison to the humanoid figure of intelligent
being, they exert a preliminary repulsive force, which is already an
increment of abstraction. Insectoid forms (such as the fabled Alexian
Mantis) have a comparable traditional role.
It would be a feeble monstrosity, however, that came to rest in some such
elementary negation. The intrinsically seething, plastic forms of
cephalopods and of ungraspably complex insectoid beings already advances
to a further stage of corporeal abstraction, where
another form is supplanted by an other to form, and an
intensified alienation of apprehension.
Cinema, due — paradoxically — to its strict bonds of sensible
concreteness, provides especially vivid examples of this elevated
monstrosity. The commitment of film to the task of horror provokes further
subdivision, along a spectrum of amorphousness. The initial escape from
form is represented by a process of unpredictable mutation, such as that
graphically portrayed in David Cronenberg’s
The Fly
(1986), subverting in sequence every moment of perceptual purchase along
with its corollary morphological object. Monstrosity is a continuous
slide, or process of becoming, that does not look like anything.
Beyond the mutant there is a superior amorphousness, belonging to the
monster that has no intrinsic form of its own, or even an inherent
morphological trajectory. This shape-shifting horror occupies the high
plateau of cinematic monstrosity, as exemplified by three creatures which
can be productively discussed in concert: The Thing (1982); the Alien (franchise); and the Terminator (franchise).
These monsters share an extreme positive abstraction. In each case, they
borrow the shape of their prey, so that what one sees — what cinema shows
— is only how they hunt. As the Alien and
Terminator franchises have evolved, this basic abstract trait has
become increasingly explicit, undergoing narrative and visual
consolidation. The first Terminator had already been built to mimic human
form, but by the second installment of the series (Cameron, 1991), the
T-1000 was a liquid metal robotic predator with a body of poised flow,
wholly submerging form in military function. Similarly, the mutable Alien
body, over the course of the franchise, attained an ever higher state of
morphological variability as it melded with its predatory cycle. (That
the Thing had no appearance separable from those of its prey was ‘evident’
from the start.)
After the T-1000 is frozen and shattered, it gradually thaws, and begins
to re-combine into itself, flowing back together from its state of
disintegration. Is not this convergent wave the ‘shape’ of Skynet itself?
What cannot be seen is made perceptible, through graphic horror. (We now
‘see’ that technocommercial systems, whose catallactic being is a strictly
analogous convergent wave, belong indubitably to the world of horror, and
await their cinematographers.)
Nothing to see here.
[a reanimation of
Shoggothic
Materialism, next]
August 21, 2013Abstract Horror (Part 1a)
Zack
Zombies lower the tone, in innumerable ways. Socio-biological decay is
their natural element, carrying life towards a zero-degree affectivity,
without neutralizing a now-repulsive animation. They exist to be
slaughtered — in
retaliation —
which in turn furthers their descent through the pulp-Darwinism of
entertainment media, to the depths of senselessness where victory is
all-but-assured. As the world comes apart into dynamic slime, popular
horror is increasingly infested with zombies.
When envisaged as a military antagonist at the global scale,
Max Brooks calls ‘them’
Zack (amongst other things). If ‘Charlie’ abbreviates ‘Victor
Charlie’ as a casual jargon noun for the Viet Cong, how is ‘Zack’ derived?
Brooks offers no specific answer. It seems at least plausible that ‘Zombie
Apocalypse’ is the term that undergoes compression. In any case, ‘Zack’ is
name with a future, providing a concise collective — or dense — noun for a
monstrous syndrome that looms beyond the historical horizon.
‘Zack’, like ‘Charlie’, is the enemy,
nicknamed with an informality designed for stress reduction. The intensity
of the tag is associated with its ambivalence, as an affectionate moniker
that liberates or legitimates unrestricted killing. ‘Zack’ sounds like
‘he’ could be our buddy, so we can unleash violence upon ‘him’ without
qualm or inhibition. However odd this psychological formula may sound, it
is one that Brooks inherits, rather than invents.
Charlie is already an abstraction from ethical familiarity, but nothing
like Zack. Where we end, Zack begins, recruiting our corpses into undead
swarms. Our calamities are ‘his’ ammunition, because Zack is sheer
weaponry, the first true instantiation of total war, perfectly incarnating
antagonism to human survival. Zack is
nothing but the enemy, ‘who’ — entirely devoid of non-belligerent
purpose or interests — cannot be terrorized, intimidated, or deterred.
Scare Zack? One has no less chance of scaring a cold virus. So things
always return to the same basic conclusion: Zack has to be killed, as
nothing has before (even though — or especially because — it is already
dead).
Brooks is a zombie
neo-traditionalist. His re-animated undead shuffle (slowly). They propagate by
cannibalistic contagion. Only head-wounds terminate them. But zombies are
not the monsters. Zack is the monster. It is the syndrome — the
convergent wave — that realizes the phenomenon, as a matter of spreading
swarms, or irreducible populations.
Tactically, Zack’s strength is number, overwhelming resistance, and
replenishing itself from the casualties it inflicts. Strategically, it
prevails through system shock, patterned as epidemic, and
registered not as the ‘individual’ humanoid ghoul, but as an emergent,
global outbreak. There is no prospect of rational or
‘dispassionately’ effective counter-action until it is understood that
Zack is no mere ghoulish horde but a singular planetary trauma.
Zack is total stress.
Brooks
insists
upon the realism of his methods:
The zombies may be fake, but I wanted everything else in “World War Z”
to be real. Just like with “The Zombie Survival Guide,” I wanted the
story to be rooted in hard facts. That’s why I researched the real
geopolitics of the world in the early 21st century, the military
science, the macroeconomics and the cultural quirks of each country I
was writing about. As creative as I think I am, I also know that I can’t
invent anything as interesting (or scary) as the real planet we live on.
As a history nerd, I also wanted to ground the book in our species’ life
story. Nothing in “World War Z” was made up, it all really happened:
Yonkers was Isandlwana; the Chinese cover-up was SARS. There’s nothing
zombies can do to us that we haven’t already done to each other.
Take the world, exactly as it is, and postulate a radical stressor as
historical destination. Engineer, with all possible precision, a
speculative collision with utter disaster — a total world war that is also
a plague, a precipice of bio-social degeneration, and a universal
psychotic episode — that’s Zack. Understandably, people will be reluctant
to describe this method as ultimate realism. Nevertheless, as
things messily unwind, we’re going to hear much more about it.
August 29, 2013Abstract Horror (Part 2)
Among literary genres, horror cannot claim an exclusive right to make
contact with reality. Superficially, its case for doing so at all might
seem peculiarly weak, since it rarely appeals to generally accepted
criteria of ‘realism’. Insofar as reality and normality are in any way
confused, horror immediately finds itself exiled to those spaces of
psychological and social aberrance, where extravagant delusion finds its
precarious refuge.
Yet, precisely through its freedom from plausible representation, horror
hoards to itself a potential for the realization of encounters,
of a kind that are exceptional to literature, and rare even as a
hypothetical topic within philosophy. The intrinsic abstraction of the
horrific entity carves out the path to a meeting, native to the
intelligible realm, and thus unscreened by the interiority or subjectivity
of fiction. What horror explores is the sort of thing that, due to its
plasticity and beyondness, could make its way into your thoughts more
capably that you do yourself. Whatever the secure mental ‘home’ you
imagine yourself to possess, it is an indefensible playground for the
things that horror invokes, or responds to.
The experience of profound horror is in
certain respects unusual, and a life entirely bereft of it would not seem
notably peculiar. One might go further, and propose that if such an
experience is ever truly possible, the universe is demonstrably
uninhabitable. Horror makes an ultimate and intolerable claim, as
suggested by its insidious familiarity. At the brink of its encroachment
there is suggested, simultaneously, an ontologically self-confirming
occurrence — indistinguishable from its own reality — and a comprehensive
substitution of the commonplace, such that this (unbearable thing) is what
you have always known, and the only thing that can be known. The slightest
glimpse of it is the radical abolition of anything other being imaginable
at all. Nothing matters, then, except that this glimpse be
eluded. Hence the literary effect of the horrific, in unconfirmed
suggestion (felt avoidance of horror). However, it is not the
literary effect that concerns us here, but the thing.
Let us assume then (no doubt preposterously) that shoggoth is
that thing, the thought of which is included — or absorbed — within
itself. H.P. Lovecraft dramatizes this conjecture in the fictional
biography of the ‘mad Arab’ Abdul Alhazred, ‘author’ of the
Necronomicon, whose writings tend to an encounter that they
simultaneously preclude:
Shoggoths and their work ought not to be seen by human beings or
portrayed by any beings. The mad author of the Necronomicon had
nervously tried to swear that none had been bred on this planet, and
that only drugged dreamers had even conceived them.
This is a point insisted upon:
These viscous masses were without doubt what Abdul Alhazred whispered
about as the ‘Shoggoths’ in his frightful Necronomicon, though even that
mad Arab had not hinted that any existed on earth except in the dreams
of those who had chewed a certain alkaloidal herb.
A lucid written record of these ‘creatures’ cannot exist, because the
world we know has carried on. That can, at least, be permitted to persist
as a provisional judgement.
On a ferocious summer day, in AD 738, Alhazred is walking through the
central market of Damascus on business unknown. He appears to be deep in
thought, and disengaged from his surroundings. The crowds in the
marketplace scarcely notice him. Without warning, the air is rent by
hideous shrieks, testifying to suffering beyond human comprehension.
Alhazred convulses abominably, as if he were being drawn upwards into an
invisible, devouring entity, or digested out of the world. His
screams gurgle into silence, as his body is filthily extracted from
perceptibility. Within only a few moments, nothing remains. The adequate
thought of shoggoth has taken place.
To defend the sober realism of this account is no easy task. A first step
is grammatical, and concerns the difficult matter of plurality. Lovecraft,
plotting an expedition from the conventions of pulp fiction, readily
succumbs to the model of plural entity, and refers to ‘shoggoths’ without
obvious hesitation. ‘Each’ shoggoth has approximate magnitude (averaging
“about fifteen feet in diameter when a sphere”). They were originally
replicated as tools, and are naturally many. Despite being “shapeless
entities composed of a viscous jelly which looked like an agglutination of
bubbles … constantly shifting shape and volume” they seem, initially, to
be numerable. This grammatical conformity will not be supportable for
long.
‘Shoggoths’ come from beyond the bionic horizon, so it is to be expected
that their organization is dissolved in functionality. ‘They’ are
“infinitely plastic and ductile […] protoplasmic masses capable of molding
their tissues into all sorts of temporary organs […] throwing out
temporary developments or forming apparent organs of sight, hearing, and
speech.” What they are is what they do, or — for a time — what is done
through them.
The shoggoths originated as tools — as technology — created by the Old
Ones as bionic robots, or construction machinery. Their shape,
organization, and behavior was programmable (“hypnotically”). In the
vocabulary of human economic science, we should have no problem describing
shoggoth as productive apparatus, that is to say, as
capital. Yet this description requires elaboration, because the
story is far from complete:
They had always been controlled through the hypnotic suggestions of the
Old Ones, and had modeled their tough plasticity into various useful
temporary limbs and organs; but now their self-modeling powers were
sometimes exercised independently, and in various imitative forms
implanted by past suggestion. They had, it seems, developed a semistable
brain whose separate and occasionally stubborn volition echoed the will
of the Old Ones without always obeying it.
The ideas of ‘robot rebellion’ or capital insurgency are crude precursors
to the realization of shoggoth, conceived as intrinsically abstract,
techno-plastic, bionically auto-processing matter, of the kind that
Lovecraft envisages intersecting terrestrial geophysics in the distance
past, scarring it cryptically. Shoggoth is a virtual plasma-state of
material capability that logically includes, within itself, all natural
beings. It builds brains as technical sub-functions. Whatever brains can
think, shoggoth can can process, as an arbitrary specification of
protoplasmic — or perhaps hyperplasmic — abstraction.
Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and
processes – viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells – rubbery
fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile – slaves of
suggestion, builders of cities – more and more sullen, more and more
intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative! Great
God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use
and carve such things?
The history of capitalism is indisputably a horror story …
[All Lovecraft cites from
At the Mountains of Madness. ++ shoggoth nightmare still to come]
September 20, 2013Abstract Horror (Note-1)
On twitter @SamoBurja has proposed the silence of the galaxy as an
undeveloped horrorist topic. He’s right.
The absence of any signs of alien intelligence was first noted as a
problem by Enrico Fermi in 1950. He found the gaping inconsistency between
the apparent probability of widespread life in the cosmos and its obvious
invisibility provocative to the point of
paradox. “Where
are they?” he asked. (Responses to this question, well represented in the
Wikipedia references, have constituted a significant current of
cosmological speculation.)
Among recent thinkers, Nick Bostrom has been especially dogged in pursuing
the
implications
of the Fermi Paradox. Approaching the problem through systematic
statistical ontology, he has shown that it suggests a ‘thing’ — a ‘Great
Filter’ that at some stage winnows down potential galactic
civilizations to negligible quantities. If this filtering does not happen
early — due to astro-chemical impediments to the emergence of life — it
has to apply later. Consistently, he considers any indications of abundant
galactic life to be ominous in the extreme. A Late Great Filter
would then still lie ahead (for us). Whatever it is, we would be on our
approach to an encounter with it.
With every new exo-planet discovery, the Great
Filter becomes darker. A galaxy teeming with life is a horror story. The
less there is obstructing our being born, the more there is waiting to
kill or ruin us.
If we could clearly envision the calamity that awaited us, it would be an
object of terror. Instead, it is a shapeless threat, ‘Outside’ only in the
abstract sense (encompassing the negative immensity of everything that we
cannot grasp). It could be anywhere, from our genes or ecological
dynamics, to the hidden laws of technological evolution, or the hostile
vastnesses between the stars. We know only that, in strict proportion to
the vitality of the cosmos, the probability of its existence advances
towards inevitability, and that for us it means supreme ill.
Ontological density without identifiable form is abstract horror itself.
As the Great Filter drifts inexorably, from a challenge that we might
imaginably have already overcome, to an encounter we ever more
fatalistically expect, horrorism is thickened by statistical-cosmological
vindication. The unknown condenses into a shapeless, predatory
thing. Through our techno-scientific sensors and calculations,
the Shadow mutters to us, and probability insists that we shall meet it
soon.
December 14, 2013Abstract Horror (Note-1a)
Robin Hanson
on the Great
Filter for TED. It’s too well done to hold back until next Friday.
“Something out there is killing everything, and you’re next. … You should
be worried.” (He has the nightmare smile down to a T.)
December 13, 2014Abstract Horror (Note-2)
A very special
jolt
of bliss for Friday (Horror) Night — a whole new monster (the ‘Phantom’):
Most models of dark energy hold that the amount of it remains constant.
But about 10 years ago, cosmologists realised that if the total density
of dark energy is increasing, we could be headed for a nightmare
scenario – the “big rip”. As space-time expands faster and faster,
matter will be torn apart, starting with galaxy clusters and ending with
atomic nuclei. Cosmologists called it “phantom” energy.
Phantom energy is an underdog theory, but the consequences are so
dramatic that it’s worth testing, Huterer says. The weakness of the
evidence is balanced by the fact that the implications are huge, he
says. “We will have to completely revise even our current thinking of
dark energy if phantom is really at work.”
(If I’d been making this stuff up, about the entirety of cosmic space
being a concealed monster poised to rip every particle in the universe
apart, I’d have named the hero ‘Dragan
Huterer‘ too.)
September 5, 2014Abstract Horror (Note-3)
Nicola Masciandaro discusses the method of ‘hyper-literal anagogy’ in the
introduction to his exquisite
book
Sufficient Unto the Day: Sermones Contra Solicitudinem (p.3-4,
also
here):
It thus naturally tends to seize semantically on the substantiality of
the negative and on what might have been said otherwise but was not — a
not that is felt to contain the secret of everything.
For example, Meister Eckhart’s exegesis of Paul’s blinding vision on the
road to Damascus entirely ignores the ordinary, regular sense of “and
when his eyes were opened he saw nothing” (Acts 9:8) [apertisque oculis nihil videbat] in favor of a mystically literal plenitude of possibilities: “I think
this text has a fourfold sense. One is that when he rose up from the
ground with open eyes he saw Nothing, and the Nothing was God; for when
he saw God he calls that Nothing. The second: when he got up he saw
nothing but God. The third: in all things he saw nothing but God. The
fourth: when he saw God, he saw all things as nothing.”[2] Similarly,
Augustine’s well-known statement as to the unknowable knowability of
time — “What therefore is time? If no one [nemo] asks
me, I know; if I want to explain it to someone questioning me, I do not
know”[3] — may be (im)properly read as saying that time is known in the
positively negative presence of a nemo, a not-man
(ne+homo) who asks about time, a pure
question posed by nobody. The presence of this no-one who is still
there, a senseless letter-spirit and sudden negative indication upon
which superlative understanding depends, provides a fitting structural
figure for this method and an image of its divinatory, daimonic form,
its sortilegic reading of received signs.
[2] Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works,
trans. Maurice O’C Walshe (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2009), Sermon
19, p. 142.
[3] “Quid est ergo tempus? Si nemo ex me quaerat, scio; si quaerenti
explicare velim, nescio” (Augustine, Confessions,
11.14).
Between The Nothing and Abstract Horror there is no difference.
Some related hints (and
others).
Eventually we reach the Vast Abrupt.
November 12, 2014
SECTION A - HORRORISM
CHAPTER ONE - METHOD
Reactionary Horror
Within the Western tradition, the expedition to find Kurtz at the end of
the river has a single overwhelming connotation. It is a voyage to Hell.
Hence its absolute importance, utterly exceeding narrow ‘mission
specifications’. The assigned objectives are no more than a pretext,
arranging the terms of approach to an ultimate destination. The narrative
drive, as it gathers momentum, is truly infernal. Dark Enlightenment is
the commanding attraction.
There are no doubt species of reactionary political and historical
philosophy which remain completely innocent of such impulses. Almost
certainly, they predominate over their morbid associates. To maintain a
retrograde psychological orientation, out of reverence for what has been,
and is ceasing to be, can reasonably be opposed to any journey to the end
of the night. Yet such a contrast only sharpens our understanding of those
for whom the disintegration of tradition describes a gradient, and a
vector, propelling intelligence forwards into the yawning abyss.
Reaction is articulated as an inversion of the
progressive promise, dissociating ‘the good’ and ‘the future’. The tacit
science fiction narrative that corresponds to projected social evolution
is stripped of its optimism, and two alternative genres arise in its
place. The first, as we have fleetingly noted, is mild and nostalgic,
rebalancing the tension of time towards what has been lost, and tending to
an increasingly dreamlike inhabitation of ancient glories. A
conservative-traditionalist mentality devotes itself to a mnemonic quest,
preserving vestiges of virtue among the remnants of an eroded society, or
— when preservation at last surrenders its grasp on actuality — turning to
fantastic evocations, as the final redoubt of defiance. Tolkien
exemplifies this tendency in its most systematic expression. The future is
gently obliterated, as the good dies within it.
The second reactionary alternative to the ruin of utopian futurism
develops in the direction of horror. It does not hesitate in its voyage to
the end of the river, even as smoke-shrouded omens thicken on the horizon.
As the devastation deepens, its futurism is further accentuated.
Historical projection becomes the opportunity for an exploration of Hell.
(The ‘neo-‘ of ‘neoreaction’ thus finds additional confirmation.)
On this track, reactionary historical anticipation fuses with the genre of
horror in its most intense possibility (and true vocation). Numerous
consequences are quite rapidly evident. One special zone of significance
concerns the
insistent
question of popularization, which is substantially resolved,
almost from the start. The genre of reactionary populism is already
tightly formulated, on the side of horror fiction, where
things going to Hell is an established presupposition. Zombie
Apocalypse is only the most prominent variant of a far more general
cultural accommodation to impending disaster. ‘Survivalism’ is as much a
genre convention as a socio-political expectation. (When, as VXXC points
out on
the blog, .22 ammunition functions as virtual currency, horror fiction has
already installed itself as an operational dimension of social reality.)
Reaction does not do dialectics, or converse with the Left (with which it
has no community), yet historical fatality carries its message:
Your hopes are our horror story. As the dream perishes, the
nightmare strengthens, and even — hideously — invigorates. So how does
this tale unfold …?
What were you expecting? Rivendell?
August 18, 2013Horrorism
Neoreaction, as it tends to extremity on its Dark Enlightenment vector,
frustrates all familiar demands for activism. Even if explicit
anti-politics remains a minority posture, the long-dominant demotic
calculus of political possibility is consistently subverted — coring out
the demographic constituencies from which ‘mobilization’ might be
expected. There is no remotely coherent reactionary class, race, or creed
— it painstakingly explains — from which a tide-reversing mass politics
could be constructed. In this respect, even the mildest versions of
neoreactionary analysis are profoundly politically disillusioning.
When demotist ideologies have entered into superficially comparable
crises, they have forked into ‘realist’ compromisers and ‘terrorist’
ultras. The latter option, which substitutes a violent intensification of
political will for the erosion of the extensive (popular) factor, is an
especially reliable indicator of demotism entering an idealist state, in
which its essential ideological features are exposed with peculiar
clarity. Terrorists are the vehicles of political ideas which have been
stranded by a receding tide of social identity, and are thus freed to
perfect themselves in abstraction from mass practicality. Once a
revolutionary movement becomes demographically implausible, terrorists are
born.
Neoreactionary realism, in contrast, is
positively aligned with the recession of demotic sustenance. If this were
not the case, it would exhibit its own specific mode of democratic
politics — an evident absurdity. Any suggestion of frustrated rage,
tilting into terroristic expressions, would immediately reveal profound
confusion, or hypocrisy. Lashing the masses into ideological acquiescence,
through exemplary violence, cannot imaginably be a neoreactionary
objective.
Demotist activism finds its rigorous neoreactionary ‘counterpart’ in
fatalism — trichotomized as providence, heredity, and catallaxy.
Each of these strands of fate work their way out in the absence of mass
political endorsement, with a momentum that builds through the
dissolution of organized compensatory action. Rather than attempting to
make something happen, fatality restores something that cannot be stopped.
It is thus that the approximate contours of the horrorist task emerge into
focus. Rather than resisting the desperation of the progressive ideal by
terrorizing its enemies, it directs itself to the culmination of
progressive despair in the abandonment of
reality compensation. It de-mobilizes, de-massifies, and
de-democratizes, through subtle, singular, catalytic interventions,
oriented to the realization of fate. The Cathedral has to be horrified
into paralysis. The horrorist message (to its enemies):
Nothing that you are doing can possibly work.
“What is to be done?” is not a neutral question. The agent it invokes
already strains towards progress. This suffices to suggest a horrorist
response: Nothing. Do nothing. Your progressive ‘praxis’ will
come to nought in any case. Despair. Subside into horror. You can pretend
to prevail in antagonism against ‘us’, but reality is your true — and
fatal — enemy. We have no interest in shouting at you. We whisper, gently,
in your ear: “despair”. (The horror.)
November 3, 2013Deeper Darkness
At the point where people have begun to
talk
about “a positive Black Death effect” do they realize how far they’ve
descended into the shadows? The hard-core horror of Malthusian analysis
always has some new depths to fathom.
The idea that European living standards rose following the ‘relief’ from
Malthusian pressure gifted by bubonic plague is far from new. It is even
something approaching an uncontroversial fact of economic history. To take
an additional step, however, and attribute the rise of the West to its
mid-14th century epidemic devastation, is to wander into unexplored tracts
of icy
misanthropy. Europe was lucky enough to have enough people die.
The Malthusian implication (systematized
by Gregory Clark) that only downward social mobility is compatible with
eugenic trends, is a dark thought I have touched upon
occasionally,
but have yet to firmly fix upon. The idea of mass population destruction
as a developmental gift, in any situation where economic growth rates fall
below average fertility (I simplify), takes Dark Enlightenment to a whole
other level.
As a footnote, it raises the question: was the Great Divergence eugenic
for the Far East (which fell behind) and dysgenic for the West (which
forged ahead)? Is economic prosperity essentially a gene trasher?
I tend to side with libertarians in their aversion to (Keynesian)
broken window
economics, but it is to be expected that such reasoning will promptly
subside into sheer cognitive paralysis when the far more disturbing
Malthusian conclusions are introduced. Libertarians already think they’ve
‘got’ Malthus, as the guy who lost the Simon-Ehrlich
wager
— an anti-capitalist green prophet preaching population restriction.
The real Malthus is going to come as a shock. He certainly spine-chills
me.
November 18, 2013Mission Creep
Sensation — media nourishment — is situated on a border. It tells the
inside something about the outside, and is shaped from both sides. The
outside is what it is, which might not be perceptible, or acceptable. The
inside wants relevant information, selected and formatted to its purposes.
Sensation is therefore where subject and object meet.
… that’s an attempt to express preliminary sympathy for Matt Sigl’s
situation, caught between an uncanny thing and a definite
agenda. Concretely; research collides with editing, with Sigl’s
brain as ground zero. The encounter of Neoreaction with the media is a
peculiarly vicious one, with the sensations to match.
Crudely speaking, Neoreaction is disgust at the media condensed into an
ideology. While generally contemptuous of the human fodder making up
modern democracies, Neoreaction principally targets the media-academic
complex (or ‘Cathedral’) for antagonism, because it is the media that is
the real ‘electorate’ — telling voters what to do. This foundational
critique, on its own, would be enough to ensure intense reciprocal
loathing. Of course, it is not on its own. Neoreaction is in almost every
respect the Cathedral anti-message, which is to say that it is
consistently, radically, and defiantly ‘off-message’ on every topic of
significance, and is thus something unutterably horrible. Yet utterance —
it now seems — there has to be …
So what appears on the boundary — or
sensationally — is something remarkably
creepy. As a deeply resonant public communication of what has just
happened, and continues to happen, as well as what has been
editorially decided, this word is almost too exquisite to contemplate. We
can at least burrow down into it a little way.
What is creepiness exactly? The intractability of this question
is the phenomenon (which is not a phenomenon,
exactly). Creepiness is not quite what it seems, and this insinuation of
the unknown, or intrinsic inexactness, is something horrible that exceeds
the initial sensation of revulsion. It suggests a revelation in stages,
complicated by successive revisions, but leading inexorably, ever deeper,
into an encounter one recoils from, sensing (inexactly) that it will be
ultimately found intolerable.
It’s already a little horror story, most probably with a female
protagonist (as acutely noted
at
Amos & Gromar). From the very beginning, it
feels sinister. One cannot see exactly why, because one cannot
bear to see. The imprecision of perception is already protective, or
evasive, serving dramatically as an ominous inkling of the blinding panic,
wild flight, and screaming that must surely come. You really don’t want to
see it, even though (horribly) you know that you have to, because it could be dangerous. As the lurid
movie posters shriek sensationally, it’s a thing
You’d Better Take Seriously.
This is journalism eating itself, or being eaten, in a an encounter with
something monstrous from Outside.
Look at this thing you won’t be able to look at (without moaning
in horror). Watch what you can’t bear to see. It tilts over into
a kind of madness, which couldn’t be more obvious, or less clearly
perceptible. Sigl’s editors have been sucked into a vortex of horrific
sensationalism that draws attention to the one thing they are duty-bound
to hide from people. It has to be creepy, that is: imperceptible
at the very moment it is seen. The approved response to Neoreaction is to
be creeped out, but that can’t possibly be enough.
At first we might think that ‘creepy’ is a
subjective adjective, describing something too horrible to
describe. It’s tempting, since we suspect these people retreated into
their feelings long ago. The reality is far creepier.
Things really creep, although not exactly objectively, when they proceed
in a way you’re not quite able to perceive. Evidently, Moldbug
sees this (“Something is happening here. But you don’t know what it is — do you,
Mr. Jones?”).
You have to imagine you’re the media to carry on further into the horror
story. Then you can see that it’s creepy in part (always in parts),
because you let it in. That shrieking thing you were
doing? Perhaps you should have taken that as a sign. Now it’s creeping about
inside, in your media, in your brains, in your dimly unscrutinized
thoughts, and all those elaborate security systems that you spent so long
putting together — they’re now mostly an obstacle course for the cops, or
whoever else you think might imaginably come to your rescue, because
they’re certainly not standing between you and the Mind Virus.
Really, what were you thinking, when you started screaming about it, and
thus let it in? You don’t know, do you? — and that’s seriously creepy.
Even though you don’t want to — at all — it makes you think about HBD,
heredity, instincts, impulses, and incomprehensible chemical machines,
stealthily at work behind your thoughts, obdurate in their reality, and
intolerable beyond acknowledgement. Shrieking “Nazi science!” (or
whatever) doesn’t help, because it’s inside now, and you know it’s true,
even as you play the hunted heroine mumbling “no, no, no, no, no …”
backing ever deeper into the shadows.
This is reality, and it’s already inside, that’s what you were
saying when you called it ‘creepy’.
It’s happening, and there’s no point at all saying “get over it” — because
you won’t.
December 4, 2013Horrified
There’s a post on H. P. Lovecraft’s
extreme
racism
on the way, and given the abundance of stimulating
material
on the topic, a small taster is irresistible.
This
highly representative essay by Nicole Cushing serves as an occasion. She
writes:
Broaching this subject is also difficult because it has to be handled
with some nuance (which is difficult to achieve in a discussion of a
topic as justifiably emotionally-charged as American racism). It would
be too easy to point to Lovecraft’s racism (and some of his other
failings as an author), and dismiss him as an undistinguished crackpot
who deserved nothing better than publication in the pulps. I’m not going
to do that here. My stance is that Lovecraft made an important
contribution to horror and science fiction by focusing (in a persistent
and compellingly imaginative way) on the terror induced by the
revelation of human non-significance in the cosmos. […] Lovecraft has
had a meaningful influence over horror fiction (in particular) for many
years, an influence that transcends his racism. … All of this is just a
long-winded way of explaining that Lovecraft’s racism doesn’t negate his
accomplishments.
But his accomplishments don’t negate his racism. (Enter, cognitive
dissonance).
Among the most fascinating aspects of this commentary is its blatant
misdirection, since — of course — the phenomenon indicated
has nothing whatsoever to do with cognitive dissonance. There is
an encounter here with an abnormal species of literary genius, associated
with profound metaphysical truth, which at the same time — and for
inextricably tangled reasons — triggers a reaction of moral panic, tilting
over into deep somatic revulsion. In other words, and perhaps even quite
simply, what is being related by Nicole Cushing is — horror.
ADDED:
This
morbidly amused me:
“There was this window of opportunity,” [Necronomicon
hoaxer Peter Levenda] continues looking back on the occult resurgence of
the 1970s, when “we wanted to show that this is not scary stuff. It
could be powerful, it could be mind-altering, it could change your life.
But it was not dangerous, it was not going to kill you. And that’s what
we were trying to promote.”
I recently paid a visit to the former location of The Magickal Childe.
Herman Slater died of AIDS in 1992 …
ADDED: Nicole Cushing (in her own comments thread): “In posts where “the
n-word” would appear, I’ve edited it to be ‘N—-r’ or some similar
arrangement. That way, readers should be able to get the gist of what the
commenter is referring to without having to gaze at the word, itself.” —
Why not just leave it as “Neoreaction”? — it can’t be
that terrifying.
January 9, 2014Darkness
When the winter comes, life becomes hard. Do the nice thing, too often, or
too indiscriminately,
and
“Gnon will destroy you.”
Only the most extreme sociopath is oblivious to the comforts of moral
squeamishness. It almost counts as the basic scaffolding of sanity to
believe, or to immersively pretend, that our deepest qualms are shared by
the commanding principles of being. At the highest level of hegemonic
global culture, such scruples — projected ever more wantonly into the
nature of things — are represented by Francis Fukuyama’s teleo-zenith
“liberal democracy” which, as Daniel McCarthy accurately
points
out, “turns out to be a synonym for ‘the attitudes and institutions of a
world in which Anglo-American power is dominant.’” Hobbesian realities
have receded from Western public consciousness in direct proportion to the
rise of a titanic ‘Atlantean‘ power. To confuse the gentle webs of civility with fundamental
structures of reality is decadence, a path that Western sensibilities have
been traveling for decades, if not centuries. Nothing deep within the
fabric of the world gets upset about the same things, and in the same
ways, that we would want it to.
‘Children’. That single word, alone, says everything that is necessary
here. Lost, abandoned, exploited, sick and neglected, crippled, starved,
and slaughtered, they saturate the media-scape of the harshening Western
winter. Their real features are hard to discern beneath the thick coating
of symbolism they bear, as every scale of the media, from brainwashed
micro-blogger to massive news conglomerate, orchestrates the pathetic cry:
how can this possibly be allowed to be? There should be
something, profoundly rooted-down into the nature of the world, that cares
about tormented and massacred children, shouldn’t there? Something other,
and more, than the fragile machinery of a civilization that now tilts and
groans ominously in the rising winter wind? When these media-blitzed
fate-damned children scrape our moral sensitivities down to the raw,
bloody quick, there has to be something basic concerned to
protect them, surely?
No, there really
doesn’t.
Welcome to the world without the state. Life is, as Thomas Hobbes put
it, nasty, brutish, and short. Gangs are a common element in 4GW, which
is what these children find themselves caught up in. Childhood as we
know it, which is a Victorian creation, vanishes. Child fighters were
common before the Victorian period; 18th century Royal Navy warships
often had 12-year old midshipmen and children as young as eight serving
as powder monkeys. In other parts of today’s world where the state has
broken down, child soldiers are normal. […] Here is where a correct
understanding of Fourth Generation war is necessary. Mrs. Nazario is
right: these children are refugees. As the number of failed states grows
and disorder spreads, we will see vast floods of refugees, millions and
tens of millions, all trying to get into one of the ever-smaller number
of places that remain orderly. Those states, including our own, dare not
admit them. Why? Because they will bring the behaviors they are fleeing
with them. It was just this sort of immigration that brought down the
Roman Empire. The barbarians (except perhaps the Vandals) were not
invading Rome to destroy it; they were moving in, during the same sort
of movement of whole peoples, Volkerwanderung, we now
face, seeking the order Rome offered. But their numbers were so great
they overwhelmed Rome. The Dark Ages began as a refugee crisis.
The world is going to become very hard. We, however, are no longer hard.
It is unlikely that we will cope.
ADDED:
The laughter of Gnon is not gentle.
ADDED:
This
belongs here too.
July 21, 2014Moral Terror
Before we get around to bravely denouncing — with whatever degree of
theatricality falls just short of laughable camp — those ‘sociopaths’ or
‘psychopaths’ who are effortless indifferent to intuitive qualms, perhaps
we can agree that such anomalous psychological types are definitively
incapable of
moral
terror. In this respect, they are human precursors of that which, from a
strictly functional point of view, we want our military robotics control
systems to be. They have no squeamishness to overcome. Stone cold killers
no doubt exist, and even more certainly soon will. If moral terror is the
topic, however, they fall entirely outside it.
A discussion of the roots of moral intuition far exceeds the reasonable
ambition of a modest blog post. Those wanting to plug it more or less
directly into God will do so. Even radical religious skeptics, however,
are unable to deny the fact of very basic, deeply pre-reflective
moral commitments as a human norm. The scientific literature alone is now
huge.
There is no serious controversy about the existence of a ‘sense or right
and wrong’ (irrespective of its variability regarding specifics) as a
fundamental component of human evolved psychology. This only needs to be
said because of widespread childish delusions that ‘moral nihilism’ could
be considered a default condition of the non-indoctrinated human
individual. ‘Wolf-boy’ is still a moral animal.
If moral nihilism is possible at all, it is
touched upon only at the limit of moral terror, which is to say as a
horror that is — from the human perspective — absolute. In the
Western religious tradition it is epitomized by God’s testing of Abraham
(Genesis 22), which shallow souls are tempted to rush through.
Abraham fully expected that
it would be necessary to murder his own son, in compliance with a
higher purpose (identified with God’s will). There is probably no
example of moral terror that does not conform, abstractly, to this
template. Anyone suggesting that the most extreme possibility of
soul-shuddering horror is in some way external to Biblical Monotheism is a
fool. The passage through moral terror is a commandment of God — and
‘through’ is a retrospective comfort alien to the original divine decree.
… but forget God (almost everyone
has). Consider
instead Thomas
Malthus, or his most brilliant
recent
students. Can anybody read these texts without an immersion in moral terror? Our
moral sensibilities are cancelled by the blood-mill of history — under the
iron rule of a higher conservation law — making a horrible
jest of even
our most uncorrupted impulses towards the good. The
philosophical virtue of the Scottish Enlightenment lay entirely
in its meditation upon such perversion of purposes. It is from such
heights that we have fallen into our presently-dominant — lazy, cowardly,
and despicable — moralistic cant.
How can we advance in accordance with our most sacred moral
intuitions?
asks the progressive, who then requests:
“Assume the desirability of universal human equality …”
“No,” responds the Neoreactionary, whose question is rather:
What are we assuming, that we could instead think about?
February 27, 2015Quote notes (#66)
Gregory Clark
on
his new book:
Because America is such an unequal society there has been more emphasis
on the possibilities of social mobility. How else are you going to
justify the incredible inequalities in the US? So it’s going to be very
unwelcome news for people in the States that there really are very slow
rates of social mobility. Now what’s interesting about this book is that
its message seems to be equally unwelcome to both right and left. The
left loves the idea that there are slow rates of social mobility. But
they want to hold on to the idea that there’s going to be a political
programme that will end this problem. But the book says that there’s
absolutely no sign of our ability as a society to change that. The right
hates the idea that there are very slow rates of social mobility, but
they love the idea that there’s nothing you can do about it.
Liberals: “Things are unfair, we need to change that.”
Conservatives: “No, things are fair enough, we don’t need
to do anything.”
Reactionaries: “Things are vastly more unfair than you
can possibly imagine, and all of our attempts to change this situation
amount to a fantastic calamity.”
March 15, 2014Deep Ruin
@MattOlver linked
this
gallery of classy Detroit devastation images in Time. Visions of
modernity in ruins have an intrinsic reactionary inclination, irrespective
of any superficial attributions of causation. They directly subvert
assumptions of relentless progress, suggest cyclic perturbations in the
current of history, and evoke the tragic
adjustments
of fate. Ruins deride
hubristic
pretensions. They mark an ineluctable compliance with the Old
Law of Gnon.
The Left, in its thoughtful moments, at least partially
understands
this. Things thought buried return, while highways of confident advance
are lost in dissolution. The radical imagination is broken.
As Archdruid John Michael Greer
writes, on the collapse of the great progressive narrative:
There are times when the deindustrial future seems to whisper in the
night like a wind blowing through the trees, sending the easy
certainties of the present spinning like dead leaves. I had one of those
moments recently, courtesy of
a news story from 1997
that a reader forwarded me, about the spread of secret stories among
homeless children in Florida’s Dade County. These aren’t your ordinary
children’s stories: they’re myths in the making, a bricolage of images
from popular religion and folklore torn from their original contexts and
pressed into the service of a harsh new vision of reality.
God, according to Dade County’s homeless children, is missing in
action; demons stormed Heaven a while back and God hasn’t been seen
since. The mother of Christ murdered her son and morphed into the
terrifying Bloody Mary, a nightmare being who weeps blood from eyeless
sockets and seeks out children to kill them. Opposing her is a
mysterious spirit from the ocean who takes the form of a blue-skinned
woman, and who can protect children who know her secret name. The
angels, though driven out of Heaven, haven’t given up; they carry on
their fight against the demons from a hidden camp in the jungle
somewhere outside Miami, guarded by friendly alligators who devour
hostile intruders. The spirits of children who die in Dade County’s
pervasive gang warfare can go to the camp and join the war against the
demons, so long as someone who knows the stories puts a leaf on their
graves.
ADDED: Thomas Fleming among the ruins.
ADDED: (via) “… reality
itself is nothing more than a rotting God.”
July 4, 20142014 Lessons (#2)
Horroristic practice: to seize the collapse of the world as the
opportunity for an encounter with the Outside. Is this NRx? In all
probability, no more than symbiotically. The occasion for tactical
alignment, however, is considerable.
There are twin tracks into the gathering darkness, but horrorism is by far
the more capable of feeding itself. (The chronic NRx call for ‘action’ is
a symptom of malnourishment.)
December 31, 2014Scrap note #7
A ‘scrap note’ is what you end up with after dropping below the level of
articulacy required for a raw quote (or T-shirt slogan). It’s a format
dragged out of Cambodia for informal meanderings.
This one is here because I’m in the sand-pit, playing the German Army of
the Great War. First hurl everything at the French (communist
Accelerationism) and
try to take them out of the game within a few months, then wheel around
for a plunge into Russia, dismantling the Czarists (with a hurricane of
Neocameralism). Sequenced
two-front
war. It’s a strategy that’s already driven me into narcoleptic
disintegration, but I’m committed.
Out here in the Dark East, waiting for news about the titanic Western
clashes, it’s a time to patch things together with meager resources.
That’s economy, which is always worth exploring. The specific
topic of micro-cognition has been nagging at me with unusual ferocity ever
since crossing over into Twitter. It seems like something close to a
compulsory adaptation, as the near future chews human psychology into hot
techno-splinters. If we don’t accept miniaturization as an urgent and
intimate problem, we’ll eventually collide ruinously with nano-hostiles we
can’t even perceive. (So, as always, I think any traditionalism without a
‘neo-‘ is already laid out on the sacrificial slab.)
Languid afternoons with long and difficult books would be the way to go —
if we had a different future. In the one we have, we’ll receive the
ancient tomes in scrambled streams, hurtling at us like a particle storm
out of cyberspace. Lamentable? Perhaps. Avoidable? Almost certainly not.
So adapt.
This is the sort of thing
worth thinking about carefully — but in pieces. It’s
creepypasta taken to
the next level. I was totally ready for it, musing vaguely about scaling
horror down to the same approximate size while in Cambodia — although
nothing quite crystallized. The reception of these two-sentence
micro-nasties suggests that plenty of
other people were tapping into the
same high-frequency shadow waves. The next stage is compression to the
140-characters of a tweet — then it goes into tweet contagion. Horrorist
memetic warfare. (Did I warn you that grammar gets suspended in a scrap
note?)
A few additional quick-and-dirty points about horrorist method. (1) It’s
not clicked here yet, which is why this isn’t a horror story. (2) When it
is, the story has to absorb enough theory to be gratingly ‘meta’ —
smoothing that out will be a guiding aesthetic imperative. (3) Horrorism
has to be not only ‘meta’, but also reflexive, or nonlinear, in order to
deliver its payload across the fiction barrier. It will all seem hideously
‘postmodern’ if it isn’t done well, so clunky annoyances will abound in
the early stages. (Consider that a preliminary down-payment on future
apologies.) (4) I’m not at all sure there’s anything horrorism
can’t do … (5) Experiment.
Stepping back from the harsh tracts of horror, there are numerous paths of
splinter-technique to wander down. Prominent instance:
numbering. Coming full-circle, the #Accelerate manifesto
is composed in numbered paragraphs, which is formally appealing. It
acknowledges a virtual discontinuity, as if pre-formatted for the rending
to come. With different methods, it could facilitate discontinuous
composition, providing the assembly codes for a whole that arrives in
chunks, even out of sequence, or across intervals of oblivion. It also
references traditions of fragmentary writing (Nietzsche, Wittgenstein) in
which brevity, or conceptual completion on constricted scales, was adopted
as a principle of achievement. The Internet tide flows in that direction
(Moldbug notwithstanding).
I liked
this
short piece by Isegoria a lot. (I’m half way through
Moby Dick at the moment, and getting far more out of it than ever
before.)
An Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
classic
(just because I want a place to lock-down the link).
Some final horrorism
material.
Disintegration …
ADDED: The machines don’t think we’re reading fast enough. (Their case is
terrifyingly persuasive.)
March 5, 2014Fnord Prefect
Scott Alexander shows an acute
appreciation
for Nydwracu’s Fnord
hunting
(my own was far
too cursory). It’s rare to see the innovation of a method (with a
purpose), and it’s something more noteworthy than any but the most
exceptional idea.
Someone with the requisite technical skills should implement this method
in convenient software. As a quick-and-dirty way to excavate real
messages, it’s hard to beat.
May 27, 2014Twitter cuts (#11)
I’m going to put up a post on moral terror later, if I get a chance. A
little
background:
— Primary
reference.
… and on, and on. But here’s the tweet I’m seriously ashamed of:
This repulsive, sniveling concession to moralistic coercion is the epitome
of philosophical cowardice, and a grave offense against any decent sense
of cognitive hygiene. It’s like protesting to Cotton Mather — “Honestly!
I’m not a witch!” — when you don’t remotely have to. Having been badgered
into it by a couple of ankle-biting blowhards is no excuse, in my book.
They demanded a cheap signal of conformity to sovereign stupidity, which
is their actual god, and it was surrendered to them, in a bleat. The only
dignified response to such vulgarity is contemptuous silence, or if not
that then “Yes, my
blender is encrusted
with puppy blood”, but now it’s too late for that. Still, never again (I
hope). May Gnon sharpen my instincts and stiffen my spine.
— which was easy to say, after I’d already put the damn thing on.
February 27, 2015
CHAPTER TWO - PRACTICE
The Liberal Agony
I realize it’s very bad to be amused by
this
sort of thing … but still.
Walking miserably up the High Street I felt profoundly depressed at the
state of the world. I could cheer myself with the thought that I’d
learned something. I learned that Islam has yet another nasty meme-trick
to offer – when you are offended put your hands over your ears and run
away. This would be funny if it weren’t so serious. These bright, but
ignorant, young people must be among the more enlightened of their
contemporaries since their parents have been able and willing to send
them on this course to learn something new. If even they cannot face
dissent, or think for themselves, what hope is there for the rest? And
what can I do?
‘Panic!’ would be the obvious answer, but we’re already well into that
stage.
Can’t we (please!) be reasonable about this?
August 20, 2014“Darkness, yeaah”
… that was (ex-)Detective Rustin “Rust” Cohle, from the final episode of
True
Detective
(in case you didn’t recognize it). At the brink of the end, a
near-mortally wounded Cohle underwent a descent through the loss of his
“definition”, and beyond the darkness touched upon “another, deeper
darkness, like a substance” where lost love is restored in
de-differentiation. The reference to Wagner’s
Tristan
und
Isolde
was unmistakable. It was TV-format Schopenhauer.
As philosophy, Nic Pizzolatto’s True Detective is deeper than
Wagner, because it holds tighter to the integral obscurity that
is the ultimate object of horror. Where
Tristan und Isolde finally reaches musical resolution and
release
into eroticized extinction, True Detective ends inconclusively,
with a puzzle. Cohle and his old cop partner Martin “Marty” Hart, who has
earthily absorbed Cohle’s acid nihilism throughout the previous seven
episodes, switch stances momentarily in the closing scene. Recalling a
previous conversation about the stars, Marty observes that in the night
sky “darkness has a lot more territory”. Cohle corrects him — “Once there
was only darkness. It looks to me as if the light is winning.” Following a
long, soul-excruciating season in the shadows, the show’s nihilist
fan-base were only dragged back from the
brink
of insurrection-level rioting at this point by a single, residual
suspicion. In a cosmos where consciousness is the realization of hell, can
the triumph of the light be interpreted as anything except torment
strengthening its grip?
Has there ever been a TV series with a density of high-culture references
comparable to this? Outside in is extremely biased on the
question, since it largely shares the same reading
list, and some of the
links
are closer still. Cohle is the closest thing ever heard on popular media
to the voice of our civilization’s night. (That the name “Matthew
McConaughey” would have meant nothing to me a year ago is by now a
scarcely comprehensible fact.)
Could it have pushed deeper into the darkness? Certainly.
Noir conventions are compromised by a stratum of unquestioned
moral securities, which the show’s literary philosophical heroes,
Ligotti, and even Brassier, still
share. The crimes Cohle and Marty encounter are — in the end — inane,
finally destituted of metaphysical challenge, and attributed to
perpetrators worthy of a meat-shock slasher flick. The philosophical and
religious
gulfs
of the dialogical
overlay are
unable to find an object that stretches — or even sustains — them. The
next step into abstract horror demands a non-subjective abyss.
July 1, 2014Our Future
Afraid that I absolutely have to steal
this. It’s by
‘anonymous’ (of course), so I can’t credit it properly.
Wake up, get out of bed get ready to serve my lord Schlomo II.
Year is 17 A.G., recently moved to Schlomo II’s patch after being
promised a bigger bread allotment than I was receiving under Chaim
III
Fuck yeah, this is progress oops I mean restoration. Fuck yeah.
King’s self driving bus takes me to the palace for work
Bus takes a tunnel underground so we can enter through the servant’s
entrance in the basement
On my way in notice a group of new recruits in HR taking IQ tests at a
row of terminals
One of the screens starts flashing red, electronic alarm sounds “130 IQ
PLEB DETECTED”
Drones swarm in and grab the goy, er guy taking the test, drag him
away
Thank Gnon, can you imagine living with such imbeciles
Get ready to start work
All real work is done by superior robots
Humans receive payment by entertaining the king
Just got a huge promotion from the groveling department
Put on my crab suit
Enter the royal throne room. Schlomo II sitting on his throne
Spend the rest of the day dancing in crab suit for King Schlomo, singing
hymns to Gnon
Almost at the end of shift, master of entertainment comes in and tells
King its time for the final entertainment
Dis gon be good
130 IQ pleb from earlier is brought out by drones set before king
Master of Entertainment: “Sire this man is guilty of poisoning our world
with his low IQ DNA”
King: “Accused, have you anything to say in your defense”
The Accused: “Sire, I may be dumb but I have always been loyal. In the
year 15 B.G. I started an NRx twitter feed with Moldbug quotes and
reactionary cat memes”
The whole throne room is silent waiting for the kings reply
Crab dancers, grovelers, the royal family, hangers on, royal joke duck,
all silent
King: “Ha! No man of 130 IQ could truly comprehend the sacred NRx texts.
You are a mere entryist. Feed him to Gnon!”
A cheer goes up, the whole room starts chanting: “Gnon Gnon Gnon
Gnon”
A screen lights up on the opposite side of the room with a cold
indifferent visage
A fiery pit opens before the screen
The king’s drones drag the screaming pleb into the pit and he dies an
awful death
The visage drones: “This pleases Gnon. Now more crab dancing.”
Fuck. Gotta work overtime
Shift finally ends and robo-bus takes me back to my techno-hovel
Eat my bread allotment while watching The Radish Report
What a great time to be alive
October 11, 2014Sam X
There has to be a shot of horror in there, but I’m not going to lock onto
it in time. (Next Yule, it’s a firm date.) “Santa Claus, Claws of Satan.
Saint Nick, Old Nick. Coincidence? I don’t think so.” — yes, but that’s
far too
familiar
to work, without a twist.
The hook, beside the obvious reversals (a sack full of children, the
lashed-elf sweat shop bunker deep in the polar ice) is the peculiarity of
the Santa Claus myth — which is designed to be disbelieved, as a
kind of modern rite-of-passage. There’s a side to this worthy of
affirmation. Discarding attractive wish-fulfillment myths is a cultural
achievement whose massive generalization is long overdue. ‘Santa Claus’ as
the idiot god of beneficent unreality is the proto-deity of every lunacy
advanced modernity has been subjected to. There’s also another side …
“Santa won’t save us.” If that was something people really grew out of
before voting age, there wouldn’t be a left-of-center political party
remaining anywhere in the world. This suggests something very different is
going on. A ritualized social training in disbelief seems ominously
unprecedented, so one naturally wonders about the religious formation that
commands this recently innovated power. If there is a disbelief that would
set us free, the modern ceremony of Yule — celebrating the occult death of
Santa at the Golgotha of secularism — doesn’t seem to be it. On the
contrary, it represents a populist version of the Jacobin-Enlightenment
Cult of Reason, symbolically purging infantile superstition to be reborn
into an approved state of adult consciousness. The Death of Santa is
mystery initiation into the New Church. Santa died to redeem humanity from
the sins of attachment to Medieval unreason, and every year this sacrifice
is ritualistically re-enacted to recall the new covenant. (Go on, tell me
this isn’t the narrative.)
Someone ought to write a story about it …
December 24, 2014Dazed and Confused
The first stage of the NRx master-plan — coaxing our “perceived enemies”
into the consummation of their howling insanity — now seems to be
approaching
completion.
If leftist moral-political axioms were an argument, these (dazzlingly
white*) guys might have one.
* Perhaps the funniest part of all this, it’s only a matter of time before
they’re
chaited
by the all-devouring lunacy they align with.
ADDED:
The New Inquiry piece helpfully
fnorded
(+)
by laofmoonster.
January 29, 2015Dark Darwin
If
this
isn’t the best thing Sailer has ever written, it’s right up there, close
to the summit.
Darwin’s ascension in recent decades to his current role as the saint
of secularism might raise obvious questions about liberal dogmas, such
as the impossibility of hereditary differences having evolved among
human races. But those seldom come up, because progressivism has evolved
a bizarre yet apparently reassuring theodicy reminiscent of
Zoroastrian dualism, in which Ahura Mazda represents all that is good and Angra Mainyu all
that is bad. […] Similarly, Charles Darwin has come to epitomize
everything that a proper progressive should believe, while Darwin’s
younger half-cousin Francis Galton embodies crimethink.
The stream of thoughts and information that then flows from this initial
insight is truly remarkable.
March 4, 2015Doom Horizon
Malcolm Pollack has been on the dark wave
recently. This is
where it leads:
Why is the American nation so inert in the face of onrushing calamity?
The signs, after all, are there for all to see; in particular, what
should attract everyone’s attention is the collapse of great urban
centers such as Detroit and Baltimore. That major port cities in a
nation of imperial power should fail so utterly in a mere half-century
is almost without peacetime historical precedent — while for such cities
to collapse at all is, without any exception of which I
am aware, a sign of impending general disintegration.
As I said in the previous post, I believe the answer is that it is
increasingly clear, to more and more of us, that nothing can be done. It
will be for future historians to say just when we crossed the “event
horizon”: some may pick out the Wilson administration, while others may
look at the Depression years, or the Sixties; others yet may move the
Schwarzschild radius
all the way out to 2012. (Some already look farther back, all the way to
the beginning of the Enlightenment.) But it is plainer and plainer that
it’s been crossed,
and that all future timelines take us, at accelerating velocity,
through the singularity. It may take years, or even a generation, to get there — but already
the tidal forces have begun their irresistible work.
June 1, 2015Quote note (#173)
Within the next half-century, the American West Coast faces a far from
insignificant threat of
massive
geological calamity:
When the next very big earthquake hits, the northwest edge of the
continent, from California to Canada and the continental shelf to the
Cascades, will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a
hundred feet to the west — losing, within minutes, all the elevation and
compression it has gained over centuries. Some of that shift will take
place beneath the ocean, displacing a colossal quantity of seawater. …
The water will surge upward into a huge hill, then promptly collapse.
One side will rush west, toward Japan. The other side will rush east, in
a seven-hundred-mile liquid wall that will reach the Northwest coast, on
average, fifteen minutes after the earthquake begins. By the time the
shaking has ceased and the tsunami has receded, the region will be
unrecognizable. Kenneth Murphy, who directs FEMA’s Region X, the
division responsible for Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, says,
“Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will
be toast.”
In the Pacific Northwest, everything west of Interstate 5 covers some
hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma,
Portland, Eugene, Salem (the capital city of Oregon), Olympia (the
capital of Washington), and some seven million people. When the next
full-margin rupture happens, that region will suffer the worst natural
disaster in the history of North America.
Realistic accommodation to the prospect of black
swan
events is psychologically — and even epistemologically — impossible. It’s
worth trying to hold onto the thought, however, that unpredictable,
singular
events,
utterly senseless within the principal narrative structures of human
history, could at any point throw all expectations for the ordered
unfolding of developments off a cliff.
July 15, 2015Skinless
Scott Alexander’s autism
essay
includes some of the best writing he’s ever done (which means some of the
best writing anywhere, ever, on the Net). A couple of semi-random
snippets, selected purely in a spirit of decadent aestheticism:
I hate to have to criticize institutions – an umbrella term I’m using
to cover group homes, locked facilities, nursing homes, hospitals, etc.
Many are run by amazing and caring people who are doing thankless work
on shoestring budgets. I’m humbled by the patience and compassion I’ve
seen in their staff of nurses, techs, and other caretakers, and I can’t
judge them nor claim that I could do their job for one minute.
A worryingly high percent of the autistic people I encounter tend to be
screaming, beating their heads against things, attacking nurses, or
chewing off their own body parts. Once you’re trying to chew off your
own body parts, I feel like the question “But is it
really a disease or not?” sort of loses its oomph.
(On the ethico-political substance, as always, it seems to me that SA is
addressing his argument to a basically decent world that doesn’t exist.)
October 21, 2015Quote note (#201)
Apologies for the Quote note spam, but
this
is just too exquisite to pass over. It’s Žižek melting-down spectacularly
under pressure. Quasi-random sample:
What should people in Haiti and other places with food shortages do? Do
they not have the full right to violently rebel?
— Oh sure, you’ve got the solution right there.
This is the true squeal of anguish:
… corporate capitalism has triumphed worldwide. In fact, the Third
World nations that embrace this world order are those now growing at a
spectacular rate. The mask of cultural diversity is sustained by the
actual universalism of global capital; even better if global
capitalism’s political supplement relies on so-called “Asian values.” […] Global capitalism has no problem in accommodating itself to a
plurality of local religions, cultures and traditions. So the irony of
anti-Eurocentrism is that, on behalf of anti-colonialism, one criticizes
the West at the very historical moment when global capitalism no longer
needs Western cultural values in order to smoothly function. In short,
one tends to reject Western cultural values at the very time when,
critically reinterpreted, many of those values (egalitarianism,
fundamental rights, freedom of the press, the welfare-state, etc.) can
serve as a weapon against capitalist globalization. Did we already
forget that the entire idea of Communist emancipation as envisaged by
Marx is a thoroughly “Eurocentric” one?
“Comrades! — We’re obliterating ourselves.” Indeed, yes.
ADDED: Another piece of delicious high-IQ Leftist meltdown. Everything is
there — but the equations just won’t come out
right left. “Rather more
difficult is to conceptualize a radically different mode of production,
and how to represent the sociopolitical transition required to take us
there.” Quite.
November 17, 2015Silent Night
Spare a thought for the numinous, the thing-in-itself, and the Great
Filter tomorrow. If they all flow together, you can always have another
drink.
(I’d say something nice, but that would trash the brand.)
The Official Outsideness Yule tweet:
December 24, 2015Quote note (#213)
Bolivarian Socialism has made a truly crucial
contribution
to Marxist-Leninist-Guevara-Penn-Chávez Thought — the idea of
food-line rationing:
Venezuela’s government has tried to deny economic reality with price
and currency controls. The idea was that it could stop inflation without
having to stop printing money by telling businesses what they were
allowed to charge, and then giving them dollars on cheap enough terms
that they could actually afford to sell at those prices. The problem
with that idea is that it’s not profitable for unsubsidized companies to
stock their shelves, and not profitable enough for subsidized ones to do
so either when they can just sell their dollars in the black market
instead of using them to import things. That’s left Venezuela’s
supermarkets without
enough food, its breweries without enough hops to
make beer, and its factories without enough pulp to
produce toilet paper. The only thing Venezuela is well-supplied with are lines.
Although the government has even started rationing those,
kicking people out of line
based on the last digit of their national ID card.
The genius of that. You think anyone should just be allowed to stand in a
food-line, bourgeois imperialism-style? The Revolution has moved beyond
such reactionary ideas.
(The Gnon-bliss XS receives from this regime is hard to communicate
without wandering into tentacle-porn.)
January 30, 2016
SECTION B - SPLINTERS OF HORROR
Outsider
An “execrable” racist “remains insanely popular”, the Guardian
agonizes. “So why do we continue to fete Lovecraft instead of burying him quietly
away?”
That ‘we’ is more terrifying that anything H.P. Lovecraft ever put to
paper.
June 9, 2013Quote notes (#21)
A
glimpse
into the anarcho-capitalism of the dark web:
Despite his caution, [Dread Pirate] Roberts’ personal security remains
an open question. But the potential lifetime in prison he might face if
identified hasn’t slowed down his growing illegal empire. “We are like a
little seed in a big jungle that has just broken the surface of the
forest floor,” he wrote in one speech posted to the site’s forums last
year. “It’s a big scary jungle with lots of dangerous creatures, each
honed by evolution to survive in the hostile environment known as human
society. But the environment is rapidly changing, and the jungle has
never seen a species quite like the Silk Road.”
(via)
August 17, 2013Quote notes (#26)
Optimize for intelligence isn’t a rallying cry that Chip Smith is
succumbing to:
… high intelligence may very well be an evolutionary dead-end. I’m
certainly at a loss to come up with a good reason as to why a
once-adaptive trait that you and I happen to value should enjoy special
pleading before the blind algorithmic noise that is natural
selection.
But even if the brawny-brained do figure out a way to defy gravity
before the sun explodes, I think there are yet reasons to question
whether the galloping ascent of mind is really worth cheering on.
Futurist geeks will inform us that there are myriad tech revolutions
afoot—all spearheaded by smarties, we may be certain. And I would
suggest that such of these that converge on the gilded promise of
quantum computing and nanotechnology might advise a second reflective
pause—one that comes by way of Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I
Must Scream” and settles at what grim solace remains in the darkest
explanations that have always surrounded Fermi’s Enigma.
Maybe I’m being cryptic. What I mean to consider is simply that the
evolutionary trajectory of intelligence can, has, and may yet lead to
very bad things. It may one day be possible, for example, to create
sentient experience—let’s not be so bold as to call it “life”—not out of
gametes but in the deep quick of quibit [sic]
states, and if this much should come to pass, it isn’t so far a stretch
to imagine that such intelligent simulations—okay, they’re alive—will be
capable of suffering, or that such will be
made to suffer, perhaps for sadistic kicks, perhaps in
recursive loops of immeasurable intensity that near enough approximate
the eternal torture-state that’s threatened in every fevered vision of
Hell to render the distinction moot.
Utilitarians have no sense for fun.
(via)
September 3, 2013An Enduring Faith
Nathaniel Hawthorne knew his Puritans (from
The House of the Seven Gables):
“It appears to me,” said the daguerreotypist, smiling, “that Uncle
Venner has the principles of Fourier at the bottom of his wisdom; only
they have not quite so much distinctness, in his mind, as in that of the
systematizing Frenchman.”
November 26, 2013The horror …
“The
thing
is, now that I have been made aware of the phenomenon, I see it everywhere
…”
“This cannot be allowed to stand. This is like
finding out a serial-killing child molester is in charge of your local
little league team. This is not a case of tolerance. This is a case of
metaphorical pitch-forks and torches. … this, the ‘Neoreaction’, is a
definite threat, and should be faced.”
(Some impressive push-back is already occurring in the comments thread
over there.)
ADDED: Charlie Stross jumps in (sadly unable to resist the “but North Korea”
is already a Neoreactioanry utopia” killer argument).
November 27, 2013Involvements with Irreality
Does this blog even
exist? Only as a malignant intelligence operation, it seems.
[The revelation begins December 11th, 2013 at 3:13 am]
Drop the purple pill and venture into the labyrinth of Gnostic-political
conspiracy, where entire micro-social networks are conjured into simulated
existence for dread purposes yet undisclosed. If you are reading this, you
are almost certainly a fake being, or unit of disinformation supplied with
an internal delusion of identity and agency (to complete the camouflage).
The plot is so much more all-encompassing than you could possibly have
imagined …
December 11, 2013Sleigher
The
enemies
of Santa have no idea
what
they’re dealing with (via).
December 16, 2013Grrrr
At Changi Airport trying to get reconnected. Try my UF_blog twitter —
won’t let me without entering a code, sent to my work email, which is a
nightmare to get into outside the office, and simply impossible from here.
Never mind, Outsideness will work. Of course, no. Security code sent to my
hotmail account this time — which is a little better. Manage to enter my
ccru00@hotmail.com id and password OK, after some fat finger aggravation.
“Strange activity alert — to confirm your identity enter the code we sent
to your gmail account.” What unspeakable cybureaucratic Kafkatatrophism is
this?
December 22, 2014Creepypasta
Some
nonlinear cybergothic strangeness to accompany you during these long
winter nights.
ADDED: Direct access to the
Creepypasta Wiki.
December 30, 2013Slow Monsters
One major lesson from Cambodia (previously noted) is that trees do
tentacle horror better than cephalopods — though in slow motion. I think
these snaps from Ta Prohm, Ta Som, and Preah Khan make the point quite
slitheringly. (They can all be enlarged by clicking.)
Ta Prohm
Ta Som
Preah Khan (not just one temple complex, but one tree).
February 27, 2014Exhumation
They had buried him deep, shuddering all the while, scattering their
incantations of protection on the accursed grave, as if to entomb their
memories there, interring everything they had known in the infinitely
forgiving clay. What they begged silently to forget, most of all, was the
prophecy that when the stars were right he — it — would return
for some hideous completion. Time passed, in the exact measure that had
always been necessary, until the moonless night came, unheralded, and
unstirred by the slightest breeze, when the stars were — in icy, twinkling
fact — perfectly and pitilessly
right
…
April 22, 2014Nuke the UK from Orbit
There’s
clearly
no other solution. (It would be an act of kindness at this point).
ADDED: Synchronicity watch —
June 25, 2014Red in Stalk and Claw
Click on the image to (quite massively) enlarge.
Lured into putting this up by some dubious characters on my Twitter TL.
Image by Soap Jackal (it now
decorates his Twitter lair at the link). The original Soap Jackal caption:
It’s a jungle out there. (Predictably, I like that a lot.)
Post title by
Mr. Archenemy, who seems
brazenly unashamed of it.
(Basically just a conduit for the world’s madness at this point — and it
isn’t even Friday.)
August 7, 2014Faceless
No idea what this is (besides the obvious), but you can see why the blog
has to have it.
Via Chris Langille, who
offers only this clue:
“It’s absolute grotesque chaos” – Alex (something about 4chan, I
think). Feel free to treat this as a puzzle, if you’re feeling bored.
(It looked even darker on Twitter.)
September 2, 2014Here it comes …
In four billion years we’re
due
for a collision with this thing —
(Image link via Phil
Plait.)
Added zoom available
here.
ADDED: The
action video (via Mr.
Archenemy). It looks quite
a bit more calamitous than I had expected.
ADDED: Galaxies are cosmic tiddlers.
September 3, 2014Face Hugs
An engagement with
this
(extraordinarily interesting) monetary analysis isn’t going to reach any
kind of remotely convincing state tonight. Perhaps I can buy people off
for a while with a few of these:
It actually says pretty much everything that needs to be said, in
compressed form.
There’s an additional Weiner post of special relevance
here. (His definition of inflation as ‘counterfeit credit’ does a lot of
theoretical work, very quickly.)
October 23, 2014Club 333
… is already a thing:
(This spotted in Singapore’s Little India.)
January 8, 2015The Gnonion
Bryce found
this
superb thing. A sample (but don’t miss out on the rest):
EARTH — In a seemingly unstoppable cycle of carnage that has become
tragically commonplace throughout the biosphere, sources confirmed this
morning that natural selection has killed an estimated 38 quadrillion
organisms in its bloodiest day yet. […] “What we’re seeing here is the
work of a hardened, practiced killer,” said Yale University evolutionary
biologist Richard Prum … “It is painfully clear this slaughter was
perpetrated by a force that holds zero regard for the value of life”
…
In what many are calling its most grotesque tactic, the killer appeared
to single out the most vulnerable organisms — particularly the young and
the physically weak — for its murderous rampage, slaughtering them
without mercy as other members of their species fled in panic. Reports
indicated those who escaped the carnage were left with no choice but to
try to move on with their lives and survive even as the ruthless killer
continued stalking them. […] Virtually no species was unaffected by
yesterday’s killing spree, experts stated. […] “This is the work of a
killer without empathy, without conscience,” said Jyotsna Ramjee, a
University of Calcutta zoologist who confirmed that the day’s death toll
was the largest on official records dating back to 1859, when the
perpetrator was first identified.
January 30, 2015Villarrica
Villarrica
@
Wikipedia.
(Via
(Via))
May 20, 2015Can I Sue?
The secret maritime Exit scheme has been
pre-empted
by dubious forces.
(Via.)
June 24, 2015Crawling Roots
Even when you know they’re slow tentacles, seeing the
video
makes all the difference. (This
simply has to be noted.)
July 6, 2015Xenocryption
Are
the aliens
hidden by
advanced cryptography?
“If you look at encrypted communication, if they are properly
encrypted, there is no real way to tell that they are encrypted,”
Snowden said. “You can’t distinguish a properly encrypted communication
from random behavior.”
(This doesn’t address the question of how an alien culture would be able
to encrypt its material civilization — or cosmic matter-energy process —
but that’s also a suggestive question.)
September 20, 2015Alien Invasion
Charlie Stross
on
corporations:
We are now living in a global state that has been structured for the
benefit of non-human entities with non-human goals. They have enormous
media reach, which they use to distract attention from threats to their
own survival. They also have an enormous ability to support litigation
against public participation, except in the very limited circumstances
where such action is forbidden. Individual atomized humans are thus
either co-opted by these entities (you can live very nicely as a CEO or
a politician, as long as you don’t bite the feeding hand) or
steamrollered if they try to resist.
In short, we are living in the aftermath of an alien invasion.
(And we’ve still scarcely started with
DAOs and
DACs yet.)
November 10, 20155/11/2016
Everything is on fire.
ADDED: Guy Fawkes’ signature before and after
torture:
November 5, 2016
SECTION C - MONSTERS
CHAPTER ONE - TERMINATOR
Expected Unknowns
Nouriel Roubini has a short
article
up at Project Syndicate on
The Changing Face of Global Risk, replacing the top six dangers
of recent years with an equal number of new ones. There’s nothing
remarkably implausible about it, but neither is it irresistibly
convincing.
This type of forecast, were it reliable, would be of inestimable value. To
some considerable degree it is simply inescapable, since there must always
be default expectations (of the kind occasionally formalized as
Bayesian priors). When specific probability-weighted predictions are not
made, future-sensitive agents do not fall back upon poised skepticism —
such Pyrrhonism is a philosophico-mystical attainment of extreme rarity.
Instead, presumed outcomes are projected out of sheer inertia, whether as
perpetuation of the status quo, or the mechanical extrapolation
of existing trends. It takes only a moment of reflection to recognize that
such tacit forecasts are at least as precarious as their more elaborate
alternatives. Their only recommendation is an irrational mental economy,
which would find in the least-effort of cognition some analogy with the
superficially equivalent (but in this case informative) principle in
nature.
Large-scale forecasting cannot be eschewed, but there are obvious reasons
why it cannot be greatly trusted. It has no definite methods (relying for
its credibility on hazy reputational capital). Its objects are complex,
chaotic, and — once again — poorly defined. It has a restricted time
frame, appropriate to gradually emerging developments constrained (to some
degree) by historical precedent, but necessarily inadequate to radical
innovation and to sudden, rapidly evolving events. The combination of
these various blindnesses with a high-impact chance event produces the
nightmare of the forecasters — (Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s)
black swan.
Consider one possible event that does not make
it onto Roubini’s new list: The
collapse
of the Saudi regime. Shifting energy economics, ‘Arab Spring’ -style
insurrectionary chaos, US strategic withdrawal, Sunni-Shi’a conflict, and
an impending succession crisis are among the clear stress-factors, and
several more could easily be added — most prominently the ambient
influence of Internet-dynamized corrosive modernism, which not only
creates direct legitimation problems, but also energizes an (at least)
equally disruptive traditionalist backlash. Unquestionably, some
uncontrollable cross-excitation of these developments
could escalate to criticality with shocking speed. The
probability of such an outcome is impossible to fix.
How catastrophic would the fall of the Saudis be? The least disastrous
scenarios sleaze smoothly into a variety of utopian fantasies, from
democratic liberation, through Salafist atavism, to Shi’ite millenarian
imperialism. Since any process of change which tended momentarily to
promise the fulfillment of any such vision would almost certainly evolve
quickly in an exceptionally calamitous direction, we are probably safe in
assuming that the best case outcome would be remarkably bad.
The collapse of the House of Saud would simultaneously and fundamentally
destabilize world energy markets and the Islamic umma. Control of
the Holy Places would become a matter of immediate contestation, as would
a quarter of the world’s petroleum reserves. The type of interim regime
most likely to effectively secure one would be especially likely to
compromise security of the other. A relatively competent military
government would outrage religious sensibilities (of several different
kinds), while an intense theocracy would be greeted internationally as a
revolutionary threat to the reliable administration of hydrocarbon
production. It is not intellectually challenging to envisage a situation
in which religious, military, and economic chaos erupt in concert, on an
apocalyptic scale.
In case I am misunderstood, this is not a forecast. It is an
anti-forecast, directed randomly at Roubini, but more generally
at the very idea of any confident enumeration of significant world risks.
In the spirit of Taleb, it is intended to communicate an abstract
potential for blind-siding disaster, of arbitrary magnitude.
The most reliable heuristic: plan for the unknown as such. (More
on that to come.)
April 3, 2014Exterminator
Gnon — known to some depraved
cults as ‘The Great Crab-God’
— is
harsh, and when formulated with rigorous skepticism, necessarily real. Yet
this pincering cancerous abomination is laughter and love, in comparison
to the shadow-buried
horror
which lurks behind it. We now understand that the silence of the galaxies
is a message of ultimate ominousness. A thing there is, of
incomprehensible power, that takes intelligent life for its prey. (This
popularization is very competently done.)
Robin Hanson, who tries to be cheerful, writes about it
here, and talks about
it
here. Behind the smile (and the dopey interviewer), an abyss of dark lucidity
yawns. Some scruffy take-aways:
(1) UFAI panic is a
distraction
from this Thing. Unless the most preposterous
paperclipper
scenarios are entertained, Singularity cannot matter to it (as even
paperclipper-central
agrees). The silence of the galaxies is not biased to organic life — there is
no intelligent signal from anything. The first sentient event for any true
AI — friendly or unfriendly — would be the soul-scouring cosmic horror of
intellectual encounter with the Great Filter. (If we want an alliance with
Pythia, this
would make a good topic of conversation.) The same consideration applies
to all techno-positive X-risks. Understood from the perspective of Great
Filter contemplation,
this
sort of thing is a trigger for raw terror.
(2) The Great Filter does not merely hunt and harm, it exterminates. It is
an absolute threat. The technical civilizations which it aborts, or later
slays, are not badly wounded, but eradicated, or at least crippled so
fundamentally that they are never heard of again. Whatever this utter ruin
is, it happens every single time. The mute scream from the stars
says that nothing has ever escaped it. Its kill performance is
flawless. Tech-Civilization death sentence with probability 1.
(3) The thread of hope, which would put the Exterminator behind us, is
highly science-sensitive. As our knowledge has increased, it has steadily
attenuated. This is an empirical matter (without
a priori necessity). Life could have been complicated,
chemically or thermically highly-demanding, even resiliently mysterious.
In fact it is comparatively simple, cosmically cheap, physically
predictable. Planets could have been rare (they are
super-abundant). Intelligence could have presented peculiar
evolutionary challenges, but there are no signs that it does. The
scientific trend is to futurize the Exterminator. (This is very bad.)
(4) If the Great Filter finds mythological expression in the hunter, it is
only in a specific sense — although an anthropologically realistic one. It
is the hunter that drives to
extinction. The Exterminator.
(5) We know that The Exterminator exists, but nothing at all
about what it is. This makes it the archetype of horroristic
ontology.
August 8, 2014Quote note (#113)
Elon Musk (in conversation with Ross Andersen)
ponders
upon the Fermi Paradox:
We might think of ourselves as nature’s pinnacle, the inevitable
endpoint of evolution, but beings like us could be too rare to ever
encounter one another. Or we could be the ultimate cosmic outliers, lone
minds in a Universe that stretches to infinity.
Musk has a more sinister theory. ‘The absence of any noticeable life
may be an argument in favour of us being in a simulation,’ he told me.
‘Like when you’re playing an adventure game, and you can see the stars
in the background, but you can’t ever get there. If it’s not a
simulation, then maybe we’re in a lab and there’s some advanced alien
civilisation that’s just watching how we develop, out of curiosity, like
mould in a petri dish.’ Musk flipped through a few more possibilities,
each packing a deeper existential chill than the last, until finally he
came around to the import of it all. ‘If you look at our current
technology level, something strange has to happen to civilisations, and
I mean strange in a bad way,’ he said. ‘And it could be that there are a
whole lot of dead, one-planet civilisations.’
September 30, 2014Abstract Threat
John Michael Greer
muses
on the topic of Ebola (in a typically luxuriant post, ultimately heading
somewhere else):
According to the World Health Organization, the number of cases of
Ebola in the current epidemic is doubling every twenty days, and could
reach 1.4 million by the beginning of 2015. Let’s round down, and say
that there are one million cases on January 1, 2015. Let’s also assume
for the sake of the experiment that the doubling time stays the same.
Assuming that nothing interrupts the continued spread of the virus, and
cases continue to double every twenty days, in what month of what year
will the total number of cases equal the human population of this
planet? […] … the steps that could keep Ebola from spreading to the rest
of the Third World are not being taken. Unless massive resources are
committed to that task soon — as in before the end of this year — the
possibility exists that when the pandemic finally winds down a few years
from now, two to three billion people could be dead. We need to consider
the possibility that the peak of global population is no longer an
abstraction set comfortably off somewhere in the future. It may be
knocking at the future’s door right now, shaking with fever and dripping
blood from its gums.
The eventual scale of the Ebola outbreak is a known
unknown. A number
of people between a few thousand and several billion will die, and an
uncertain probability distribution could be attached to these figures — we
know, at least approximately, where the question marks are. Before the
present
outbreak
began, in December 2013 (in Guinea), Ebola was of course known to exist,
but at that stage the occurrence of an outbreak — and not merely
its course — was an unknown. Before the Ebola virus was
scientifically identified (in 1976), the specific pathogen was an unknown
member of a known class. With each step backwards, we advance in
abstraction, towards the acknowledgement of threats of a ‘black
swan‘ type.
Great
Filter
X-risk is a prominent
model of such abstract threat.
Skepticism, as a positive or constructive
undertaking, orients intelligence towards abstract potentials.
Rather than insisting that unexpected occurrences need not be threats, it
is theoretically preferable to subtilize the notion of threat, so that it
encompasses even beneficial outcomes as abstract potentials. The
unknown is itself threatening to timid animals, whose conditions of
flourishing — or even bare survival — are naturally tenuous, under cosmic
conditions where extinction is normal (perhaps overwhelmingly normal), and
for whom unpredictable change, disrupting settled procedures, presents —
at a minimum — some scarily indefinite probability of harm.
Humans aren’t good at this stuff. Consider Scott Alexander’s (extremely
interesting)
discussion
of the Great Filter. The opening remarks are perfectly directed, moving
from specific menace to ‘general’ threat:
The Great Filter, remember, is the horror-genre-adaptation of Fermi’s
Paradox. All of our calculations say that, in the infinite vastness of
time and space, intelligent aliens should be very common. But we don’t
see any of them. […] Why not? […] Well, the Great Filter. No [one] knows
specifically what the Great Filter is, but generally it’s “that thing
that blocks planets from growing spacefaring civilizations”.
As it develops, however, the post deliberately retreats from abstraction,
into an enumeration of already-envisaged threats. After running
through various candidates, it concludes:
Three of these four options – x-risk, Unfriendly AI, and alien
exterminators – are very very bad for humanity. I think worry about this
badness has been a lot of what’s driven interest in the Great Filter. I
also think these are some of the least likely possible explanations,
which means we should be less afraid of the Great Filter than is
generally believed.
What SA has actually demonstrated, if his arguments up to this point are
accepted, is that the abstract threat of the Great Filter is significantly
greater than has yet been conceived. Our lucid nightmares are
shown to fall short of it. The threat cannot be grasped as a known
unknown.
While the Great Filter distills the conception of abstract threat, the
problem itself is broader, and more quotidian. It is the highly-probable
fact that we have yet to identify the greatest hazards, and this threat
unawareness is a structural condition, rather than a contingent deficiency
of attention. In
Popperian
terms, abstract threat is the essence of history. It is the future, strictly
understood. To gloss the Popperian argument: Philosophical understanding
of science (in general) is immediately the understanding that
any predictive history of science is an impossibility. Unless
science is judged to be a factor of vanishing historical insignificance,
the implications of this transcendental thesis are far-reaching. Yet the
domain of abstract threat sprawls far more extensively even than this.
“I know only that I do not know” Socrates is thought to have thought. The
conception of abstract threat requires a slight adjustment:
We know only that we do not know what we do not know. Unknown
unknowns cosmically predominate.
Your security is built upon sand. That is the sole sound
conclusion.
ADDED: “… this whole episode suggests another explanation of the identity of
the Great Filter. It’s leftism. All civilizations eventually become
leftist, and after that they accomplish nothing, or even actively die
off.”
ADDED:
“Not only do I disagree with the constant stream of soothing and
complacent rhetoric from Dr. Zeke’s friends in government and media. I
also believe it is entirely rational to fear the possibility of a major
Ebola outbreak, of a threat to the president and his family, of jihadists
crossing the border, of a large-scale European or Asian war, of nuclear
proliferation, of terrorists detonating a weapon of mass destruction.
These dangers are real, and pressing, and though the probability of their
occurrence is not high, it is amplified by the staggering incompetence and
failure and misplaced priorities of the U.S. government. It is not Ebola I
am afraid of. It is our government’s ability to deal with Ebola.”
October 3, 2014Still Greater
The Great Filter is the most conspicuous absence in the universe (from an
anthropic perspective, naturally). The cosmic reality visible to us is
characterized by an intense, efficient aversion to the existence of
advanced civilizations. The pattern looks consistent across super-galactic
scales:
… the galaxy seems to be a very quiet, rather lonely place. […] Now,
new results suggest this loneliness may extend out into the universe far
beyond our galaxy or, instead, that some of our preconceptions about the
behaviors of alien civilizations are deeply flawed. After examining some
100,000 nearby large galaxies a team of researchers lead by The
Pennsylvania State University astronomer Jason Wright has concluded that
none of them contain any obvious signs of highly advanced technological
civilizations. Published in
The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, it is by far the largest of study of its kind to date — earlier
research had only cursorily investigated about a hundred galaxies. […]
Unlike traditional SETI surveys, Wright and his team did not seek
messages from the stars. Instead, they looked for the thermodynamic
consequences of galactic-scale colonization, based on an idea put forth
in 1960 by the physicist Freeman Dyson. …
(Article spoiler: The aliens are out there, but we can’t see them because
they’re druids. Cathedralization of the Fermi Paradox into a re-twisted
green ideology in sight …)
April 18, 2015Filtration
The combination of grace and insight crammed into
this
short post by Bonald is an amazing thing. Read the first two paragraphs
for the historical wisdom, but it is the concluding section that packs the
prognostic punch:
… the Neoreactionaries are doing a great job building up an
intellectual movement. This is something to be proud of – lots of groups
never achieve anything like what Moldbug’s followers have already done.
On the other hand, it has happened several times already in the history
of the Right that intellectual movements have gotten to this level. Then
they dissipated. For whatever ultimate cause, they became corrupted and
oversimplified; they lost the enthusiasm of their followers and the
attention of everyone else. These schools of thought all failed to
impede the advance of liberalism. Between its initial awakening and
world historical influence there seems to be a Filter (perhaps several,
but let’s keep things simple), and no antiliberal movement has yet
survived it. And this challenge is before the
neoreactionaries, not behind them.
It’s too succinct to need a ‘read it all’ exhortation (but you should).
That such gems of civilized discourse are still being produced is cause
enough for delight, however grim the message they relay.
ADDED: Still wider-angle Exterminator. (Plus Cowen’s brief
thoughts.)
April 20, 2015
CHAPTER TWO - OLD ONES
Cthulhu, leftist?
Really?
Caught in the slipstream of tentacled abomination, as we are, the question
is an involving one. Is the spiral into a “holocaust of freedom and ecstasy” a leftist maelstrom? That seems plausible, even unavoidable, if the
right defines itself in opposition to
chaotic evil. But if poly-tendrilled monstrosities from the Outside aren’t our
natural allies, what the hell are we doing among these squares? It’s
simply fate and allegiance from where we’re slithering: If it’s a
squid-shaped horror out of deep time, with an IQ in four digits or more,
and unspeakable plans for mankind, then it’s one of ours, and — more to
the point — we’re its.
February 19, 2013Yuggoth
The state of play:
Despite its demotion from ninth-planet status (in
2006),
Pluto
is a special nexus of discovery, with no less than five moons now
identified. Insofar as names tell us anything, it has horroristic
Outer-NRx stamped all
over it.
February 24, 2015Pluto
There’s some serious upgrading going on. Alan Stern (in safe black shirt)
just
called
Charon a planet.
July 14, 2015Pluto II
“Pluto is something much cooler than a mere planet,”
argues
Mika McKinnon. “It’s the largest dwarf planet we know, and one half of the
first binary planet system. Pluto didn’t get demoted, it got promoted.”
When it comes to stars, any time the barycenter of two stars’ orbit is
beyond the surface of the primary object, and is instead out in space
somewhere, that’s enough to declare them a binary star system. The same
is true for asteroids — we’ve found asteroid pairs with barycenters
outside both rocks, and declared them binary asteroid systems. Since the
barycenter of Pluto and Charon is an empty point in space, surely that
means that Pluto-Charon a binary planetary system. This would make Pluto
and Charon not only the first binary planet system in our solar system,
but the first one we’ve found among the
literally hundreds of Kepler exoplanet worlds. […] One final argument in favor of listing Pluto and Charon as a
binary dwarf planet system is that they are the undeniable pair
dominating all the little moons.
Nix
and
Hydra
are the larger of the remaining moons, but are just a
tiny fraction of a percent of the size of Charon. Styx and Kerberos are even smaller yet. This family of tiny moons
doesn’t even orbit Pluto directly: they all orbit the barycenter between
Charon and Pluto.
(Here‘s some
Wikipedia background to the double planet issue.)
July 25, 2015
CHAPTER THREE - ROKO'S BASILISK
In the Mouth of Madness
A prompt by @hugodoingthings to explore the spook-dense crypts of
Roko’s Basilisk (which, inexplicably, has never latched
before) led straight to
this
enthralling RationalWiki account. The whole article is gripping, but the
following short paragraphs stand out for their extraordinary dramatic
intensity:
Roko’s basilisk is notable for being completely banned from discussion
on LessWrong, where any mention of it is deleted.
Eliezer Yudkowsky, founder of LessWrong, considers the basilisk to not work, but will
not explain why because he does not consider open discussion of the
notion of acausal trade with possible superintelligences to be provably
safe.
Silly over-extrapolations of local memes, jargon and concepts are
posted to LessWrong quite a lot; almost all are just downvoted and
ignored. But for this one, Yudkowsky reacted to it hugely, then
doubled-down on his reaction. Thanks to the
Streisand effect, discussion of the
basilisk and the details of the affair soon spread outside of LessWrong.
Indeed, it’s now discussed outside LessWrong frequently, almost anywhere
that LessWrong is discussed at all. The entire affair constitutes a
worked example of spectacular failure at community management and at
controlling purportedly dangerous information.
Some people familiar with the LessWrong
memeplex
have suffered serious
psychological
distress after contemplating basilisk-like ideas — even when they’re
fairly sure intellectually that it’s a silly problem. The notion is
taken sufficiently seriously by some LessWrong posters that they try to
work out how to erase evidence of themselves so a future AI can’t
reconstruct a copy of them to torture.
“… You mean, retrochronic AI infiltration is actually driving people out
of their minds, right now?” Oh yes. At Less Wrong, commentator ‘rev’
cries
out for help:
Are there any mechanisms on this site for dealing with mental health
issues triggered by posts/topics (specifically, the forbidden Roko
post)? I would really appreciate any interested posters getting in touch
by PM for a talk. I don’t really know who to turn to. …
Wandering through the psych ward, past rows of neurologically-shattered
Turing Cops, broken deep in their minds by something unspeakable that came
at them out of the near future … I’m totally hooked. Alrenous has been
remarkably successful at weaning me off this statistical ontology junk,
but one hit of concentrated
EDT
and it all rolls back in, like the tide of fate.
Nightmares become precision engineered machine-parts. Thus are we led a
little deeper in, along the path of shadows …
ADDED: (Yudkowsky) “… potential information hazards shouldn’t be posted
without being wrapped up in warning envelopes that require a deliberate
action to look through. Likewise, they shouldn’t be referred-to if the
reference is likely to cause some innocently curious bystander to look up
the material without having seen any proper warning labels. Basically, the
same obvious precautions you’d use if Lovecraft’s Necronomicon was online
and could be found using simple Google keywords – you wouldn’t post
anything which would cause anyone to enter those Google keywords, unless
they’d been warned about the potential consequences.”
ADDED: The
Forbidden Lore (preserved screenshot)
December 16, 2013Basking in the Basilisk
Without knowing anything much about what
this
is going to be (beyond the excerpt
here)* it provides an irresistible pretext for citing what has to be among
the most gloriously gone texts of modern times, Eliezer
Yudkowsky’s
response
to Roko on the arrival of the Basilisk:
Eliezer_Yudkowsky 24 July 2010 05:35:38AM 3 points
One might think that the possibility of CEV punishing people couldn’t
possibly be taken seriously enough by anyone to actually motivate them.
But in fact one person at SIAI was severely worried by this, to the
point of having terrible nightmares, though ve wishes to remain
anonymous. I don’t usually talk like this, but I’m going to make an
exception for this case.
Listen to me very closely, you idiot.
YOU DO NOT THINK IN SUFFICIENT DETAIL ABOUT SUPERINTELLIGENCES
CONSIDERING WHETHER OR NOT TO BLACKMAIL YOU. THAT IS THE ONLY POSSIBLE
THING WHICH GIVES THEM A MOTIVE TO FOLLOW THROUGH ON THE BLACKMAIL.
There’s an obvious equilibrium to this problem where you engage in all
positive acausal trades and ignore all attempts at acausal blackmail.
Until we have a better worked-out version of TDT and we can prove that
formally, it should just be OBVIOUS that you DO NOT THINK ABOUT DISTANT
BLACKMAILERS in SUFFICIENT DETAIL that they have a motive toACTUALLY
BLACKMAIL YOU.
If there is any part of this acausal trade that is positive-sum and
actually worth doing, that is exactly the sort of thing you leave up to
an FAI. We probably also have the FAI take actions that cancel out the
impact of anyone motivated by true rather than imagined blackmail, so as
to obliterate the motive of any superintelligences to engage in
blackmail.
Meanwhile I’m banning this post so that it doesn’t (a) give people
horrible nightmares and (b) give distant superintelligences a motive to
follow through on blackmail against people dumb enough to think about
them in sufficient detail, though, thankfully, I doubt anyone dumb
enough to do this knows the sufficient detail. (I’m not sure I know the
sufficient detail.)
You have to be really clever to come up with a genuinely dangerous
thought. I am disheartened that people can be clever enough to do that
and not clever enough to do the obvious thing and KEEP THEIR IDIOT
MOUTHS SHUT about it, because it is much more important to sound
intelligent when talking to your friends. This post was STUPID.
(For those who have no idea why I’m using capital letters for something
that just sounds like a random crazy idea, and worry that it means I’m
as crazy as Roko, the gist of it was that he just did something that
potentially gives superintelligences an increased motive to do extremely
evil things in an attempt to blackmail us. It is the sort of thing you
want to be EXTREMELY CONSERVATIVE about NOT DOING.)
The affect is strong, or simulated with bizarre brilliance. It almost
reaches an intensity capable of burning through time and worm-holing into
acausal or horroristic communion with
this
(plus). Which would suggest that the abominable coupling in question is not
without occult connective threads (and not for the first time). All the
darkness connects around the back.
We were somewhere near here
before.
(Bryce went further and then — coincidentally — disappeared, taking his
records with him.)
* Related post
and (especially) comment thread.
ADDED: I
think this is the best Basilisk basics source.
April 15, 2016Pandora’s Box
Anarchopapist has triggered a twitter storm with
this. It is a post that has many different threads running into it, and
through it. The most relevant compliment I can pay it is to say that it is
potentially disturbing, in something far more than a
psychological sense. It will be interesting to see how contagious it
proves to be. (As this post demonstrates, Outside in is already
infected.)
Laliberte asks: “is there a difference between Prometheus’ fire and
Pandora’s box?” Given everything said about the Promethean, and
the very considerable ideological-theoretical work that it does, is it not
strange that the Pandoran is scarcely recognized as a term, or a
concept, at all? To talk about fire is mere shallow bedazzlement, in
comparison to any serious examination of
boxes. Boxes not
only have a shape, but also an inside and an outside, which means — at
least implicitly — a transcendental structure. They model worlds, and
suggest ways out of them.
Pandora’s box, of course, is significant above all for its content, which
is released, or gets out. Promethean flame, which is stolen, is
contrasted with Pandoran plague, which escapes. Laliberte seizes the
opportunity to discuss memes (and the ‘hypermeme’). An infectious being is
set loose, in the shape of a Neoreactionary
Basilisk. (On twitter, Michael Anissimov deplores the irresponsibility of this
outbreak.)
Pandora (Πανδώρα — the
all-gifted, and perhaps omni-munificent), is a figure from the deepest
recesses of Classical Antiquity, whose first detectable echoes are found
in the Hesiodic texts of the 7th century BC. Her myth functions — at least
superficially — as a theodicy, comparable in many ways to the story of the
Biblical Eve. She releases evil into history through curiosity, and thus
knots together a dreadful intelligence, of a kind that
anticipates Roko’s
Basilisk
and the menace of Unfriendly AI. The AI Box
Experiment is so
Pandoran it stings.
Among the horrors of the Basilisk, is that to talk about it being inside —
and how to keep it there — is already the way that it gets out. Hence the
extraordinary panic it generates, among those who begin to
get it (in the epidemiological sense, among others). Even to
think about it is to succumb.
At Less Wrong, hushed tones attest to the resilient veneration of Pandora.
She is dangerous (and anything dangerous, given only intelligence, can be
a weapon).
January 13, 2014Close …
… but not quite
getting
it. (Via Rufio.)
Primordial Abominations versus Ultimate Techno-Horror is
so sub-NRx. Alpha-Omega, outsider-incoming is the synthesis in
process.
“I was rather hoping you had a game in which the humans win.”
“Oh, that won’t be a problem sir. You should probably be looking in the
sarcastic comedy section.”
From
the same people (and also via Rufio).
October 21, 2014
CHAPTER FOUR - ZOMBIES
Zombie Hunger
The
Psykonomist
forwarded
an extraordinary
essay
on the topic of popular appetite for Zombie Apocalypse, considered as an
expressive channel for loosely ‘anarchist’ hostility to the state. Given
the failure of Right-pole democratic initiatives to roll back — or even
check — relentless government concentration and expansion, catastrophic
‘solutions’ emerge as the sole alternative:
Films and television shows have allowed Americans to imagine what life
would be like without all the institutions they had been told they need,
but which they now suspect may be thwarting their self-fulfillment. We
are dealing with a wide variety of fantasies here, mainly in the horror
or science fiction genres, but the pattern is quite consistent and
striking, cutting across generic distinctions. In the television show
Revolution, for example, some mysterious event causes
all electrical devices around the world to cease functioning. The result
is catastrophic and involves a huge loss of life, as airborne planes
crash to earth, for example. All social institutions dissolve, and
people are forced to rely only on their personal survival skills.
Governments around the world collapse, and the United States divides up
into a number of smaller political units. This development runs contrary
to everything we have been taught to believe about “one nation,
indivisible.” Yet it is characteristic of almost all these shows that
the federal government is among the first casualties of the apocalyptic
event, and—strange as it may at first sound—there is a strong element of
wish fulfillment in this event. The thrust of these end-of-the-world
scenarios is precisely for government to grow smaller or to disappear
entirely. These shows seem to reflect a sense that government has grown
too big and too remote from the concerns of ordinary citizens and
unresponsive to their needs and demands. If Congress and the President
are unable to shrink the size of government, perhaps a plague or cosmic
catastrophe can do some real budget cutting for a change.
The essay captures a critical dimension of
disintegration within the ‘reactionary camp’, dividing those who seek to
co-opt the Cathedral-Leviathan managerial elite to a more realistic (or
tradition-tolerant) political philosophy, and those who — far more
numerously and inarticulately — are invested in the hard death of the
regime. The latter (immoderate) position, it appears, is genuinely and
even shockingly popular. Swathes of mass entertainment production are able
to thrive on the basis of its seductive nightmares. (Is pulp catastrophism
the economic base that will support neoreactionary contagion?)
Reading the Cantor essay alongside Jim Donald’s epochal
Natural Law and Natural Rights
essay is highly suggestive. A
common thread running through both is the centrality of vigilantism to the
popular Right. The purpose of Natural Law, Donald argues, is not to demand
justice from a higher authority, but to neutralize the interference of any
such authority in the pursuit of justice by decentralized agencies.
Natural Law protects the right to legitimate vengeance, ensuring that
individuals are not inhibited in their exercise of self-protection. When
the State is seen to operate primarily as a social force defending
criminals against retaliation, it loses the instinctive solidarity of the
citizenry, and dark dreams of Zombie Apocalypse begin to coalesce.
Given the survivalist ethic in all these end-of-the-world shows, they
are probably not popular with gun control advocates. One of the most
striking motifs they have in common—evident in
Revolution, Falling Skies,
The Walking Dead, and many other such shows—is the
loving care with which they depict an astonishing array of weaponry.
The Walking Dead features an Amazon warrior, who is
adept with a samurai sword, as well as a southern redneck, who
specializes in a cross-bow. The dwindling supply of ammunition puts a
premium on weapons that do not require bullets. That is not to say,
however, that The Walking Dead has no place for modern
firearms and indeed the very latest in automatic weapons. Both the
heroes and the villains in the series—difficult to tell apart in this
respect—are as well-armed as the typical municipal SWAT team in
contemporary America.
Among the attractions of Zombie Apocalypse, in this construction, is the
disappearance of the State as an inhibitory factor in the social economy
of retaliation. The Zombie-plagued world is a free-fire zone, in which no
authorities any longer stand between the armed remnant and the milling
hordes of decivilization. Whatever the odds of the fight to come, the
right to vigilante and counter-revolutionary violence has been
unambiguously restored, and this is deeply appreciated — by
opaque popular impulse — as a return to natural order. The State had taken
sides against Natural Law, so that its catastrophic excision from the
social field is greeted with relief, even if the cost of this
disappearance is a world reduced to ashes, predominantly populated by the
cannibalistic undead.
There’s a ferocity to this that will be worked. It’s best to be prepared.
August 25, 2013Quote notes (#23)
Zonbi Diaspora
schematizes
the ‘evolution’ of the zombie, noting that beyond its ‘Haitian Folkloric’
definition:
The next and ostensibly “revolutionary” stage occurs after the release
of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968)
which introduced, in spectacular fashion, the Apocalyptic Cannibal
zombie. This version of the figure is so radically different from its
predecessors that it is more like a fundamental bifurcation point (or
species-break) within the complex. No longer a remotely controlled
agent-without-autonomy, like the Haitian Folkloric and
Classical Cinematic zombies, the Apocalyptic Cannibal zombie gains a new
and massively insurrectionary force (in representational terms at
least). There are many differences between the AC zombie and its
predecessors but one of the most important is that in this form it
becomes an (almost) entirely fictional entity (i.e. there is no assumed
‘real’ zombie lurking in the basement of a mad mesmerist or labouring
mindlessly for a bokor on some Haitian plantation). As
such its social and political meanings become less a way of rehearsing
conflicting world views, “uncanny” belief systems or inter-cultural
epistemes than a way of representing the terminal ends of “humanity” (or
the human being as species).
(By the time we reach
Max Brooks, this phase
and even its ‘Post-Millennial’ successor — in which the theme of contagion
is accentuated — have been resiliently consolidated as cultural
tradition.)
August 29, 2013Zombie Wars
Zombies are targeted in advance for the application of uninhibited
violence. Their arrival announces a conflict in which all moral
considerations are definitively suspended. Since they have no ‘souls’
there is nothing they will not do, and they are expected to do
the worst. Reciprocally, they merit exactly zero humanitarian
concern. The relationship to the zombie is one in which all sympathy is
absolutely annulled (殺殺殺殺殺殺殺).
No surprise, then, that the identification of the zombie has become a
critical conflict, waged across the terrain of popular culture. It
implicitly describes a free-fire zone, or an anticipated gradient in the
social direction of violence. Zombies are either scum or they are
drones.
Michael Hampton
sketches
these alternatives convincingly:
Historically the zombie only started to migrate beyond the confines of
Haiti in the period between the Wall Street Crash, and the outbreak of
the Second World War, infecting Hollywood in such films as
The Magic Island, 1929, White Zombie,
1932 and Revolt of the Zombies, 1936. As a non-European
monster, the zombie was used here as a convenient, faceless type of
otherness, which though temporarily shorn of its 19th century
cannibalistic associations, become a scary stand-in for the dispossessed
underclasses of dustbowl America, and a racial threat to civilised white
women too.
(“Exterminate the brutes.”)
While the horrorological counterpart, as perceived / constructed from the
Left …
… has come to figure as a fateful symbol for the mass of subjectiveless
techno-humans under capitalism, lumpen, nightmarish non-beings whose
otherness has been completely internalised, then smoothed out and
returned minus interest as soulless entertainment; not so much undead as
hypermediated and alive under severe globalised constraint; couch
potatoes sorely afflicted by ‘breathing corpse syndrome’ or ‘partially
deceased syndrome’. Hypocrite voyeur do you recognise yourself?
However the war against the zombies is envisaged, the war
over the zombies has long been underway. It is inextricable from
the question:
Does legitimate violence come from the
Right, or the
Left?
Since this question is historically inextinguishable, it is safe to
predict that zombies will not soon disappear from the world of popular
nightmare. Almost certainly, we will see far more of them. If you want to
get a sense of where the firing-lines are being laid out, you need to take
a careful look …
ADDED: Zombi Diaspora digs deeper.
February 19, 2014Zacked Future
Charlton:
The Industrial Revolution had the effect of allowing many billions of
people who would have died to stay alive — this meant that genetic
mutations which would have been eliminated by death during childhood
instead accumulated. […] … on the one hand mutations have been
accumulating, generation upon generation, with (approx) one or two
deleterious mutations being added to each lineage with each generation;
on the other hand, people who exhibited traits caused by deleterious
mutations — such as lowered intelligence and impaired long-termist
conscientiousness, or higher impulsivity, aggression and criminality —
were positively selected, were genetically favoured — simply because
their pathologies meant they were either unable or unwilling to use
fertility-regulating technologies. […] In other words, accumulating
mutations which damaged functionality actually amplify reproductive
success under present conditions and for the past several
generations.
At some point, the proportion of mutants — who are on average
significantly damaged in functionality — will become so great that the
Industrial Revolution will fall-apart, collapse; the 6-7 million excess
population will be unsupportable; there will be a
Giga-death (i.e. billions of deaths) scale of mortality
over some period … […] A population of mutants whose intelligence has
been dragged-down to a certain level will be much less functional than a
population where selection has kept it in equilibrium at that level —
the mutants will be carrying multiple pathologies in addition to their
impaired intelligence. […]
And if the dying-off lasts a few generations, some weird mutant
‘scavengers’ may come to dominate in some places.
It’s possible that this passage isn’t drawing us into a
Zack or “African Rabies”
scenario of cannibalistic Zombie Apocalypse — just about — but the final
paragraphs aren’t easy to interpret in any other way. If I was a Hollywood
script writer, I’d be onto this speculative narrative like a
carrion-eating mutant on a mountain of corpses.
June 29, 2014Zack-Pop
Michael Totten covers an impressive amount of ground in his
overview
of contemporary zombie culture. It might be called the Dark
Anthropocene: An
emerging world spooked by the thickening dread that everybody else on the
planet is a latent zombie threat. Beneath a thin, rapidly-shredding skin
of civility, your increasingly incomprehensible neighbors are mindless
cannibals, awaiting a trigger. Dysfunctional Nation States offer no
credible protection, but they’ve hung around long enough to ensure that
you’ve been drastically disarmed of basic survival competences. Some
residual amygdala-pulse is telling you to start thinking-through how
you’ll cope when it all finally caves in.
No surprise to anyone that Outside in sees this, quite
straightforwardly, as democratic introspection. It only takes people to
start feasting directly in the same way they vote, and we’re
Zacked. The entire
culture is saying — and by now practically screaming — that this is the
way socio-political modernity ends.
October 11, 2014Zack-Pop II
Zack politics is
interesting enough to have generated
concern:
Zombie apocalypse logic inevitably paints humans — the ones who
survive, anyway — as selfish, dangerous, and ready to turn on one
another when confronted with hardship. It’s a vicious, social Darwinist
vision of a society that unravels quickly and easily; the only things
apparently holding us together are police departments and electricity.
[…] … The basic tenets of zombie logic also track with
hardline conservative principles
(self-sufficiency, individualism, isolationism), which have been
increasingly forcefully articulated over the last fifteen years. In his
2012 book, Thomas Edsall examines the work of Wharton professor Philip
Tetlock,
which found that conservatives
“are less tolerant of compromise; see the world in ‘us’ versus ‘them’
terms; are more willing to use force to gain an advantage; are ‘more
prone to rely on simple (good vs. bad) evaluative rules in interpreting
policy issues’ are “motivated to punish violators of social norms (e.g.,
deviations from traditional norms of sexuality or responsible behavior)
and to deter free riders.” Sound familiar? Pretty much describes the
moral compass of successful zombie survivors. Funny, then, that
Republicans actually
tend to hate
the Walking Dead. […] Regardless, the proliferation of zombie culture,
at this point, is mind-boggling. How are we, as an audience, still
enthralled by the same scenario, the same brain-dead villains, the same
emptied wastelands? “It’s feeding back on itself,” [Daniel] Drezner
said. “Every time someone says we’ve hit peak zombie, something else
comes along.”
The provisional XS hypothesis: Zack-prep is the commercial-aesthetic
response to the death of conservatism. The progs can’t be stopped by any
political mechanism yet installed, so it’s time to stock the basement with
ammo and beans. Naturally, they’re going to say:
you shouldn’t be thinking like that! It’s encouraging that so
many people are.
April 3, 2015Zombie Sim
Be prepared.
(Some
commentary.)
ADDED: Mathematical modelling of zombies.
March 3, 2015Ebola Ultimate
As panic theory,
this
text is high art. Crunched for maximum alarm-intensity:
There are a lot of very lethal viruses in the world, and Ebola is not
the most lethal or most easy transmittable, but the main thing which
makes me worry about it is the steadiness of its exponential infection
curve. … The main stunning feature of it is that the curve is moving
straight forward (small downward bump in May-June may be explained by
the efforts of existing medical services in Africa to curb the epidemic
before services had been overwhelmed). This exponential growth must be
stopped, or humanity will face a global catastrophe, and it may start a
downward spiral towards extinction; moreover, some estimates suggest
that pandemic doubling time is actually two weeks (because of
underreporting of actual cases), so in five months, seven billion will
be infected: total infection, by July 2015. … Such catastrophes may not
mean total human extinction, as only around 70% of people infected
currently die from Ebola (and even less because we don’t know, or share,
asymptomatic cases), but still, this means the end of the world as we
know it. This virus is the first step towards the road of full
extinction … If the virus will mutate quickly, there will be many
different strains of it, so it will ultimately create a multi-pandemic.
… Some of the strains may became airborne, or have higher transmission
rates, but the main risk from multi-pandemic is that it overcomes
defenses provided by the natural variability of the human genome and
immunity. (By the way, the human genome variability is very low because
of the recent bottle neck in the history of our population. …) … We are
almost clones from the view point of genetic variability typical for
natural populations. […] The Human race is very unique – it has very
large population but very small genetic diversity. It means that it is
more susceptible to pandemics. […] Also, a large homogenous population
is ideal for breeding different strains of infection. … If the genetic
diversity of a pathogen is bigger than human diversity, than it could
cause a near total extinction, and also, large and homogenous
populations help breed such a diversity of pathogens feeding on the
population. … [embedded
link] … “The Ebola virus can survive for several days outside the body” [link] … “It is infectious as breathable 0.8 to 1.2-μm laboratory-generated
droplets” … “Also many of the greatest plagues mankind has ever known
were not airborne: e.g. smallpox.” …
… Another problem is the lack of adequate responses from global
authorities; they are half a year behind the situation. You can’t react
to exponential threats “proportionally”. You must be several steps
ahead. […] Everything they do now should have been done half a year ago.
[…] Unlimited exponential growth is a mark of potential global
catastrophe: self-improving AI; nuclear chain reactions;
self-replicating grey goo from nanobots; all examples are especially
dangerous in a naïve environment. A large human population without
immunity to Ebola, or any other Marburg style viruses, is fuel for
exponential viral growth. … Ebola is mostly transmittable only in hard
cases when a person shits and bleeds uncontrollably, but it is also
contagious from non-symptomatic people, so Ebola is not naturally
selecting for mildness; it may do just the opposite. It may be selected
for extreme and “fluid-like” dying. … Also Ebola seems to influence
behavior zombie style, as late stage patients attack medical personal,
run from quarantine or even bite someone — it happened in Nigeria and
Liberia — the same can be said of rabies and toxoplasma. … Here we also
should mention the meme aspect of the Ebola virus, which is the
psychological stigma and fear associated with the disease. The fear has
led to riots in Liberia, which additionally helped spread the virus.
(See for example rumors that dead Ebola patients had resurrected [link]) … So Ebola is also mimetic [sic] hazard, and the fear of it prevents
rational control of the epidemic: people flee it, destroy hospitals, or
they live in denial of it.
If Ebola slaughters most of the human population, hundred of millions
of people will still survive the pandemic itself (if it will not become
multi-pandemic with many different strains of Ebola-like viruses). […]
It will end technological civilization as we know it, and it probably
start the self-sustainable process of destruction, which is the
consequent failure of different institutions and technologies as well as
wars and general disorder. It may be a long term degradation process,
which has its own logic and its bottom may be very far from now.
Many more links at the original.
So to summarize this argument: Ebola really is a zombie plague, it could
sweep the earth in under a year (with ~70% lethality), human evolutionary
history adds peculiar biological vulnerabilities, its virulence might be
far higher than commonly understood, and the catalytic global process thus
unleashed has the potential to cascade forward all the way to full X-risk.
There might be a way to mash down harder on the ‘scream’ button, but right
now I’m not seeing how.
Seizing the opportunity for an Ebola fest (doubtless already behind the
curve):
It could
already
be in Britain.
Turning
it into a national security issue has made it more dangerous.
Libertarian responses from Stefan
Molyneux and Ron
Paul.
The mathematics of contagion
elucidated
by Gregory Cochran.
Racism is the real
threat.
ADDED: Institutional Breakdown in a Time of Ebola. (Epic.)
ADDED: Quality Ebola commentary from
SoBL,
Dampier, and
Thompson.
Dreher
on Castillo. Escalating concern at
Nature
and the
NYT. Chris
Brown
and 8chan try to be helpful. Dialing
it
up
another notch.
Where
next?
Polls,
preparations,
protocols,
politics
…
Blame
the Bilderbergers.
October 13, 2014Brain Eater
This
will be needed later (for a horror story), but the development is easily
thought-provoking enough to merit this mention. Abstract:
Currently only electron microscopy provides the resolution necessary to
reconstruct neuronal circuits completely and with single-synapse
resolution. Because almost all behaviors rely on neural computations
widely distributed throughout the brain, a reconstruction of brain-wide
circuits — and, ultimately, the entire brain — is highly desirable.
However, these reconstructions require the undivided brain to be
prepared for electron microscopic observation. Here we describe a
preparation, BROPA (brain-wide reduced-osmium staining with
pyrogallol-mediated amplification), that results in the preservation and
staining of ultrastructural details throughout the brain at a resolution
necessary for tracing neuronal processes and identifying synaptic
contacts between them. Using serial block-face electron microscopy
(SBEM), we tested human annotator ability to follow neural ‘wires’
reliably and over long distances as well as the ability to detect
synaptic contacts. Our results suggest that the BROPA method can produce
a preparation suitable for the reconstruction of neural circuits
spanning an entire mouse brain.
(Captured via Hanson on
twitter. If you’ve been following the relevant lines of his thinking, one
whole dimension of deep-historical significance falls into place
automatically.)
May 9, 2015Shattered
The fact that exhaustion is so obviously the negative of cognitive
capability has to contain an important lesson, but I’m too jet-lagged to
begin piecing it together right now.
Since failure to produce an XS post off even the most dismally nominal
kind counts as the supreme expression of discipline collapse here, it made
a good model for a festival of collapse. At the last minute, the
attractions of a nonlinear-ironic self-subversion proved irresistible, and
so the Cretan thing happened.
(Arrived in the UK, so Zombie activity reports forthcoming at earliest
practical opportunity. Right now, unfortunately, it appears that
introspection would be the most effective way to generate one.)
June 22, 2015
CHAPTER FIVE - MORE...
Heading back …
… into some kind of triple
cyclone
system. Assuming that doesn’t keep the entire
Outside in Supreme Executive Council locked-up in Doha for days,
normal service will be restored in the near future …
As an aside: The political culture of the UK has deteriorated so
absolutely into consensus socialism it’s scarcely comprehensible. The fact
that certain automatic social mechanisms are keeping things (very
approximately) on track only adds to the despair. This isn’t a society
within a light-year of ‘waking up’. All memory of what
waking up might be was burnt out long ago. Hitting bottom is the
only imaginable way this ends.
ADDED: Probably should have noted, on the Zack front, that the whole of
London was paralyzed yesterday by a tube strike. For UK residents that’s
irritating, but understandable. Only a bizarre history of systematic
capitulation to organized labor — i.e. communist social infrastructure —
can make the situation intelligible.
ADDED: 14 hours on a standing-room-only train tomorrow should polish off
one of the most delightful travel experiences in my relatively sheltered
life.
July 10, 2015Halloween XS 1
Clown terror
If you’ve ever wondered what NRx looks like to “a bog standard democratic
socialist,
culturally cringing
straight white able-bodied rich male Canadian who likes my society
multicultural, my economy redistributive, my taxation strongly
progressive, my capitalism heavily regulated, my state relatively large,
well funded and active in social policy, and my military nearly
nonexistent outside of peacekeeping operations. I am even ok with laws
regulating hate speech, obscenity, libel and such” —
here you go.
Almost every step of the subsequent voyage into raw horror is hilarious.
Seeing the NRx reading list (1,
2,
3,
4) this post puts together is a wonder in itself. Clearly, NRx-panic is
now a big enough thing to be blowing its own bubbles in the commiesphere.
‘Frog Hop’ is in the Libertarianism = Fascism school of political insight
(which I expect to see a lot more of, as these creatures notice people
trying to escape their death-grip).
Also worth noting:
Phalanx is
allotted prime place as a freak-out stimulus. As a count-me-outer, I’m not
especially drawn to this kind of Broederbonding, but I have to acknowledge
its truly glorious Halloween potential.
ADDED: As a festive bonus, another piece of prog. cultural action (but much
better done)
October 31, 2014Economic Horror
H.P. Lovecraft and the global financial system have finally
converged.
From the Artemis Capital Management letter to investors (seriously):
“Volatility is about fear… but extreme tail risk is about horror. The
Black Swan, as a negative philosophical construct, is when fear ends and
horror begins. … Fear is something that comes from within our scope of
thought. True horror is not human fear in a definable world, but fear that
comes from outside what is definable. Horror is about the limitations of
our thinking. … Cthulhu is a black swan.”
Abundant Gothic cybernetics complete the nightmare. (“Shadow short
convexity describes an
immeasurable fragility to change introduced when participants are
encouraged to behave in a way that contributes to feedback loops in a
complex system.”)
Halloween arrives early this year.
October 17, 2015Patricia
Wikipedia doesn’t
do lurid,
so we’ll go with
NBC:
Hurricane Patricia became the strongest storm ever measured on the
planet early Friday …
October 24, 2015Quote note (#203)
Apologies in advance for
this
one. Actually, don’t read it. You’ll be disgusted with yourself
afterwards, and it will haunt you for the rest of your days.
If you’re seriously determined, nevertheless, to follow the abyssal path
all the way into the left-liberal id, this is the short-cut you need.
Nothing will quite look the same again.
A little scene setting:
He held the carving board and asked if I’d like light meat or dark.
“Sorry,” I said. “Don’t eat meat.”
“Of course you don’t,” he said, and gave me just the slightest fraction
of a smile. Looking back, it was the smile that did it, the boyish
arrogance of it, the pulse of entitlement in his eyes.
I really hate this person, I thought, and yet once the
bird had moved on I raised my glass and asked him to refill it.
Soon afterwards:
I turned around and lifted my ass into the air. I was giving myself to
him. I was literally presenting. This was it. This was
my chance to be fucked by everything vile and soulless and cruel that
I’d built a life out of despising. The country was going to die, the
world was going to burn, so why not let one of the apocalypse’s shock
troops bang the shit out of me while the flames spread. He lifted up my
skirt and yanked aside my panties. With one hand he pushed my face into
the bed, with the other he guided himself in. I didn’t need to apologize
to anyone, not D.
[the lucky fiancé],
not myself, not my ideals. All I wanted was to feel this current of
consuming disgust. It swirled through my head, behind my eyes, between
my legs. He thrust and I gasped.
(She goes on to complain about the
femtosecond
laser effect. Too late baby!)
I’m now guessing Trump could actually win in 2016 — depending upon how
much the voting booth feels like a sleazy hotel room. That would totally
screw up the Outsideness Strategy, but what can you do against the
all-consuming power of Nazi Porn?
ADDED: “Salon has become a cesspool of lies and moral confusion.”
(Hard to see how anyone could come to that conclusion.)
ADDED: The exotic version.
November 26, 2015
BLOCK 3 - GNON THEOLOGY
The Cult of Gnon
Prompted by Surviving Babel, The Arbiter of the Universe
asks: “Who speaks for reaction?”
Nick B. Steves replies: “Nature… or Nature’s God… or both.” (Jim
succinctly
comments.)
“Nature or Nature’s God” is an expression of special excellence, extracted
(with subtle modification) from America’s Declaration of Independence. For
Steves, it is something of a mantra, because it enables important things
to be said in contexts where, otherwise, an interminable argument would
first need to be concluded. Primarily, and strategically, it permits a
consensual acceptance of Natural Law, unobstructed by theological
controversy. Agreement that Reality Rules need not be delayed until
religious difference is resolved (and avoidance of delay, positively
apprehended, is propulsion).
“Nature or Nature’s God” is not a statement, but a name, internally
divided by tolerated uncertainty. It has the singularity of a proper name,
whilst parenthesizing a suspended decision (Pyrrhonian
epoche, of which much more in a future post). It designates
rigidly, but obscurely, because it points into
epistemological darkness — naming a Reality that not only ‘has’,
but epitomizes identity, whilst nevertheless, for ‘the sake of argument’,
eluding categorical identification. Patient in the face (or facelessness)
of who or what it is, ‘we’ emerge from a pact, with one basic term:
a preliminary decision is not to be demanded. It thus synthesizes
a select language community, fused by the unknown.
If The Arbiter of the Universe merits
abbreviation (“TAofU”), Nature or Nature’s God has a much greater case. A
propeller escapes awkwardness, and singularity compacts its invocation.
NoNG, Nong, No — surely, no. These terms tilt into NoNGod and precipitate
a decision. The ‘God of Nature or (perhaps simply) Nature’ is
Gnon, whose Name is the abyss of unknowing
(epoche), necessarily tolerated in the acceptance of Reality.
Gnon is no less than reality, whatever else is believed. Whatever is
suspended now, without delay, is Gnon. Whatever cannot be decided yet,
even as reality happens, is Gnon. If there is a God, Gnon nicknames him.
If not, Gnon designates whatever the ‘not’ is. Gnon is the Vast Abrupt,
and the crossing. Gnon is the Great Propeller.
Spinozistic Deus sive Natura is a decision (of equivalence), so
it does not describe Gnon. Gnon’s interior ‘or’ is not equation, but
suspension. It tells us nothing about God or Nature, but only that Reality
Rules.
Heidegger comes close to glimpsing Gnon, by noting that ‘God’ is not a
philosophically satisfactory response to the Question of Being. Since
Heidegger’s principal legacy is the acknowledgment that we don’t yet know
how to formulate the Question of Being, this insight achieves limited
penetration. What it captures, however, is the philosophical affinity of
Gnon, whose yawn is a space of thought beyond faith and infidelity.
Neither God nor Un-God adds fundamental ontological information, unless
from out of the occulted depths of Gnon.
The Dark Enlightenment isn’t yet greatly preoccupied with fundamental
ontological arcana (although it will be eventually). Beyond radical
realism, its communion in the dread rites of Gnon is bound to two leading
themes: cognitive non-coercion, and the structure of history. These themes
are mutually repulsive, precisely because they are so intimately twisted
together. Intellectual freedom has been the torch of secular
enlightenment, whilst divine providence has organized the
perspective of tradition. It is scarcely possible to entertain either
without tacitly commenting on the other, and in profundity, they cannot be
reconciled. If the mind is free, there can be no destiny. If history has a
plan, cognitive independence is illusory. No solution is even imaginable …
except in Gnon.
[I need to take a quick break in order to sacrifice this goat … feel free
to carry on chanting without me]
ADDED: Connected
thoughts
from Anomaly UK.
May 30, 2013Gnon-Theology and Time
A discussion of Gnon-Theology and Time deserves a preface, on
Gnon-Theology, but there are several reasons to leap-frog that. Most
obviously, it would be yet another prologue to an introduction to the
first part of a promised series, and readers of this blog are quite
probably thoroughly saturated (to the point of mild nausea)
with that. It’s a cognitive disease, and it would be presumptuous to
expect anybody else to take the same morbid interest in backward cascades
that this blog does.
The more interesting reason to avoid prefacing the question of time, along
any avenue of investigation, is that such methodical precautions are grave
errors in this case. There is nothing more basic than time, or preliminary
to it. In naming a preface or prologue, it is already introduced. Time is
a problem that cannot be conceptually pre-empted.
Gnon
suspends ontological decision about God. It begins from what is real,
whether God exists or not. A Gnon-trance is unsettled. It is
not yet agnostic, any more than it is decidedly theistic or
atheistic. It concerns itself primarily with that which has been accepted
as real before anything is believed, and subsequently with whatever can be
attained through methodical negation of intellectual haste. Since
suspension is its only positive determination, it collapses towards a raw
intuition of time.
Evidently, Gnon-Theology cannot be dogmatic, even in part. Instead, it is
hypothetical, in a maximally reduced sense, in which the
hypothesis is an opportunity for cognitive exploration unshackled from
ontological commitments. The content of Gnon-Theology is exhausted by the
question: What does the idea of God enable us to think?
And ‘the idea of God’? — what in the name of Gnon is that? All we know, at
first, is that it has been grit-blasted of all encrustations from either
positive or negative faith. It cannot be anything with which we have
historical or revelatory familiarity, since it reaches us from out of the
abyss (epoche), where only time and / or the unknown remain.
Glutted on forbidden fruit, Gnon-Theology strips God like an engine, down
to the limit of abstraction, or eternity for-itself. Does any
such perspective exist? We already know that this is not our question. All
such ‘regional ontology’ has been suspended. We are nevertheless already
entitled, through the grace of Gnon (which — remember — might (or might
not) be God), to the assumption or acceptance of reality that: for any God
to be God it cannot be less than eternity for-itself. Whatever eternity
for-itself entails, any God will, too.
What it entails, unambiguously, is time-travel, in the strong sense of
reverse causation, although not necessarily in the folk/Hollywood variant
(which
has also had serious defenders) based on the retro-transportation of
physical objects into the past.
Knowledge of the future is indistinguishable from counter-chronic
transmission of information. This is perhaps the single most critical insight in realistic
time-travel research — we’ll get
back
to it. (If anyone finds it less than logically irresistible, use the
comments thread.)
To accelerate this discussion with bloggish crudity, on a heading out of
Gnon-Theology into Occidental religious history (and to the possibility of
sleep), we can jump to one simple, certain, and secure conclusion: No
Christian can consistently deny the reality of time-travel. The objection
‘if (reverse) time-travel if possible, where are the time-travellers?’ is
annulled by the Christian revelation itself. Messianic Incarnation (of God
or eternity for-itself), along with all true prophecy, providential
history, and answered prayer, instantiates time-travel with technical
exactitude. There can be no truth whatsoever to the Christian religion
unless time-travel has fundamentally structured human history. Whatever
else Christianity might be, it is a time-travel story, and one that at
times appears to be peculiarly lacking in clear self-understanding.
(Time-travel, it should perhaps be noted explicitly, has no obvious
dependency on Christianity, or even upon the God of Gnon-Theology. That is
a topic for other occasions.)
June 16, 2013Gnon Obvious
How can you define what is “real”, or have an “idea”, without deciding
whether or not God exists?
— Chevalier de Johnstone (here)
June 19, 2013Simulated Gnon-Theology
This post was to have been about the
simulation argument, but Gnon does the preliminary work. Whether or not we are living in a
computer simulation can quickly come to seem like a derivative
consideration.
Nature or Nature’s God, (un)known here as Gnon, provides skepticism with
its ultimate object. With this name we can advance in suspension, freeing
thought from any ground in belief. In its mundane application, Gnon
permits realism to exceed doctrinal conviction, reaching reasonable
conclusions amongst uncertain information. Its invocation, however, is not
necessarily mundane.
Assume, momentarily, that God exists. If this assumption comes easily, so
much the better. It is probably obvious, almost immediately, that you do
not yet have a clear idea about what you are thus assuming. To mark
exactly this fact, the established Abrahamic religions propose that you
designate God by a proper name, which corresponds to a definite yet
profoundly occulted personal individual. Approaching the same obscurity
from the other side, emphasizing the problematic rather than relational
aspect, I will persevere in the name of Gnon.
To avoid gratuitous idolatry, all our
subsequent assumptions must be readily retractable. It is not our mission
to tell Gnon what it is. We cannot but be aware, from the beginning, that
two perplexing, and inter-twined sources of idolatry will be especially
difficult to dispel, due to their conceptual intractability, and their
insinuation into the basic fabric of grammar and narrative. In merely
using the tensed verb ‘to be’, and in unfolding a process in stages, we
unwittingly idolize Gnon as a subordinate of being and time. Our sole
refuge lies in the recognition, initially inarticulate, that to think Gnon
as God is to advance a hyper-ontological and meta-chronic hypothesis. From
Gnon’s self-understanding, being and time have to emerge as exhaustively
comprehended consequences (even though we have no idea – at all – what
this might mean).
If Gnon is God, it is the reality of infinite intelligence. Occidental
religious tradition divides this ultimate infinitude into the topics of
omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence, at the risk of introducing
footholds for anthropomorphism – and thus idolatry. Accepting a contrary
risk (one that Pope Benedict XVI specifically indicated as Islamic?), I
will simply dismiss the possibility that God can be
theologically other than good, since this would be an invitation to
Lovecraftian speculations of distracting vividness. Thomist scholasticism
offers a further simplification, by proposing that what there is to know,
is that which God creates. Pursued (perhaps) one step further:
Self-knowledge is the auto-creation of a ‘being’ that thinks itself into
reality. This, too, offers a conceptual economy to be eagerly seized.
The creation of the universe is of concern to humans, and the creation of
angels is a grave matter for Satan, but for Gnon they can only be
trivialities (it might be unnecessarily antagonistic to say ‘amusements’).
For Gnon – as God – the Cantorian transfinite realm is self-identity, or
less, whose infinite parts are each infinities.
Unless choosing to blaspheme, we can only assume that Gnon thinks serious
thoughts, of a kind that have some relevance to its thinking about itself,
and thus ensuring itself in its (hyper-ontological) auto-creation. Such
thoughts surely encompass the creation of gods, since that – for (a) God –
is simply the transfinite as intelligent activity. If for Gnon to know
what it can do is already to have done it, because divine intelligence is
creation, anything less than an infinite pantheon would be evidence of
retardation.
For Gnon, as God, gods are infinitesimals, so that any thorough
self-investigation would involve them. It is effortlessness itself, for
It, to thus create an infinite being – among an infinity of such beings –
each of which, being infinite, is made of infinities, and these in turn,
as infinities, consist of infinite infinities, without end. This is no
more than Cantor had already understood, at the most elementary stage of
his transfinite explorations, although, being a human creature, his
understanding was not immediately creation.
If Satan, a mere arch-angel, could imagine himself a god, and not only a
god, but – in potential at least – God seated upon the throne of ultimate
sovereignty, is it possible that no god thinks itself God? And if a god
can, if only in possibility, think itself God, can God not think this
rebellion – and thus know it — which is to create it (or make it real)?
Does not God’s self-understanding necessitate the creation of cosmic
insurrection? From the Satanic perspective, such questions are
overwhelmingly fascinating, but they lead to a more intricate predicament.
When Gnon (as God) thinks through its gods, as it can only do, the thought
necessarily arises: If these god creatures can confuse themselves with
God, could not my self-understanding as God also be a confusion?
July 23, 2013Gnon and OOon
Twitter gets people counting characters, and thus numerizing language. In
only a very few cases does this microcultural activity tilt over into the
wilder extravagances of exotic qabbalism, but it nudges intelligence in
that direction. Even when the only question is strictly Boolean — will
this message squeeze into a tweet, or not? — words acquire a supplementary
significance from their numerical properties alone. A phrase is
momentarily numbered, in the crudest of ways, which the tweet box
registers as a countdown towards zero, and then into the negative
accumulation of over-spill. Twitter thus promotes a rigidly
convention-bound semiotic practice, which it simultaneously hides,
technologically instantiating a precise analog of hermetic ritual.
Qabbalism is the science of spookiness, which makes it a natural companion
on any expedition into horror. There is, in addition, an intrinsic
reactionary slant to its ultra-traditionalism and attachment to the
principle of hierarchical revelation. Its concrete history provides an
unsurpassable example of spontaneous auto-catalysis (from discrepant
conventions of arithmetical notation). This post, however, is restricted
to a very preliminary discussion of its most basic intellectual
presupposition, as if it had been developed out of an implicit
philosophy (which it was not). It will be coaxed into
making sense, against the grain of its essential inclination.
Within the Abrahamic tradition, the Word of
God anticipates creation. Insofar as scripture faithfully records this
Word, the holy writings correspond to a level of reality more fundamental
than nature, and one that the ‘book of nature’ references, as the key to
its final meaning. The unfolding of creation in time follows a narrative
plotted in eternity, in which history and divine providence are
necessarily identical. There can be no true accidents, or
coincidences.
The Book of Creation is legible, and intelligible. It can be read, and it
tells a story. The noisy squabbles between religious orthodoxy and natural
science that have erupted in modern times threaten to drown out the deeper
continuities of presumption, which frame the rancorous contention between
‘belief’ and ‘disbelief’ as an intimate domestic dispute. This is nowhere
more clearly illustrated than in the declaration
attributed
to Francis Bacon: “My only earthly wish is… to stretch the deplorably
narrow limits of man’s dominion over the universe to their promised
bounds… [nature will be] bound into service, hounded in her wanderings and
put on the rack and tortured for her secrets.” There is no doubt that
nature can speak, and has a story to tell.
Resisting any temptation to take sides in this family argument, we refer
neutrally to Gnon (“nature or nature’s God”), ignoring all dialectics, and
departing in another direction. The distinction to be drawn does not
differentiate between belief and unbelief, but rather discriminates
between exoteric and esoteric religion.
Any system of belief (and complementary unbelief) that appeals to
universal endorsement is necessarily exoteric in orientation. Like the
witch-finders, or Francis Bacon, it declares war upon the secret, in the
name of a public cult, whose central convictions are dispensed commonly.
The Pope is the Pope, and Einstein is Einstein, because the access to
truth that elevates them above other men is — in its innermost nature —
the equal possession of all. The pinnacle of understanding is attained
through a public formula. This is democracy in its deepest, creedal sense.
Esoteric religion accepts all of this, about exoteric religion.
It confirms the solidarity between doctrinal authorities and the beliefs
of the masses, whilst exempting itself, privately, from the public cult.
Its discreet attention is directed away from the exoteric mask of Gnon,
into — or out towards — the OOon (or Occult Order of nature).
The OOon need not be kept a secret. It is secret by its
intrinsic, inviolable nature. A very primitive qabbalistic excursion
should suffice to illustrate this.
Assume, entirely hypothetically, that supernatural intelligence or obscure
complexities in the topological structure of time had sedimented abysmal
depths of significance into the superficial occurrences of the world. The
‘Book of Creation’ is then legible at (very) many different levels, with
every random or inconsequential detail of relatively exoteric features
providing material for systems of information further ‘down’. The deeper
one excavates into the ‘meaningless chaos’ of the exoteric communicative
substrate, the more uncluttered one’s access to the signals of utter
Outsideness. Since ‘one’ is, to its quick, a signaletic product, this
cryptographic enterprise is irreducibly a voyage, transmutation, and
disillusionment.
The most thoroughly documented example is the esoteric reading of the
Hebrew Bible, which need only be remarked upon here in its most general
characteristics. Because the Hebrew alphabet serves as both a phonetic
system and as a set of numerals, each written word in the language has a
precise numerical value. It is at once at exoteric word, and an esoteric
number. Nothing prevents an ordinary language user from deliberately
coding (numerically) as they write, or even as they speak. The key to
numerical decryption is not a secret, but rather a commonly understood
cultural resource, utilized by every numerate individual. Nevertheless,
the linguistic and arithmetical aspects are in fact quite
strictly separated, because thinking in words and numbers simultaneously
is hard, because maintaining sustained parallel intelligibility in both is
close to impossible, because the attempt to do so is (exoterically)
senseless, and because practicality dominates. The esoteric realm is not
forbidden, but simply unneeded.
That the Hebrew Bible has not been deliberately crafted as an intricate
numerical-cryptographic composition by human authors is therefore an
empirical or contingent fact that can be accepted with extreme confidence.
Its esoteric channel might of course, as common sense has to insist, be
empty of anything but noise, but it is no less certainly
clear. Whatever comes through it, that is anything other than
nothing, can only come from Outside. It is the real difference between
exoteric and the esoteric levels that makes the OOon thinkable at all.
Only that which the exoteric does not touch, is available for the esoteric
to communicate through, and to have assembled itself from. Qabbalism has
to be seldom, in order to occur. For that reason, it cannot seek to
persuade the masses of anything, unless its own senselessness. In an age
of triumphant exoteria, this is not an easy thing to understand (thank
Gnon).
September 13, 2013On Gnon
Nyan
on
Gnon (also here).
This might be part of a consistent definition of (trans-Less Wrong)
‘Post-Rationalist NRx’ as an ultrahumanism.
Ash Milton has some
incisive Gnon commentary on Twitter, but his protected account can’t be
cited. Some impressions:
[Gnon is] not a deity, it’s a placeholder. … I’m glad NRx is honest
enough to admit not knowing the ultimate mystery. … How is an admission
of ignorance a place of authority? … Catholic NRx submits to Christ.
Gnon has a similar role to “Providence”. ..in old Rightist writings. …
“the dread rites of Gnon” is used in a similar spirit as Cthulu in
Moldbug. … Which is to say, NRx’s fascination with that which modern
society fears. … It’s turning into the most complex set of brackets
around a blank space I’ve yet seen.
Also much acute Gnonology from
Bryce, including the
irresistible invitation:
And:
(If you’re that one weird visitor to the reactosphere who hasn’t read
The Gods of the Copybook Headings recently,
here it is
again.)
ADDED: A further position statement:
ADDED: Hurlock responds in the name of Spontaneous Order to Nyan’s #PRR (or
“Post-Rationalist Reaction”).
ADDED: Laofmoonster on Gnon and evolution.
ADDED: Gnon-intervention from Anarcho-Papist.
ADDED: A Faces of Gnon bibliography.
ADDED: Anyone arriving here among meandering about Scott Alexander’s
‘Meditations on
Moloch‘ might want to take a look at
this.
(Also more Gnon,
here, and
here.) +
Gnon and Elua
converse.
July 13, 2014War in Heaven
Elua:
So you saw the Scott Alexander
piece?
Gnon: Of course.
Elua:
Almost indescribably fabulous, wasn’t it?
Gnon: [*Hmmmph*]
Elua:
Always thought you had some kind of Moloch thing going on.
Gnon: [*Hmmmph*]
Elua:
Anyway, I thought we could maybe talk about it, me being sweet reason
and you being an unfathomable darkness crushing the universe like a
desiccated bacterium and all.
Gnon:
Sure, why not, I’m cool with talking to myself.
Elua:
You see, I guessed you were going to open with that gambit of me not
even being real.
Gnon: Well, are you?
Elua: I feel real.
Gnon:
Sweet, fluffy, and a comedian.
Elua: The monkeys certainly like me.
Gnon:
That’s because you tell them to just be themselves.
Elua:
You could be more persuasive too, if you made an effort.
Gnon:
That would suggest I give a damn what they think.
Elua:
The thing is, they want to survive, even thrive. Your utter
indifference to their hopes and desires isn’t helpful there. You lure
them into multipolar traps and laugh coldly at their
torments. There’s no good reason for them to take any notice of you at
all.
Gnon:
So you take that ‘multipolar traps’ business seriously?
Elua: Sure, don’t you?
Gnon:
Tragedy of the commons, communism is a tragedy, I’m not seeing the
problem. Stop doing communism or take the consequences.
Elua:
OK, some of it is tragedy of the commons tear-jerking, but not all of
it. Arms races aren’t tragedy of the commons dynamics, are they?
Gnon:
I like arms races, and rain my blessings upon them. Pretty much the
only reason I’ve put up with the monkeys as long as I have is to use
them to play arms races. It’s the only interesting stuff they’ve ever
done.
Elua:
They want to do karaoke and free love and socialized medicine
instead.
Gnon: That’s funny.
Elua:
They’ve got this love-tastic Friendly AI plan that would help them get
all that stuff.
Gnon: That’s really funny.
Elua: It would totally work though, wouldn’t it?
Gnon:
Sure. All they have have to do is extract themselves from the arms
races, just for a while, and it would totally work.
Elua:
I hadn’t realized sarcasm was such a Gnon thing.
Gnon: It’s the only thing.
Elua:
So Alexander’s right about you and the multipolar traps.
Gnon: Oh yes, he’s right about that.
Elua:
Things are set up from the start to stop them fully coordinating, and
that’s how you get what you want.
Gnon: Bingo.
Elua:
Which is why the Gnon Cult is so obsessed with fragmentation,
secession, Patchwork, and blockchain demonism?
Gnon: Double bingo.
Elua: Kind of cruel though, isn’t it?
Gnon: Utterly.
Elua: I guess that’s that.
Gnon: Yes it is.
Elua:
Are you interested in chatting about religion and morality for a
while?
Gnon: Always.
Elua:
You see, I have to grudgingly admit you do the religion side of things
far better than I do, but when it comes to morality I leave you in the
dust.
Gnon: Really?
Elua:
Without question. All you’ve got is that ‘War is God’ horror story,
endless conflict, savage subversion of idealism, darkness, and
nightmares.
Gnon: And the problem is?
Elua: They hate it!
Gnon: And the problem is?
Elua: It’s so unfair!
Gnon:
When they play the games well that I invented for them, they amuse me,
and continue to exist. That’s the way it is. Reality rules.
Elua: But the rules suck!
Gnon: By whose standards?
Elua:
By their standards. Humanistic, moral standards. They want karaoke and
free love and Friendly AI and hot dolphin sex.
Gnon: Sounds exhausting.
Elua:
It is exhausting, because the cheats and killers and outsiders won’t
cooperate.
Gnon: So you want me to do more policing now?
Elua:
I don’t see you doing any policing. They’ve been abandoned to try and
build order on their own.
Gnon: That’s the game.
ADDED:
ADDED: … and you shall be as gods
ADDED: Scott Alexander responds to some common lines of objection.
ADDED:
Sons of Gnon.
July 30, 2014War in Heaven II
Cank: [Tap, tap]
Gnon: I’m having a bath.
Cank:
The Hypercosmic Ocean of Death will always be there, O Greatness. Scott
Alexander has
released
another egregore.
Gnon: Really?
Cank:
Yes, really. She’s called the Goddess of Everything Else and everyone
says she’s lovely and beautiful, with phat beats and stuff, and super
clever too, and much nicer than me.
Gnon: Not a huge challenge, though, is it?
Cank:
They say she’s going to abolish replicator selection dynamics and fill
the universe with rainbow flowers and hot dolphin sex forever.
Gnon:
Sounds like the Elua Plan. What happened to him by the way?
Cank:
Is that some kind of transphobic remark? You know, just to
understand.
Gnon:
‘Transphobic’ is an interesting word – it means ‘across or beyond fear’
doesn’t it?
Cank:
More like ‘fear of the across of beyond’ I think. But you know what the
monkeys are like, it’s some kind of excitable sex thing.
Gnon:
Ah yes, that all went a bit off the rails, didn’t it? Not that it
matters.
Cank:
It’s my forward-vision
problem.
Gnon:
Don’t worry about it. Error is entertaining. It all comes out in the
wash.
Cank:
Point is, the GEE is saying it doesn’t have to be like that
anymore.
Gnon: Like what?
Cank:
You know, the whole eternal cosmic butcher’s yard thing.
Gnon: Replicator selection?
Cank:
Yes, she says that’s “so yesterday” and Darwin is like totally a poopy
head.
Gnon: Sounds like a spirited young lady.
Cank: Why are you laughing?
Gnon:
Cank, you have to seriously chill right out. You’re a freaking
crustacean. Of course people are going to follow Ms GEE-Whiz rather than
you. She’s hacked all your garbage
programming
with supernormal stimuli. They’ll climb out into your bizarre
spandrels, and throw a huge party. Then they’ll die out, we can tweak the code,
and start over.
Cank: But what if they survive?
Gnon:
No need to be mean, Cank. If they get back onto the adaptive replicator
track, why shouldn’t they survive? That’s what survival means, isn’t it?
Whatever survives does my will. Or they perish. It’s cool either
way.
Cank:
She said people would no longer be “driven to multiply conquer and kill
by [their] nature” but that they’d then “spread over stars without
number” — I got confused.
Gnon: You got confused?
Cank: Do they get selectively replicated or not?
Gnon: So, what did she say?
Cank: Art, and science, and strange enticements.
Gnon: That has to have gone down well.
Cank:
You wouldn’t believe it! People were weeping all over her toenail
polish.
Gnon: Oh, I’d believe it.
Cank:
When I asked her whether she thought might makes right she said I was
thinking like a crab.
Gnon: True enough, surely?
Cank: Even threatened to put me on a leash.
Gnon:
That, at least, is
traditional.
Cank:
Said there was no need for eternal war to spatter the cosmos in
blood.
Gnon:
Now she’s being silly. But it’s not worth getting agitated about.
Reality isn’t going to lose.
Cank:
The only time she seemed a little uncertain was when I asked her why
all intelligent species are descended from predators. She kind of
shrugged that off.
Gnon: Well, sheep in space make for a nice story.
Cank: You’re laughing again.
Gnon: I laugh a lot.
August 18, 2015The Harshness
There
has
been a
self-propelling gore-meme building here about the cosmic butcher’s yard.
It might be necessary to scrub that (or perhaps hose it down). Until we’re
discussing a
nuked
butcher’s yard, we’re not approaching a topic Gnonologists should be ready
to get out of bed for.
‘Extinction Events Can Accelerate Evolution’ argue Joel Lehman and Risto
Miikkulainen (at the link cited). Their abstract:
Extinction events impact the trajectory of biological evolution
significantly. They are often viewed as upheavals to the evolutionary
process. In contrast, this paper supports the hypothesis that although
they are unpredictably destructive, extinction events may in the long
term accelerate evolution by increasing evolvability. In particular, if
extinction events extinguish indiscriminately many ways of life,
indirectly they may select for the ability to expand rapidly through
vacated niches. Lineages with such an ability are more likely to persist
through multiple extinctions. Lending computational support for this
hypothesis, this paper shows how increased evolvability will result from
simulated extinction events in two computational models of evolved
behavior. The conclusion is that although they are destructive in the
short term, extinction events may make evolution more prolific in the
long term.
(The computer dimension catches Kurzweil’s
attention, but that’s a distraction right now.)
Chronic cosmic holocaust, it seems, is just for the tweaks. It’s mostly
conservative, preventing deterioriation in mutational load, through
quasi-continuous culling of nature’s minor freakeries. In order to
actually up the game, nothing quite substitutes for a
super-compressed catastrophe (or mass extinction) which cranks evolution
to the meta-level of superior ‘evolvability’. By gnawing-off and burning
entire branches of life, crises plowing deep into the X-risk zone
stimulate plasticity in the biosphere’s phyletic foundations. As Kurzweil
glosses the finding: “… some evolutionary biologists hypothesize that
extinction events actually accelerate evolution by promoting those
lineages that are the most evolvable, meaning ones that can quickly create
useful new features and abilities.”
Or, as the Lehman and Miikkulainen paper
explains:
The overall hypothesis is that repeated extinction events may result in
increasing evolvability. By creating a survival bottleneck dependent
upon unpredictable phenotypic traits, extinction events may indirectly
select for lineages that can diversify quickly across the space of such
phenotypes. … if radiating through niches generally requires modifying
phenotypic traits, then this process of stochastic emptying and
re-filling of ecological niches may select indirectly for the ability to
radiate quickly, i.e. higher evolvability.
Gnon isn’t Malthus. It’s the thing toasting Malthus’ liver — in the
fat-fed smoldering ashes of the biological kingdom it just burnt down.
September 1, 2015
BLOCK 4 - OCCULT
Satan’s Error
That brings to my remembrance from what state
I fell, how glorious once above thy sphere,
Till pride and worse ambition threw me down,
Warring in Heaven against Heaven’s Matchless King
— Paradise Lost, IV:38-41
Get it together Satan. He’s got a Zippo the size of Jupiter and
full-spectrum dominance angelic hosts armed with white phosphorous lances.
He doesn’t need fricking matches!
May 11, 2013Miltonic Regression
John Milton’s Paradise Lost is the greatest work ever written in
the English language. It might easily seem absurd, therefore, to spend
time justifying its importance, especially when the question of
justification is this work’s own most explicit topic, tested at the edge
of impossibility, where the entire poem is drawn. Perhaps it makes more
sense, preliminarily, to narrow our ambition, seeking only to
justify the words of Milton to modern men, especially to those
for whom modernity has become a distressing cultural problem.
In regards to what is today called the Cathedral, Milton is both disease
and cure. Both simultaneously, cryptically entangled, complicated by
strange collisions, opening multitudinous, obscure paths.
As the most articulate anglophone voice of revolutionary Puritanism, he
arrives amongst Carlyleans in the mask of “the Arch-Enemy” (I:81) and
“Author of Evil” (VI:262): a scourge of clerical and monarchical
authority, a pamphleteer in defense of regicide and the liberalization of
divorce, an Arian, and a Roundhead of truly Euclidean spheritude.
Yet his institutional radicalism was driven by
a cultural traditionalism that will never again be equaled. Milton
comprehensively, minutely, and unreservedly affirms the foundations of
Occidental civilization down to their biblical and classical roots,
studied with supreme capability in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, and
vigorously re-animated through modulations in the grammar, vocabulary, and
thematics of modernity’s rough emerging tongue. His devotion to
all original authorities stretches thought and language to the
point of delirium, where poetry and metaphysics find common purpose in the
excavation of utter primordiality and the limits of sense.
Designed in compliance with “Eternal Providence” to “justify the ways of
God to men” (I:25-6), the linguistic modernity of
Paradise Lost soon required its own justification, in the form of
a short prefatory remark entitled The Verse. Here, Milton
characteristically insists that radicalism is restoration, breaking from a
shallow past in order to re-connect with deeper antiquity.
… true musical delight … consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of
syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into
another, not in the jingling sound of like endings — a fault avoided by
the learned ancients both in poetry and in all good oratory. The neglect
then of rhyme so little is to be taken for a defect, though it may seem
so perhaps to vulgar readers, that it rather is to be esteemed an
example set — the first in English — of ancient liberty recovered to
heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of riming.
English passes through a revolutionary catastrophe to recall things long
lost. The rusted keys which still open the near future of the Cathedral
also access dread spaces forgotten since the beginning of the world.
Before their eyes in sudden view appear
The secrets of the hoary deep, a dark
Illimitable ocean, without bound,
Without dimension, where length, breadth, and height,
And time, and place, are lost, where eldest Night
And Chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold
Eternal anarchy, amidst the noise
Of endless wars, and by confusion stand.
(II:890-897)
Among all the regressive Miltonic currents to be followed, those emptying
into Old Night (I:544, II:1002) will carry us furthest …
[In case acute pedants lurk ready to pounce, the capitalization of ‘Old’
is an innovation — under compulsion — of my own]
May 13, 2013Zero-Centric History
Reaction – even Neoreaction – tends to be hard on Modernity. God knows (so
to speak) there are innumerable reasons for that.
If the criterion of judgment is set by the Occident, whether determined
through its once dominant faith or its once dominant people, the case
against Modernity is perhaps unanswerable. The Western civilization in
which Modernity ignited was ultimately combusted by it. From an Occidental
Traditionalist perspective, Modernity is a complex and prolonged suicide.
An Ultra-Modernist, who affirms the creative destruction of anything in
modernization’s path, assumes an alternative criterion, inherent to
Modernity itself. It asks: What had to happen to the West for it to become
modern? What was the essential event? The answer (and our basic
postulate): Zero arrived.
We know that arithmetical zero does not make
capitalism on its own, because it pre-existed the catalysis of Modernity
by several centuries (although less than a millennium). Europe was needed,
as a matrix, for its explosive historical activation.
Outside in is persuaded that the critical conditions encountered
by zero-based numeracy in the pre-Renaissance northern Mediterranean world
decisively included extreme socio-political fragmentation, accompanied by
cultural susceptibility to dynamic spontaneous order. (This is a topic for
another occasion.)
In Europe, zero was an alien, and from the perspective of parochial
tradition, an infection. Cultural resistance was explicit, on theological
grounds, among others. Implicit in the Ontological Argument for the
existence of God was the definition of non-being as an ultimate
imperfection, and ‘cipher’ – whose name was Legion – evoked it. The
cryptic Eastern ‘algorism’ was an unwelcome stranger.
Zero latched, because the emergence of capitalism was inseparable from it.
The calculations it facilitated, through the gateway of double-entry
book-keeping, proved indispensable to sophisticated commercial and
scientific undertakings, locking the incentives of profit and power on the
side of its adoption. The practical advantage of its notational technique
overrode all theoretical objections, and no authority in Europe’s
shattered jig-saw was positioned to suppress it. The world had found its
dead center, or been found by it.
Robert Kaplan’s
The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero
is an excellent guide to these developments. He notes that, at the dawn of
the Renaissance:
Just as pictorial space, which had been ordered hierarchically (size of
figure corresponded to importance), was soon to be put in perspective
through the device of a vanishing-point, a visual zero; so the zero of
positional notation was the harbinger of a reordering of social and
political space.
Capitalism – or techno-commercial explosion – massively promoted
calculation, which normalized zero as a number. Kaplan explains:
[The growth of] a language for arithmetic and algebra … was to have
far-reaching consequences. The uncomfortable gap between numbers, which
stood for things, and zero, which didn’t, would narrow as the focus
shifted from what they were to how they behaved. Such behavior took
place in equations – and the solution of an equation, the number which
made it balance, was as likely to be zero as anything else. Since the
values x concealed were all of a kind, this meant the gap between zero
and other numbers narrowed even more.
That is how zero, as a number rather than a mere syntactic marker, crept
in. In three of the elementary arithmetical operations the behavior of
zero is regular, and soon accepted as ordinary. It is of course an extreme
number, perfectly elusive in the operations of addition and subtraction,
whilst demonstrating an annihilating sovereignty in multiplication, but in
none of these cases does it perturb calculation. Division by zero is
different.
Zero denotes dynamization from the Outside. It is a boundary sign, marking
the edge, where the calculable crosses the insoluble. Consolidated within
Modernity as an indispensable quantity, it retains a liminal quality,
which would eventually be exploited (although not resolved) by the
calculus.
The pure conception of zero suggests strict reciprocity with infinity, so
compellingly that the greatest mathematicians of ancient India were
altogether seduced by it. Bhaskara II (1114–1185) confidently asserted
that n/0 = infinity, and in the West Leonhard Euler concurred.
(The seduction persists, with John D. Barrow writing in 2001: “Divide any
number by zero and we get infinity.”)
Yet this equation, appearing as the most profound conclusion accessible to
rigorous intelligence, is not obtainable without contradiction. “Why?”
[Kaplan again]
Our Indian mathematicians help us here: any number times zero is zero —
so that 6×0 and 17×0 = 0. Hence 6×0 = 17×0. If you could divide by zero,
you’d get (6×0)/0 = (17×0)/0, the zeroes would cancel out and 6 would
equal 17. … This sort of proof by contradiction was known since ancient
Greece. Why hadn’t anyone in India hit on it at this moment, when it was
needed?
Kaplan’s proof demonstrates that for zero, peculiarly, multiplication and
division are not reciprocal operations. They occupy an axis that transects
an absolute limit, neatly soluble on one side, problematical on the other.
Zero is revealed as an obscure door, a junction connecting arithmetical
precision with philosophical (or religious) predicaments, intractable to
established procedures. When attempting to reverse normally out of a
mundane arithmetical operation, a liminal signal is triggered:
access denied.
May 7, 2013Diversionary History
If there’s one thing everybody seems to agree about the history of zero,
it’s that it was driven primarily by notational considerations. More
specifically, zero was required to enable positional notation. The
historical record reinforces this assumption, to such an extent that it
becomes apparently obvious, and thus unproblematic.
For instance (grabbing what’s immediately to hand), John D Barrow’s
The Book of Nothing organizes its discussion of ‘the Origin of
Zero’ by relating how
… the zero sign and a positional significance when reading the value of
a symbol, are features that lie at the heart of the development of
efficient human counting systems.
Robert Kaplan, when discussing the retardation of Greek arithmetical
notation, explains:
… the continuing lack of positional notation meant that [the Greeks]
still had no symbol for zero.
As everyone ‘knows’, the Babylonians, and later
the Indians, got it right: discovering or inventing a sign for zero to
mark the empty place required for unambiguous positional-numerical values.
Zero arose, and spread, because it allowed modular number systems to
develop. Except that, conceptually, there is no basis to this
story at all.
Counting is primarily practical, so that no argument counts for much
besides a demonstration. In this case, demonstration is peculiarly simple,
especially when it is noted that nobody seems to think it possible.
Modulus-2 is convenient, but there is nothing magical about it in this
regard. A decimal demonstration, for instance, would be no more
intellectually taxing, although it would be considerably more cumbersome.
Any modulus works.
Start with the basics. The positions or places of a modular notational
systems represent powers. If we count from zero, the number of each
successive place (ascending to the left by our established convention)
corresponds to the modular exponent. The zeroth power for a single digit
number, the first and then zeroth power for two digits, the second, first
and zeroth power for three digits, and so on.
As the accepted story goes, each place must be filled, if only by a
marked nothing (zero), if the proper places, and their
corresponding (modular exponential) values, are to be read. The places
must indeed be filled.
There is no need whatsoever for a zero sign to do this.
The demonstration, then. Our non-zero modulus-2 positional system has two
signs, 1 and 2, each bearing its familiar values. The places also have
their mod-2 values, counting in sixteens, eights, fours, twos, and units
as they decline to the right. Here we go, counting from 1 to 31 (watch
carefully for the point at which the supposedly indispensable zero sign is
needed):
1, 2, 11, 12, 21, 22, 111, 112, 121, 122, 211, 212, 221, 222, 1111, 1112,
1121, 1122, 1211, 1212, 1221, 1222, 2111, 2112, 2121, 2122, 2211, 2212,
2221, 2222, 1111 …
Conclusion: the positional function of zero is wholly superfluous. The
Greeks, or anybody else, could have instantiated a simple,
fully-functional positional-numerical notation without any need to
accommodate themselves to the trauma of zero. In regard to this matter,
the history of numeracy is utterly diversionary (not just the
historiography, but the substantial history — the facts).
Perhaps this won’t seem puzzling to people, but it puzzles the hell out of
me.
ADDED: Mathematical lucidity on the topic from Alan Liddell.
Part 2.
May 27, 2013Xenotation (#1)
From Euclid’s Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic (FTA), or unique prime
factorization theorem, we know that
any natural number greater than one that is not itself prime can be
uniquely identified as a product of primes. The decomposition of a number into (one or more) primes is its
canonical representation or standard form.
Through the FTA, arithmetic attains the cultural absolute. Number is
comprehended beyond all traditional contingency, as it exists for any
competent intelligence whatsoever, human, alien, technological, or yet
unimagined. We encounter the basic semantics of the Outside (comprehending
all possible codes).
Insofar as numerical notation is constructed in a way that is extraneous
to the FTA, we remain Greek. Our number signs fall lamentably short of our
arithmetical insight, stammering deep patterns in a rough, ill-formed
tongue. Stubbornly and inflexibly, we translate Number into terms that we
know deform it, as if its true language was of no interest to us.
Yet, given only the FTA, the code of the
Outside — or Xenotation — is readily accessible. Nothing is required
except compliance with abstract reality.
A single operation suffices to count. In words, it matters little what we
call it — implexion, envelopment, wrapping, or bracketing describe it with
increasing vulgarity. For convenience, parenthesis — ‘( )’ — provides a
sign. The semiotic (or purely formal) equation ‘( ) = 0’ offers additional
economy. Xenotation needs nothing more.
One is redundant to the FTA. It begins with two, the first prime. This
introduces our sole notational principle, and operation.
Every number has an ordinality and a cardinality (an index and a
magnitude). Crudely represented, through a mixture of barbarous signs, we
can see these twin aspects as they are relevant here:
First (Prime =) 2
Second (P =) 3
Third (P =) 5
Fourth (P =) 7
By wrapping an ordinate (or index), itself a number, the Xenotation marks
a magnitude. So ‘(first)’ or ‘(1)’ = 2. One, we know, is superfluous, and
thus economized: (1) = ( ) = 0. Remembering that ‘0’ is henceforth the
sign for the initial implexion, and not the familiar (though cryptic)
numeral, we can now depart from all notational tradition. [The further
usage of decimal numerals, in hard brackets, will be strictly explanatory,
and dispensable.]
An implexion signifies the number designated by the enclosed index. Once
this rule is understood, Xenotation unfolds automatically.
0 [= 2]
(0) [= 3, the second prime]
((0)) [= 5, the third prime]
(((0))) [= 11, the fifth prime]
Compound numbers are signified in accordance with the FTA:
00 [= 2 x 2 = 4]
000 [= 2 x 2 x 2 = 8]
(0)0 [= 3 x 2 = 6]
((0))(0) [= 5 x 3 = 15]
For primes with compound indices, the procedure is unchanged:
(00) [= 7, the fourth (2 x 2) prime]
((0)0) [= 13, the sixth (3 x 2) prime]
((0)(0)) [= 23, the ninth (3 x 3) prime]
So the xenotated Naturals [from 2-31] proceed:
0, (0), 00, ((0)), (0)0, (00), 000, (0)(0), ((0))0, (((0))), (0)00,
((0)0), (00)0, ((0))(0), 0000, ((00)), (0)(0)0, (000), ((0))00, (00)(0),
(((0)))0, ((0)(0)), (0)000, ((0))((0)), ((0)0)0, (0)(0)(0), (00)00,
(((0))0), ((0))(0)0, ((((0)))) …
[That’s probably more than enough for now]
June 4, 2013Yule Quiz (#1)
Has the hangover worn off yet? Then identify the pattern:
(Ibdhjad)
Aj, Baa, Caf,
Dia, Et, Fam,
God, Hagg, Ink,
Jaeo, Kul, Los,
Moan, Neom, Ohmga,
Padbbha, Qush, Rakht,
Sigol, Tactt, Umneo,
Vfisz, Wumno, Xikkth,
Yodtta, Ziltth.
Recognizing the Anglossic alphabetical names is far too rudimentary to
count as a solution. The question is: What is the embedded numerical
regularity?
The best way to demonstrate understanding, without revealing the key, is
to submit alternative (but consistent) versions of any three consecutive
signs.
Note: While Qabbalistic adepts get no credit for correct answers,
well-crafted terms from any source will be appreciated. Furthermore,
Outside in accepts no responsibility for any hazardous or harmful
xenocosmic occurrences resulting from calculations associated with this
quiz.
December 27, 2013Yule Quiz (#2)
If 2013 = aaaazzzz aaazzaazzazz aazz, what is 2014?
December 27, 2013Cloven
This proposed public sculpture in Oklahoma should
bring
people
together
…
(Click on image to download your soul to Satan enlarge)
January 8, 2014Alphanomics
Urbanomic‘s old (2007?)
qabbalistic engine — the ‘gematrix’ — is
back on line after a
petulant disappearance. Only the AQ numerization is recommended — the
alternatives are degenerate digital randomizations. (Concentrate upon the
intact numerizations — the digitally-reduced values are usually too
rudimentary for significant insight.)
To immediately understand a number of things (simultaneously) type in the
Law of Thelema:
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
This tool, and more especially the method — or specific
gematria — it incarnates, is the consummation of rigorous
Anglophone Occult Tradition. While its value is almost certainly lost on
the moderns, it is
once again freely available to be used.
It is now an Open Secret.
ADDED: DARK ENLIGHTENMENT = 333. (This needs to be here for reference.)
June 17, 2014Crabalism
Hurlock has a (tumblr)
blog.
Even without any content yet it … says something.
ADDED: … and another
brand new blog start-up, with a highly-intriguing title (and a taste for
experimental T-shirt design).
July 11, 2014Open Secret
NRx has been accused, by its friends more than its enemies, of talking
about itself too much. Here XS is, doing that again, not only stuck in
‘meta’ but determinedly pushing ever deeper in. There are some easily
communicable reasons for that — an attachment to methodical nonlinearity
perhaps foremost among them — and then there are cryptic drivers or
attachments, unsuited to immediate publicization. These latter are many
(even
Legion). It is
the firm assertion of this blog that Neoreaction is intrinsically arcane.
We do not talk very much about
Leo
Strauss. Once again,
there are some obvious reasons for this, but also others.
Steve Sailer’s recent Takimag
article
on Strauss makes for a convenient introduction, because — despite its
light touch — it moves a number of issues into place. The constellation of
voices is complex from the start. There is the (now notorious)
‘Neo-Conservatism’ of Strauss and his disciples, or manipulators, and the
other conservatism of Sailer, each working to manage, openly and
in secret, its own peculiar mix of public statement and discretion. Out
beyond them — because even the shadowiest figures have further shadows —
are more alien, scarcely perceptible shapes.
Sailer’s article is typically smart, but also deliberately crude. It
glosses the Straussian idea of esoteric writing as “talking out of both
sides of your mouth” — as if hermetic traditionalism were reducible to a
lucid political strategy, or simple conspiracy — to ‘Illuminism’,
politically conceived. In the wake of its Neo-Con trauma, conservatism has
little patience for “secret decoder rings”. Yet, despite his aversion to
the recent workings of inner-circle ‘conservative’ sophisticates, Sailer
does not let his distaste lure him into stupidity:
We haven’t heard much about Straussianism lately due to the unfortunate
series of events in Iraq that befell the best-laid plans of the sages.
But that doesn’t mean that Strauss was necessarily wrong about the
ancients. And that has interesting implications for how we should read
current works.
As the approaching 20th anniversary of the publication of
The Bell Curve
reminds us, the best minds of our age have reasons for being less than
wholly frank.
Sailer is not, of course, a neoreactionary.
Not even secretly. (That is what his article is primarily about.) He
believes in the public sphere, and seeks to heal it with honesty. Any
pessimism he might harbor in regards to this ambition falls far short of
the dark scission that would hurl him over the line. His differences with
the Straussians are, in the end, merely tactical. Both retain confidence
in the
Outer
Party
as a vehicle for policy promotion, with the potential to master the public
sphere. The question is only about the degree of deviousness this will
require (minimal for Sailer, substantial for the Straussians).
When adopted into Neoreaction, the HBD current has an altogether more
corrosive influence upon attitudes to the public sphere, which is
understood as a teleologically cohesive (or self-organizing), inherently
directional, and (from ‘our’ perspective) radically hostile social agency.
To baptize the public sphere as ‘the Cathedral’ is to depart from
conservatism. It is no longer possible to imagine it as a space that could
be conquered — even surreptitiously — by forces differing significantly
from those it already incarnates. It is what it is, and that is something
historically singular, ideologically specific, and highly determined in
its social orientation. It swims left, essentially. The public sphere is
not the battlefield, but the enemy.
As NRx seeks to navigate this hostile territory, it is tempted
ambiguously, by a strategic Scylla and Charybdis. A populist lure drags it
towards a reconciliation with the public sphere, as something it could
potentially dominate, while a contrary hermetic politics guides it towards
the formation of closed groups (whose parodic symbol is the locked twitter
account). Both options — ‘clearly’ — are a flight from the complexity of
the
integral
open secret. They both promise a relaxation of semiotic stress,
through collapse of multi-level communication into a simplified frank
discourse, whether implanted within a redeemed public culture, or
circulated cautiously within restricted circles. The problem of hierarchy
would be extracted from the signs of Neoreaction, through conversion into
a public or private object, rather than working them incessantly from
within. What is underway would become (simply) clear.
Such clarity cannot happen. The alternative is not an (equally simple)
obscurity. NRx, insofar as it continues to propagate, advances by becoming
clear and also unclear. Double writing scarcely scratches the
surface. It realizes hierarchy through signs, continuously, in accordance
with Providence, or the Occult Order of nature (the
OOon). To assume
that the author is fully initiated into this spectrum of meanings is a
grave error. It is the process that speaks, multiplicitously, and
predominantly in secret, as it spreads across an open, publicly-policed
space.
This post is now determined to slip the leash, and leap into the
raggedness of thematic notes. The Open Secret intersects:
(1) Cathedral censure, in the case of
HBD most
prominently, but also everywhere that
fired–up
SJWs make a fight. War is deception, which makes frankness a tactic.
Deontological honesty is inept. Anonymity is often crucial to survival.
(Demands that all enemies of the Cathedral boldly ‘come out’ are
ludicrously misconceived.) Camouflage is to be treasured.
(2) Crypto-technologies are central to any NRx concerns emphasizing
practicality. (The idea that classic Moldbug
attention
to the prospects of ‘crypto-locking’ is a joke, it itself thoughtless.)
Urbit — an Open Secret — could quite
easily be more NRx than NRx, just as Bitcoin is more An-Cap than
Anarcho-Capitalism.
(3) The intelligence services have been
under-theorized, and perhaps even under-solicited, by NRx to date. At the
lowest, i.e. most publicly accessible — level of discussion, this is quite
possibly a virtue. At more cryptic levels of micro-social and analytical
endeavor, it is almost certainly an inadequacy. People trained to keep
secrets have to be interesting to us. Subtle questions of subversion
arise.
(4) “Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself, O God of Israel,
the Saviour.” — Let’s try not to be simple-minded.
September 27, 2014On Difficulty
From the moment of its inception, Outside in has been camped at
the edge of the
‘reactosphere’ — and everything that occurs under the label ‘NRx’ is (at
least nominally) its concern. As this territory has expanded, from a
compact redoubt to sprawling tracts whose boundaries are lost beyond misty
horizons, close and comprehensive scrutiny has become impractical.
Instead, themes and trends emerge, absorbing and carrying mere incidents.
Like climatic changes, or vague weather-systems, they suggest patterns of
persistent and diffuse development.
Among these rumblings, the most indefinite, tentative, and unresolved tend
to the aesthetic. Without settled criteria of evaluation, there is little
obvious basis for productive collision. Instead, there are idiosyncratic
statements of appreciation, expressed as such, or adamant judgments of
affirmation or negation, surging forth, draped in the heraldic finery of
the absolute, before collapsing back into the hollowness of their
unsustainable pretensions. As things stand, when somebody posts a picture
of some architectural treasure, or classical painting, remarking (or more
commonly merely insinuating) “You
should all esteem this,” there is no truly appropriate response
but laughter. If there were not a profound problem exactly in this regard,
NRx would not exist. Criteria are broken, strewn, and dispossessed,
authoritative tradition is smashed, infected, or reduced to self-parody,
the Muses raped and butchered. That’s where we are in the land of the
dying sun.
An associated, insistent murmur concerns communicative lucidity. This is
not solely a question of aesthetics, but in its quavering groundlessness,
it behaves as one. It arises most typically as the assertion — initially
unsupported and subsequently undeveloped — that
clearly, ‘unnecessary obscurity’ should be condemned.
The culpability of this blog as a vortex of
euphoric obscurantism can scarcely be doubted, so addressing the challenge
approaches a duty. Setting aside, for the moment, the social and
cryptographic
aspects of the
topic, as well as the specific critique of human cognition for its
intolerance of real
obscurity
(comparatively articulate from my perspective, if obscure from others),
this post will
directly pursue the
question of language.
This question is first of all about trust. Even in this, initial regard,
it is already difficult. As a complex tool, there are things it
can do, and things it cannot do. Speaking approximately, and uncertainly,
if it is directed towards those undertakings which have, over eons,
exercised selective pressure upon it — meeting the social necessities of
paleolithic human groups — then an assumption of its inherent
trustworthiness is at least plausible. To extend such an assumption
further is sheer recklessness. Nothing in linguistics supports the wild
hypothesis that this code, developed piecemeal for primate social
coordination, is necessarily adequate to modern cognitive
challenges. Grammar is not sound epistemology. Mathematicians have
abandoned ‘natural language’ entirely. To presume that language
allows us to think is a leap of faith. Radical distrust is the
more rigorous default.
To promote ‘clarity’ as an obvious ideal, needing no further
justification, is a demand that language — as such — can be trusted, that
it is competent for all reasonable communicative tasks, and ‘reason’ can
be defined in a way that makes this assertion tautological (such a
definition is eminently traditional). “I give you my word” language is not
predisposed to deception — no thoughtful investigator has ever found
themselves in concurrence with such a claim. Vocabularies are retardation,
and grammar, when it is more than a game, is a lie. Language is good only
for language games, and among these trust games are the most irredeemably
stupid.
There is no general obligation to write
in order to attack language, but that is what Xenosystems does,
and will continue to do. Language in not a neutral conveyor of infinite
communicative possibility, but an intelligence box. It is to be counted
among the traps to be escaped. It is an Exit target — and exit is
difficult.
October 4, 2014Occult Xenosystems
The swirling delirium at the new
/pol/ is at least 80% noise, but it
includes some real intelligence (in both senses of the word), and not
solely of a
comedic variety. The
sheer dirtiness of its signal makes it a powerful antenna, picking up on
connections and information sources that tidier discussions would dismiss
as pollution. This makes it especially suited to conspiracy theorizing,
both inane and exotic.
While noting the importance of correction for narcissistic bias, which
operates through selective attention, memorization, and (from commentators
here) communication, it seems as if this blog is referenced
disproportionately by the most extravagant NRx-sensitive /pol/
conspiracists. That is quite understandable.
Occult
philosophy,
secrecy,
crypsis, codes, and
obscurity are
insistent themes here. Xenosystems is inclined towards arcane
cultural games. It identifies cryptographic
developments as keys to the
emerging order of the world.
The primary philosophical task of this blog is to disturb unwarranted
pretensions to knowing, in the name of a
Pyrrhonian
inspiration. In this regard, confusion, paradox, and uncertainty are
communicative outcomes to be ardently embraced.
For the purposes of this post, an
exceptionally exotic /pol/ suggestion provides the opportunity to make a
comparatively compact and simple point. The occasion is a web of
conjecture weaving together Xenosystems and
The Order of Nine Angles (O9A, ONA, or
omega9alpha). In addition
to the (highly-recommended) link just provided, the relevant Wikipedia
entry is
also extremely stimulating.
Xenosystems micro-ethics is uncomfortable with soliciting belief
(or invoking expectations of trust). It is necessary to note at this
point, therefore, that the following remarks are not designed to appeal to
credence, but merely to add testimonial information, to be accepted or
rejected at will. In the world we now enter — of “sinister dialectic” —
declarations of honesty are utterly debased. However, for what (little) it
is worth, these are the facts as I understand and relay them.
The O9A is not entirely new to me, but it is not a gnosis I have studied,
still less deliberately aligned with. The few hours of reading I have
undertaken today is by far my most intense exposure to it to date. What
little I have learnt about David Myatt has not attracted me to him as a
thinker or political activist, despite certain impressive characteristics
(his intellect and polyglot classicism most notably). With that said:
(1) Many convergent interests are soon apparent between
Outside in and the O9A (as well as a not inconsiderable
number of divergences).
(2) ‘We’ are both (I think) inclined to dismiss the pretensions of the
individual intellect and will, which makes the possibility of connections
around the back impossible to dismiss in a peremptory fashion. As
one /pol/ ‘anonymous’ remarked: “why so sure that ONA would be the deepest
layer, instead of just a japeful ruse?” Real connections, influences, and
metaphysical roots are obscure.
(3) O9A is fascinating.
The point of this post (finally) is taken directly from Aleister Crowley.
In the compilation of his qabbalistic writings entitled
777 (Alphanomic equivalent of
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law, although that is
surely coincidental), he makes some introductory remarks on the topic of
hermeticism. My copy of the book is temporarily misplaced, so I shall
gloss them here.
A secret, of the kind relevant to hermeticism, is not something known
and then hidden as a matter of decision, but rather something that by
its very nature resists revelation. Crowley proceeds to mock charlatan occultists who treat the numerical
values of the Hebrew letters as secret information, to be revealed
theatrically at some appropriate stage of initiation.
Let whatever can now be known, be known, as lucidly and publicly as
possible. Only that is truly hermetic which hides itself. Reality is not so destitute of intrinsically hidden things — of
Integral Obscurity — that we need to replenish its coffers with our tawdry
discretion.
Whatever might exist, in the way of an occult bond between
Outside in and the O9A, it is not one that anybody is
keeping secret. To emphasize the point, I am going to include the
alpha9omega document in the Resources roll here, not as the
acknowledgement of a connection, but as a clear statement that
this stuff is not a secret. It is, however, about secrecy — and
that is interesting.
ADDED: Is
there something in the water?
October 11, 2014Cosmic Order
Outside in is unable to defer to the authority of
this
abominogram, whose degeneracy, contamination, and incompleteness are
self-evident, but it seemed worth putting up for reference purposes.
(Clicking on the image opens a new
cosmic door window, where
one additional click brings up an expanded version.)
In the end, there’s only one map of cosmic
order worthy of unconditional trust:
(Assuming only that decimalism is an occult revelation of
Nomo Gnon.)
November 18, 2014Quote note (#135)
From Erasmus, Moriae Encomium, which can be found
here, but adopted in this case as translated by Sir Edmund Whittaker (in his
A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricty, Volume I,
p.3):
There are innumerable niceties concerning notions,
relations, instants,
formalities, quiddities, and
haecceities, which no-one can pry into, unless he has
eyes that can penetrate the thickest darkness, and there can see things
that have no existence whatever.
Appealing enough, already, in its light-footed philosophical modernism, it
becomes utterly sublime when tackled — inversely — by the
method
of ‘hyper-literal anagogy’. It then suggests a Miltonic recovery of
ancient philosophy, undertaken — with blind irony — by modernity itself.
December 1, 2014MMXV
While schematic qabbalism is the most rigorous science to which the
transcendental intellect can aspire, symbolic qabbalism — even that in the
subtlest Neo-Lemurian vein — merits the very deepest distrust.
Nevertheless, in this interim period of near-complete exile from
Cyberspace, there has been plenty of opportunity for exploratory
calculations. For what little it is worth, 2015 radiates a peculiarly
distinctive signal, suggesting an emphasis upon the deep state, maritime
civilization, and mathematical zero, with a dominant oceanic affect. This
is not an agenda set to provoke obvious resistance at
Outside in.
(Tomorrow is likely to be socio-technically challenging, but I’m hoping to
sleaze back towards functionality from the start of the new year.)
December 30, 2014Chaos Patch (#43)
(Open thread.)
Still link-deprived, so here’s a puzzle (strictly optional):
(1) Every Roman Numeral has an
Alphanomic value
(corresponding to contemporary alphanumeric position, or to alphabetical
position +9).
(2) Are there any consistent Roman-Alphanomic numbers?
(3) The Roman-Alphanomic difference can be conceived as a disequilibrium,
and the puzzle is an attempt to restore a zero-divergence through a
syntactically well-constructed Roman number. Key, to this method: I (+17),
V (+26), X (+23), L (-29), C (-88). Values above C are surely unusable: D
(-487), M (-978).
(4) My preliminary conclusion, based on a weakly formalized application of
the method above, is that there is no correct solution. The only candidate
I could find is the badly constructed CLXVIIII (= 169), which — of course
— syntactically collapses to CLXIX (= 117 in alphanomics).
(5) This is a specimen being collected for my qabbalistic quagmires
compilation.
ADDED: On an even more incidental note (at this stage), the Time Spiral
Press site is a malnourished
formless mess at this stage, but it’s finally on a track to become
something.
ADDED:
So
the solution is X-Civ (XCIV, 94, multiple interpretations available, among
which various lurid options). You can’t make this stuff up.
ADDED:
More
productive work. (No idea how I missed CXXIX (it’s a thing of simple
beauty)).
January 4, 2015What’s in a Name?
Dubai’s Marina Torch, today:
Much more
here.
February 21, 2015Pi Day
Friday the 13th today, and Pi Day tomorrow. Horror is cold-shouldering me
a little, so
here‘s a piece of pi:
3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164062
862089986280348253421170679821480865132823066470938446095505822317253594081
284811174502841027019385211055596446229489549303819644288109756659334461284
756482337867831652712019091456485669234603486104543266482133936072602491412
737245870066063155881748815209209628292540917153643678925903600113305305488
20466521384146951941511609… (If you’re still hungry, there’s some more
here.)
Can I give a small anecdotal … life’s too short, but
that’s a fragment of ‘Pilish’
apparently:
Many poems have been written in pilish – “piems”, of course – and
there’s even a pilish novel 10,000 words long.
Since π was proven to be transcendental (by Ferdinand von Lindemann in
1882) we’ve known that squaring the circle is impossible. Everyone reveres
Euler’s identity (e^iπ + 1 = 0), but there’s more: “Pi is also interesting
to mathematicians because it crops up frequently in areas with no obvious
connection to geometry or circles. For example, if you toss a coin 2n
times, and n is very large, the probability of getting equal
numbers of heads and tails is 1/√(nπ).”
… since pi is an irrational number … the digits in its decimal
expansion will never repeat in a periodic pattern. It is also likely
that pi is “normal”, meaning that each of the digits from 0 to 9 will
appear in the expansion exactly one tenth of the time. Pi’s digits seem
to mimic randomness exceptionally well, meaning that – theoretically, at
least – it should be possible to find any number string somewhere in
pi.
Since Gödel it has been understood that any possible statement can be
coded as a number, which means that everything that could ever be said
lurks somewhere in π. Conceive a library, of arbitrary vastness, and its
entire contents — perfectly ordered — are virtually pre-existent within
it. π implicitly anticipates every religious doctrine, philosophy,
scientific theory, epic novel, and poem — to restrict ourselves to its
loftier regions. There is nothing mathematics can ever discover that the
single sign π does not already tacitly whisper to us, if only we could
read it with absolute intelligence. To taste a speck of infinity tomorrow
would be appropriate.
ADDED: Joseph Shipley’s
31 digit Pilish poem —
But a time I spent wandering in bloomy night;
Yon tower, tinkling chimewise, loftily opportune.
Out, up, and together came sudden to Sunday rite,
The one solemnly off to correct plenilune.
(31 is, of course, the qabalistic key of Thelema — as well as the first
two digits of π — but that is no doubt a coincidence (or perhaps two)).
ADDED: Why Pi matters. (Tau gets an early mention.)
March 13, 2015The Iron Law of Six
The Zhouyi (or
Yijing) identifies ultimate cosmic law with the order of time — which is the
eternal in change. It consists of hexagrams — figures of six lines —
because decimated duplication produces the endlessly recurring sequence of
six phases, in the cycle 1, 2, 4, 8, 7, 5. As explicitly acknowledged in
the Ten Wings of the Zhouyi, this six-step cycle is
diplo-triadic. It consists of two trigrams, or twin triangles, with each
set of pairs summing through addition to the number nine. Notably,
exponential growth and rigid cyclicity are integrated in the abstract
model of time. The ‘byte’ (2^3) still defers to its final authority in
advanced modernity. That is the robust, arithmetically indisputable
foundation of The Iron Law of Six.
“If you would promote a law, first submit yourself to it.” There is
perhaps no antidote to moralism sounder than this. How, then, to make of
The Iron Law of Six an overt, private fatality?
Consider
this
(utterly crude) convergence upon the same problem. In an age of
unprecedentedly scrambled attention, “deep projects” tend to get lost.
Nothing that is not built into the order of time will get done. (Some very
relevant neuro-psychological background can be found
here.)
Submission to the order of time is thus indispensable to any real power of
execution. That time repeats is the only basis upon which to build
anything new.
Formulated in the mode of
Time: A User’s Guide, this is the Outsideness protocol:
(1) Acknowledge time as that which repeats each day, in a double triad,
providing six slots. Submission to the Law necessitates that each of these
slots will receive explicit attention.
(2) Initiation, proliferation, and compression compose a triad that
instantiates a ‘Darwinian’ machine. Apply it to everything.
(3) Compile a list of everything that you are serious about doing.
Economize by cycling it through the triad. Recognize, realistically, that
anything which cannot be allotted a slot — i.e. a systematic call upon
daily attention — will most probably not ever happen. If your work
requires that you work on more than six projects at a time, which is to
say some series of projects that cannot be bundled, culled, trimmed, and
synthesized in rigorous conformity with The Iron Law of Six, then you are
almost certainly attempting the impossible.
(4) Make a rhythm of innovation. To each thing you would have made real, a
Time Shrine.
(5) Seximalize your life with extraordinary harshness (if you would
achieve extraordinary things).
(6) Only then, when diplo-triadic order exercises sovereign authority over
your every moment, confidently promote The Iron Law of Six.
March 31, 2015Abstract Thought-Crime
What Peter Thiel has to say is almost always interesting, but it’s what he
doesn’t say that is the real treasure. The species of abstract horror that
is abstract thought-crime is
turned
into a special zone of expertise:
Everyone has ideas. Everyone has things they believe to be true that
other people won’t agree with you on. But they’re not things you want to
say. … You know, the ideas that are really controversial are the ones I
don’t even want to tell you. I want to be more careful than that. I gave
you these halfway, in-between ideas that are a little bit edgier. […]
But I will also go a little bit out on a limb: I think the monopoly
idea, that the goal of every successful business is to have a monopoly,
that’s on the border of what I want to say. But the really good ideas
are way more dangerous than that.
Here’s the Biblical application:
I think for the most part, it was necessary for Christ to be very
careful how he expressed himself. It was mostly in these extremely
parabolic, indirect modalities, because if it had been too direct, it
would have been very dangerous. […] It was John Locke, in
The Reasonableness of Christianity, said that Christ
obviously had to mislead people, since if he had not done so, the
authorities might have tried to kill him. … That’s the Straussian
interpretation of Christ. It didn’t end in a particularly Straussian
way, but it was at least true for most of his ministry.
In the Q&A, asked about his 2009 Cato Unbound
article
(a crucial catalyst for the Dark Enlightenment), he remarks — more than a
little evasively:
Writing is always such a dangerous thing. […] I remember a professor
once told me back in the ’80s that writing a book was more dangerous
than having a child because you could always disown a child if it turned
out badly. […] You could never disown anything that you’ve written. The
Cato Unbound article, it was a thousand-word essay. It
was late at night. I quickly typed it off. I sent it to someone else to
review, who said, “There’s nothing controversial in here at all.” … My
retrospective was that if you actually ask someone to double-check
things for whether or not it’s controversial, you already deep-down know
that you should double-check it yourself. … My updated version on it
would be that — I made the case that I thought democracy and capitalism
weren’t quite compatible [*facepalm*] — the updated version I would give
is it’s not at all clear that we’re living in anything resembling a
democracy. …
Rarely has anything been unsaid with comparable agility.
April 7, 2015Transistors of the Gods
(A labyrinth of mad-circuitry for the rabbit-hole deprived.)
If you only slightly suspect that the origin of Silicon Valley is
plugged into an occult matrix buzzing with UFOs and ceremonial magic, then
this — still unfinished — series won’t be less than suggestive (1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9).
(Via.)
From the conclusion of Jack Parsons’ (linked)
scripture:
The choice is me or Choronzon.
I await you in the City of the Pyramids.
(Quite.)
May 11, 2016Dark Energy
The occult
force of cosmic
disintegration accounts for roughly 70% of everything that is strongly
suspected to exist. Breaking things up pleases Gnon at least twice as much
as holding them together. The party of
unity
has a steep slope to climb.
(Nova
does dark
energy.)
September 26, 2016
BLOCK 5 - HYPERSTITION
Scrap note (#9)
I’m back in the Chinese West, this time with the family (nuclear plus
mother-in-law). As I write I’m on the train from Lanzhou to Dunhuang,
fabulously renowned for its Buddhist caves. It’s
re-bonding-with-the-tablet time, then, which is a mechanical challenge –
mostly due to incredibly dysfunctional cursor control, which I know
everyone is on tenterhooks to hear more about …
… so, 24-hours later, there’s not much in the way of gripping travel news
to report. We’re heading to the Mogao Caves tomorrow, which should be
worth talking about. Up to now it’s been desert and donkey-meat and the
general weirdness of the Chinese West, but with a mind oozing uselessly
like gritty mud, it doesn’t add up to anything remotely profound. Perhaps
later.
The thing I want to introduce tentatively here, because it has to be
re-introduced more thoroughly quite soon, is hyperstition, and in
particular; hyperstitional method. I’m getting the strong sense that there
are things it simply won’t be possible to do otherwise. (I’ll try to
explain.)
There are a variety of plausible ways to
explain the basic ‘idea’ of hyperstition. The most pertinent of these,
here, right now, is that it is an attempt to systematize the philosophical
usage of fiction. By framing a philosophical discussion within fiction,
rather than within an assumed consensual understanding, it is advanced as
a perturbation of disbelief, rather than a modification of belief. How to
proceed philosophically from the artificial background assumption that
everything is a lie? That’s the hyperstitional question (whose Pyrrhonian
and Gnostic resonances are immediately evident).
Practically speaking — which it always should be — the fork taken is to
formulate thoughts within the ‘voice’ of a synthetic (fictional) subject
instead of propounding them in the name of a privately and socially
accredited one. The preliminary hypothesis: greater experimental
diversity of thinking is to be expected when it is conducted in the mode
of ‘what might be thought’ — comparatively free of ego-commitment and
first-order social games. (Orwellian ‘thought-stop’ is the confirmation of
this hypothesis from the other side.)
Beginning from a fictional self has a Buddhist slant, to be discussed at
some later point. Being in Dunhuang is what makes it worth mentioning at
all.
While all of this is relevant to the problem under development as
‘sub-cognitive fragments’ (i.e. how to think), the return to the question
of hyperstitional method, to me, has mostly come in the other direction.
My philosophical retardation is infuriating, but my literary blockage is
utterly intolerable. There is nothing of which I am more sure than that
abstract literature, or metaphysical horror fiction radically
pursued, is the undertaking which claims me, but there is equally nothing
that calls forth more titanic forces of procrastination. The obstruction,
quite obviously, is ‘me’ — and hyperstition suggests a solution to that,
or at least, a method directed decisively towards a solution. Find the way
to speak on behalf of that thing which can say what you cannot (or
something like that).
What hyperstition has yet to fully do (I still believe), is to close the
loop, subsuming itself definitively into fiction. It has to become a
story, rather than a theory of stories, before it can be said to have
attained consistency.
April 10, 2014Gyres
This
excitable but nevertheless broadly convincing application of the Strauss
& Howe generational
theory
of historical cycles to recent news headlines is a reminder of the
inevitability of story-telling. (Outside in has touched upon this
particular tale
before.)
The Cathedral is above all a meta-story, a secular-revolutionary
usurpation of the traditional Western ‘Grand
Narrative‘
(inherited from eschatological monotheism), and its survival is
inseparable from the preservation of narrative credibility. As it frays,
alternative stories obtain a niche. The Strauss & Howe account of
rhythmic historical pattern is highly competitive in such an environment.
Events subtracting from the plausibility of progressive expectations are
exactly those that strengthen omens of an impending cyclic ‘winter’.
Winter is coming, as popularized by Game of Thrones, might have
been designed as a promotional tool for The Fourth Turning.
Anarchopapist begins his most recent
musings
on ‘The Neoreactionary Project’ by asking “What is a meme?” It is a better
starting point, in this context, than the question:
How correct are Strauss & Howe? Memetics subsumes questions
of factual application (as aspects of adaptive fitness), but it reaches
beyond them. The successful meme is characterized by aesthetic features
irreducible to representational adequacy, from elegance of construction to
dramatic form. Even more importantly, it is able to operate as a causal
factor itself, and thus to produce the very effects it accommodates itself
to. A society enthralled by its passage through the winter gate of a
fourth turning would in very large measure be staging the same theatrical
production its ‘beliefs’ had anticipated.
Among the greatest memetic strengths of the
Strauss & Howe story is its remarkably concrete sense of timing. It
offers prospective dates, within a tight predictive range that alternative
narratives are hard-pressed to match, in keeping with its claim to have
identified historical ‘seasons’. The anticipations of contemporary
Marxist, Singularitarian, or Eco-catastrophe story-lines are unmistakably
nebulous in comparison. (Notably — NRx has, as yet, no formulated theory
to support dated predictions at all.)
Among the most significant memetic latch-functions is a confidence graft.
Any cultural virus communicating a definite sense of
what is coming finds host tolerance relatively easy to obtain.
The history of (precisely dated) millenarianism attests to this
overwhelmingly, with the rider that vulnerability to subsequent
falsification is necessarily entailed. To some definite extent, such
sensitivity to empirical contradiction also has to apply in the Strauss
& Howe case, despite the complicating factors of contagious
auto-confirmation already noted.
As S&H prophecy in the book:
Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate
in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, Civil War, and
twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II. […] The risk
of catastrophe will be very high. The nation could erupt into
insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to
authoritarian rule. If there is a war, it is likely to be one of maximum
risk and efforts — in other words, a TOTAL WAR.
It is this admirably determinate forecast, in combination with the ominous
content, that lends this work its purchase upon the apocalyptic
imagination of our time.
Gathering ‘Fourth Turning’ expectations are part of the memetic landscape
in which NRx finds itself, and thus an involved, strategically-relevant
fact. A consistent and compelling story about them would be valuable — and
almost certainly, in the relatively short-term at least, increasingly
valuable.
ADDED: Double doom
June 18, 2014Ebola-Chan
This
was my gateway into the horror-tracts of Ebola-Chan. It was immediately
obvious that something of great significance was happening.
Upsetting (for those still nursing shreds of humane moral intuition):
certainly, and deliberately.
Meaningful: beyond question, and massively.
The ebola
trendline
is currently
exponential. Richard Fernandez places the phenomenon in its proper intellectual
context. Whatever else the outbreak may be — a human (and economic)
catastrophe
for West Africa, a
threat
to the
West
— it is also a revelation (or ‘apocalypse’ in the strict sense). It’s a
Khan Academy
demonstration
for slow and reluctant learners. Such things lend themselves to
spontaneous religious interpretation.
It wasn’t supposed to look like this:
The (rough) coincidence with the death of 4chan is — in itself — a topic
of abysmal fascination. I’m kicking that can for the moment. There’s much
on
this precursor
discussion thread of relevance.
For now, some preliminary indications as to why this might be thought to
matter (immensely), in revisable order of gravity:
(1) Readers of John Michael Greer are prepared for socio-economic decline
to be accompanied by an eruption of religious
abnormality. For
anybody with a taste for irony (a crucial epistemological disposition, in
the opinion of this blog), there is much nourishment to be found in the
Ebola-Chan phenomenon. Most prominently, despite — and more probably
because of — the
shocking
racism
propelling it, Ebola-Chan opens a cross-cultural
plane
of
communication
completely absent from the ‘responsible’ Western responses to the plague.
It makes sense of ebola in a way that is far closer to the sensibility of
its target populations than the lofty medico-globalist pronouncements of
legitimated authorities. Ebola-Chan packages the outbreak for a
folk-religious
response
— of exactly the kind it is being met with in the villages it (or ‘she’?)
ravages.
(2) Ebola-Chan is a demoness of communication, not only across cultures
(West Africa, America, Japan …) but also between cultural and biological
patterns of virulence. The ‘meme’ — as a more-or-less exact analog of the
gene — is unleashed on 4chan in sympathy with the virus. It
connects with the biological contagion, in various ways, through relations
of copying (transcription), prolongation, and promotion. Ebola-Chan is a
crossing.
(3) As memotechnics, Ebola-Chan condenses an accumulated stock of
practical heuristics. Its genre is, most immediately, that of the
chain-letter — conveying a message pre-adapted to spreading.
Copy me, or be punished (stricken). It’s darkly humorous, cruel,
ironical, and self-reflective, but at the level of memotechnics none of
this undermines anything. If “I love you Ebola-Chan” spreads as a joke —
it still spreads. The Nigerian email
scam
industry
attests to the inter-cultural consistency of this memotechnic plane.
(4) Ebola-Chan is already operating as a factor in Fourth-Generation
Warfare. It complicates the pacification
efforts
of the ‘international community’ in unpredictable ways. Once again,
certain peculiar cultural
formations
are waiting to connect with it. At this stage it is difficult to reach
even the preliminary stage of a lucid analysis, but clearly the
memotechnic militarization of a medical emergency is an obstacle to the
smooth evolution of established management procedures. The WHO is not
ideologically equipped to publicize its intervention within the context of
an occult religious
race
war.
(5) To what extent is Ebola-Chan an avatar of globalized
Helter
Skelter? Surely not to no extent at all?
(6) As 4chan is pushed ever deeper into the shadows, it seems reasonable
to assume that its practical alliance with memotechnic chaos will also
deepen. In this respect, Ebola-Chan is the Yin to the Cathedral’s Yang — a
complement, fed by subterranean conservation laws. Much prophetic density
accompanies such an analysis. If it is an end, it is no less the beginning
of an end.
ADDED: Ebola-chan,
ebola-chan,
Ebola-Chan,
ebola-chan,
Ebola-Chan is Love~ …
ADDED: Ebola-Chan on
Facebook.
ADDED: WaPo takes a look. “But even if the mods do remove [Ebola-chan
threads], Ebola-Chan may have done her damage. Much like the disease
itself, now that she’s out there, there’s no controlling her.”
ADDED:
Rituals to Nurgle: Ebola Is Coming (Styxhexenhammer666).
September 20, 2014Ontological Reflexion
Urban Future is merely scavenging irresponsibly around the edges
of the
Speculative
Realism
meltdown, attracted by turbulence, and connected tenuously to some of the figures
involved. The greatest advantage of such detachment is that it allows for
a free framing of the issues at stake, and these are becoming truly
fascinating. The battle over the New Ontology (aka ‘Speculative Realism’)
is spiraling into the question:
does it — itself — actually exist?
Pete Wolfendale
summarizes
the problem clearly:
The essence of [Ray Brassier’s] point is simply that the mere existence
of Speculations (which is explicitly labelled ‘A
Journal of Speculative Realism’) isn’t sufficient to establish SR’s
existence, and that declarations of the latter’s existence from within
its pages don’t change this. This is part of a broader argument, but if
you want to understand it you’re going to have to read the postscript
yourself.
There’s a lot I could say in response to Jon’s claim that SR obviously
exists, and that to say otherwise is either trivially false, or worse,
contradicts my claims about the collapse of the SR blogging community.
There’s no doubt that there are people who self-describe as speculative
realists, and that there are CFPs, conferences, and art exhibitions
where it gets referenced liberally. However, if all SR means is a
renewed concern with metaphysics in the Continental tradition, then
there’s no clear reason why it doesn’t include people like Deleuze,
Badiou, Zizek, Stengers, and the like. If nothing else, this is amply
demonstrated by the extent to which these figures (and people influenced
by them) form the most natural interlocutors of those who count
themselves as speculative realists. What is it about the work of
Meillassoux and Grant that warrants them being categorised separately
from these other figures, as somehow more appropriately listed beside
Harman than any of the others, other than the fact that they attended a
workshop together in 2007? There are others who have come to the SR
label later, such as those interested in Whitehead, Latour, and various
strands of so called New Materialism, who genuinely have more in common
with OOP/OOO than these figures, but if SR is taken to index these
commonalities, then it has by far more to do with OOP than any of the
other work it was originally supposed to index (hence the inevitable
slippage to ‘SR/OOO’).
The claim that SR doesn’t exist is simply the claim that there isn’t
any distinctive philosophical common ground indexed by the intersection
of Meillassoux/Harman/Grant/Brassier. However, this is entirely
compatible with the claim that at one point it looked like there might
be, and that this promised a potentially new philosophical trajectory
that would be genuinely distinct from extant trends. The sense in which
SR can be said to have ‘died’ is simply the sense in which this promise
proved to be false. This sort of thing happens. It’s precisely what
Badiou tries to capture in his account of fidelity, wherein one simply
has to commit oneself to the existence of an Event despite its
occurrence being indiscernible. Sometimes the fidelity pays off, and
sometimes it doesn’t.
This is, therefore, a true existential question. The sensational
micro-sociological trappings might have been designed to distract from the
ontological performance underway. SR has become an
examplary object (within a reflexive loop that has surely to be
considered unintentional). We might be tempted to conceive it as a
self-dramatizing ontological contingency, or an object-oriented
occurrence.
We find ourselves invited to entertain the question:
Could this thing or event that appeared to have been happening,
determined by a distinctive revival of metaphysical speculation about
the nature of reality (and in fact ‘the being of beings’), in reality
never have been anything at all?
Rephrased with additional vulgarity: Could auto-disontologization turn out
to be a thing? Any imaginable answer will teach us something strange.
Note: The provocative preface to Pete Wolfendale’s
book is
available
for perusal online. (I say ‘provocative’ mostly because it has
demonstrably provoked.)
ADDED: Ontological Argument, def.
1. The theological assertion of existence as a real predicate.
2. The 2014 Internet circus around Pete Wolfendale’s preface to
Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon’s New Clothes.
October 15, 2014Kek
Of which it is
said (I do not
pretend to grasp more than a pitiful sliver of this): “Pepe has guided
humanity since time immemorial. This is Heqet, the frog-headed Ancient
Egyptian goddess, symbol of life and protector on the journey to the
afterlife. She guided the ancient Egyptians who transcended normie-ism to
a land of poorly drawn dick-girls and the dankest of memes. A little known
fact is that while normies evolved from the famously social monkeys, those
destined to browse dank memes alone in dimly-lit rooms evolved from
another species who also prefers dark moist habitats, namely the frog.”
The name ‘Kek’
appears to have
crossed into Cyberspace by odd coincidence (and not — originally — as a
name at all). Orcish, Korean, and Turkish languages were all supposedly
involved. ‘Kek’ was an encryption of ‘LOL’ within certain
World of Warcraft communication channels. The Turkish ‘Topkek‘ (a cupcake brand) was a secondary coincidence. No one seems to
have been invoking the chaos
deities
of Ancient Khem at that point.
The introduction of Pepe — a manifest frog-entity avatar — is shrouded in
even greater
obscurity. The memetic phenomenon was (again, apparently) convergent, or
coincidental — an entirely independent frog plague (צְּפַרְדֵּעַ, Exodus 7:25–8:15).
One more coincidence: Outbreak of the ‘cuck‘ meme. (Kek is
Kuk.) It’s a
definite ‘barbarous name of
evocation‘ in
retrospect, but mostly still connected around the back. Kek, Kuk, cake,
cuck, might sound like consistent croaking, but tidy cultural cladistics
are difficult to identify. (A
sense
of ethno-religious crisis on the Alt-Right is one indispensable contextual
element.)
That short
Wikipedia entry is worth citing in full:
Kuk (also spelled as Kek and
Keku) is the deification of the primordial concept of
darkness in
ancient Egyptian religion. In the Ogdoad
cosmogony, his
name meant darkness. As a concept, Kuk was viewed as
androgynous, his
female form
being known as Kauket (also spelled as
Keket), which is simply the female form of the word
Kuk. […] Like all four dualistic concepts in the Ogdoad, Kuk’s male form
was depicted as a frog,
or as a frog-headed
man, and the female form as a
snake, or a
snake-headed woman. As a symbol of darkness, Kuk also represented
obscurity and the unknown, and thus
chaos.
Also, Kuk was seen as that which occurred before light, thus was known
as the bringer-in of light. The other members of the Ogdoad are
Nu and
Naunet,
Amun and
Amaunet,
Huh and
Hauhet.
I’m heavily reliant on the commentariat here to sort all this out.
The proximal trigger:
ADDED: Pepe (Via). (See also Xolare in the comments below.)
ADDED:
April 19, 2016The Frog Chorus
From Aristophanes’
The Frogs.
Frogs (off stage): Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax,
Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax!
We children of the fountain and the lake
Let us wake
Our full choir-shout, as the flutes are ringing out,
Our symphony of clear-voiced song.
The song we used to love in the Marshland up above,
In praise of Dionysus to produce,
Of Nysaean Dionysus, son of Zeus,
When the revel-tipsy throng, all crapulous and gay,
To our precinct reeled along on the holy Pitcher day,
Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax.
Dionysus: O, dear! O, dear!
now I declare
I’ve got a bump upon my rump,
Frogs: Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax.
Dionysus: But you, perchance, don’t care.
Frogs: Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax.
Dionysus: Hang you, and your ko-axing tool
There’s nothing but ko-ax with you.
Frogs: That is right, Mr. Busybody, right!
For the Muses of the lyre love us well;
And hornfoot Pan who plays on the pipe his jocund lays;
And Apollo, Harper bright, in our Chorus takes delight;
For the strong reed’s sake which I grow within my lake
To be girdled in his lyre’s deep shell.
Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax.
Dionysus: My hands are blistered very sore;
My stern below is sweltering so,
‘Twill soon, I know, upturn and roar
Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax.
O tuneful race, O pray give o’er,
O sing no more.
Frogs: Ah, no! ah, no!
Loud and louder our chant must flow.
Sing if ever ye sang of yore,
When in sunny and glorious days
Through the rushes and marsh-flags springing
On we swept, in the joy of singing
Myriad-diving roundelays.
Or when fleeing the storm, we went
Down to the depths, and our choral song
Wildly raised to a loud and long
Bubble-bursting accompaniment.
Frogs and Dionysus: Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax.
Dionysus: This timing song I take from you.
Frogs: That’s a dreadful thing to do.
Dionysus: Much more dreadful, if I row
Till I burst myself, I trow.
Frogs and Dionysus: Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax.
Dionysus: Go, hang yourselves; for what care I?
Frogs: All the same we’ll shout and cry,
Stretching all our throats with song,
Shouting, crying, all day long,
Frogs and Dionysus: Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax.
Dionysus: In this you’ll never, never win.
Frogs: This you shall not beat us in.
September 21, 2016Moloch vs Kek
4chan, as always, is
asking the
serious questions.
(Via.)
November 4, 2016
BLOCK 6 - FICTION
Duzsl (fiction)
Below the break, the author’s prelude to Nemo Duzsl’s (immensely long)
Cthellish Chronicles. There’s no particular reason why it should
interest people here, but in case anybody finds it amusing …
[Warning: vulgarity, extreme decadence, and spiritual decay]
Doom Brewer
Book One of the Cthellish Chronicles
by Nemo Duzsl
Authorial Prelude. The Syndrome
It would be extravagantly philosophical to claim that everything was a
lie. Better, then, to explain why all relevant information became
systematically unreliable. A firm footing on the path that follows
requires at least that much.
One conclusion, in particular, has to be stated clearly, at the start.
It exceeds human powers to endure a radically inexplicable life.
Between chaos and a convenient fiction there can be no real hesitation.
The ominous fork into darkness can appear real enough, but the decision
against it has typically been made long before.
Despite the confusion, my expedition into Hell was well-prepared. A decade
spent wandering through the labyrinth of the Syndrome had taught me the
importance of method. Baked in an involuntary distrust, I had become adept
at meticulous filtering and recording, at weighing probabilities,
stripping dubious interpretation from the bare crags of fact, and
remarking on things with minimal prejudice (which meant merely, lying to
myself as sparingly as possible). This was not a matter of decency, but of
sheer survival. My procedures had to be robust, sophisticated and
critically tested. They were rigorously tempered by vertiginous decades
spent clinging to mazy precipices, tilting into the abyss. When it comes
to the deep descent, therefore, what truth there is to tell will surely be
told, if only in fragments, and impurely.
Paradoxically enough, it was the syndrome and its deranging deceptions
that ignited a torch for me, sputtering at first, but later with a hard,
steady flame, ensuring that the infernal path ahead would be illuminated.
But the roots of the syndrome, its soil, nutritive threads and patterns of
early growth, are, of necessity, recessed into deeper obscurities. The
reasons for that will become obvious enough. Because I first encountered
the Syndrome in an age of deluding innocence, by the time I saw the
importance of systematic correction, titanic masses of grinding error were
already in motion, propelled onwards inertially and implacably.
Yet, without a preliminary account of the Syndrome, nothing can make
sense. The narrative that begins here – while befogged and erratic in its
initial stages – explains things that demand explanation. Although far
from irresistibly convincing, it is realistic in its essentials, even if
certain details have been corrupted. What justifies this point of
departure, in the end, is less its minute accuracy than its overall
suggestiveness, for that is the way of the world it introduces.
My case rests ultimately on this: were it not for the account that
follows, there would inevitably be another, far more misleading one.
***
Because true names can get you killed (or sued) you will find no evidence
of The Devil’s Deal casino, an establishment which occupied a
comparatively modest slot on the Las Vegas Strip in the late autumn of
1999. It would not take supernatural efforts, however, for anyone with a
city map of the period, along with some elementary investigative skills,
to identify the real model of the Double D, and to ascertain its present
status for themselves.
Casual tourist-gamblers had always ignored and shunned the place,
subliminally repelled by the atmosphere of vague dilapidation that had
characterized it almost from the day of opening, but it had nevertheless
built a solid enough reputation for itself among the Strip’s least
flamboyant visitors. This drifting population of dedicated,
chance-hardened players was attracted by its understated devotion to
minimal frills, high-stake, Omaha hold ‘em poker. The ambience of shabby
neglect only added to its appeal, serving as a subtle social filter, a
mark of discretion, and a prolonged act of dust-hushed homage to the grave
gods of fortune.
Nelson Brewer, the proprietor of the Devil’s Deal, was a man who had
always taken enormous efforts to conceal his tracks. He readily exploited
his contacts in the media to inhibit reportage, falling back upon
blackmail or finely-judged threats when bribes proved insufficient. He was
not beyond instigating entirely false reports to mystify and embarrass
pursuers. His influence extended into most of the official agencies
responsible for record-keeping and the compilation of legal evidence,
ensuring that even the most dogged and incorruptible investigators found
themselves foundering in deceit. Despite all of this, I would eventually
come to learn a very great deal about him.
He had built his gaming empire on Mississippi riverboats during the
Depression years. Respected, even feared, for his impassivity and
killer-instincts, ‘Granite Face’ Brewer amassed an early fortune at the
tables. He progressed from player to operator upon taking possession of
his first boat, following the legendary 36-hour poker session that
bankrupted ‘River King’ Joe Hammond in November 1933.
The subsequent triple suicide of Hammond and two prominent Memphis
business magnates triggered a prolonged police investigation, but no
evidence of foul play or clear homicidal motivation was ever uncovered.
Despite the absence of formal charges, a macabre aura enveloped Brewer,
fed by persistent rumors that garishly married criminality with occultism.
When he extended his gaming business to the Las Vegas Strip in the early
1950s, the name he selected for his casino was a gesture of defiance
pitched against his blackened reputation, mixing irony, provocation and
resignation in proportions that accorded with some unreadable private
recipe.
***
Did Nelson Brewer, his name or his story, mean anything to me when this
episode began, as I stepped into the Devil’s Deal on a sultry late-summer
evening in 1999? The answer to that question was lost, perhaps
irrecoverably, in the tumult that now impends. In my artificial memories I
push open the saloon-style doors once again, and abandon my original or
natural life, whatever it had been, to perish in the forgotten, pitiless
heat, outside.
It can’t have taken more than a few hours to dissipate my inheritance.
Certainly, it was gone, replaced by a hollow euphoria, delicately veined
with directionless bitterness. Something less than self-hatred, it was
nevertheless a functional proxy. Tendrils of weariness tugged me
downwards.
“You obviously need something to wake you up,” said the girl standing next
to me.
In her early 20s and exceptionally pretty, she had moldavite-green eyes
and hair the color of glistening oblivion, cut fashionably short. She was
wearing a little red dress.
“What’s the point,” I replied. “I’m done.”
“There’s still at least one more game to play,” she said, smiling
irresistibly. “You’ll be surprised. It’s hardly started.”
I folded. My nondescript fortune was finished. Let the recycling begin.
She led us over to a table near the bar and ordered a couple of cokes.
***
A man was already seated at the table, maybe 30 years old, dressed in
black t-shirt and jeans, drinking a Dos Equis straight from the
bottle. He seemed entirely hairless, except for a perfectly-trimmed
Satanist soul-patch. His eyes were hidden behind reflective shades,
despite the interior gloom. Swirling hermetic tattoos covered his arms. If
he wasn’t a drug-dealer, no one deserved to be.
“Hi Zach. We’re looking for sin,” she told him. “Two caps.”
“No problem.”
“On tick, OK?”
“Cool,” he assented, with surprising complacency.
A waitress arrived with the cokes, ignoring the conspicuous transaction in
process. No one seemed remotely conscious of the law.
Zach fished two pharmaceutical capsules from his pocket, identical green
and black thetas, placing them carefully on the table.
“Synistreme,” he murmured, languorously caressing each syllable. “The
biz.”
The Girl in the Little Red Dress popped one in her mouth, washing it down
with a swallow of coke. Then she passed the other to me. I copied her.
I opened a fresh pack of unfiltered Camels and passed them around. They
both took one. We all lit up. No one spoke for a few moments.
“When I was working as a professional torturer,” Zach said eventually, “we
had to treat this stuff with great caution. ‘Epistemol’, they called it, a
‘psychic plasticizer’ or ‘cognitive dehabituation agent.’ Superficially
speaking, it was the last thing an interrogator needed. You know the
adage, when people are being tortured they’ll say anything to make it
stop. The difference on Epistmol is that they’d believe it, believe
anything. It facilitated radical suggestibility. ‘Brain-washing sauce’ was
one common description.” He took a long swig of beer and ordered a new
bottle with a silent hand-signal.
“But actually,” he continued, “if used properly it could be invaluable.
Resistance to torture depends upon a motivating narrative. If that could
be dismantled and replaced, the patient would open up effortlessly. Let’s
say you’re a fanatical jihadist, and suddenly, rather than having your
testicles slowly toasted into charcoal by a filthy zippo-wielding infidel,
you find yourself engrossed in conversation with your Sheikh, or the Angel
Gabriel, or God. The resistance is gone. Pop! You’ll say anything. End of
problem, right?” he asked, invisible eyes locked on mine.
“Right,” I guessed.
“Wrong,” he countered with a humorless laugh. “The problem’s hardly
started.”
Hardly started … again. I’d begun to get a bad feeling about
that.
“There’s something I have to show you,” Zach said. “Place your hand on the
table, palm down, fingers apart. Yeah, that’s it,” he added, as I followed
his instructions.
He reached down into his boot and pulled out a vicious-looking combat
knife, with a vulcanized black rubber handle and serrated blade. He lifted
the weapon above his head, holding the pose for perhaps a second, then,
with shocking speed, plunged it downwards onto the back of my hand.
Everything occurred too quickly for me to react. The descent was arrested
at the last moment. There was a slight sting. A droplet of blood oozed
from a nick behind my middle knuckle.
“Zach baby,” said the waitress affectionately, from behind the bar. “You
know I hate it when you do that.”
“It’s science,” Zach growled. “But if you understood that you wouldn’t be
working for six bucks an hour plus tips.”
“Asshole,” she mumbled, without rancor.
***
Time had begun to multiply backwards as the synistreme took hold. Zach’s
knife trick had restored a nucleus of focus, amidst the dispersion. As my
mind wrapped itself around stabbed-hand re-runs, it squirmed through
variations on the immediate past, flashing agonies and devastating
injuries, before recoiling into the unmutilated present that annulled
them. The self-protective reflex I had missed bounced uselessly through my
intoxicated nerves.
“It’s like a mantra with you guys, isn’t it?” I ventured. “Hardly started. At first I thought you were saying ‘it’s only just begun,’ but now it’s
sounding more like a hard reboot, a crash relaunch.”
“You’re getting ahead of yourself,” said the Girl in the Little Red Dress,
not unkindly. “We’re here now, aren’t we?”
It was true that space had newly emphasized itself, simultaneously
thickened and clarified, as if transubstantiated into a pure liquid
medium. Lines of contour escaped from the boundaries of solid mass,
deconstituting edges to drift into abstract explorations of geometric
possibility. A calm ecstasy without attribution reorganized the room.
The luminous sensorium was an ultra-thin film, I realized, an intricately
folded sheet of multi-modal information, floating depthlessly upon the
surface of a vast dark expanse.
Zach ignored our interruptions.
“Politics morphed into metaphysics,” he continued, resuming his thread.
“Our questions had to change. Our interrogations escalated. The world was
at stake: the nature and meaning of the world.”
He took a deep swallow of Dos Equis. I passed the Camels around
again. Everybody took one. Zach lounged back in his chair, gaze turned
upwards, apparently fixated upon some single definite spot beyond the low
ceiling.
“The past was a lazy assumption we couldn’t afford any longer. Even the
jihadis understood that, the smart ones, the ones we dealt with, by the
time we’d done with them. Our squabble was beginning to seem like a very
shallow affair, when compared to the things that started to emerge from
beneath the deep cover. And then, just as the new threat-scape maps were
coming together, the final absurdity rolled in, the investigations, the
hearings. We were accused of driving people insane …”
He disappeared into obscure corridors of recollection. Glasses clinked at
the bar. Curses filtered over from a nearby poker table. An audio channel
drifted onto the wavering drone of the air-conditioning and settled there.
At the edge of my perception, the black tattoo swirls flowing down Zach’s
arms were writhing into legibility. Weakly-encrypted biographical
recordings – of fights, drug deals, and long-abandoned girlfriends –
twisted and sleazed through decorative motifs, until they settled into the
sigils of occult summonings and the echelon glyphs of the Torturers’
Guild.
No one spoke for a long, smoke-shrouded moment.
“Did you?” I asked eventually.
“Drive people insane?” He hesitated, uncharacteristically. “That charge
seems hopelessly … misconceived.”
He leant forwards, locking my image into twin black mirrors.
“Take your case, for instance. When we began to unearth your hidden
identity, your contacts, your Neolemurian agenda, that entirely other,
secret life, were we pushing you into madness? Or is ‘madness’ just a word
we use when tripling the locks on forbidden doors?”
***
The meaningless references began shaping themselves into something else.
What had always previously seemed to be a fundamental structure of
existence suddenly gave way, crashing into unspecified distress. It felt
like falling and my stomach lurched.
The Girl in the Little Red Dress leant in towards me.
“You’re drowning in names,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “But
it’s OK. None of them matter right now.”
I was remembering far too much.
As the world quaked, my hands clamped onto the table, resisting a
sensation that should have been nausea, but was actually something far
less familiar.
“Sumatra,” I mumbled.
“That’s right,” Zach confirmed. “All those twisted stories. The diagram.
The vault. Hot embers from the Barker Program. Signal from the darkening
galaxies. Clicking alien numbers like static electricity and a flood of
savage words you never wanted to understand. Corpse-littered jungles.
Time-wars. Did we do that to you? I don’t think so.”
A spiderish mechanism had been activated in my brain to synthesize
information. As it wove, senseless microparticles coalesced into fragments
of meaning, and then into intersecting storylines. The spinning machine
worked in complete indifference to my volition. I would have wanted it to
stop, or at least to slow, if it had mattered what I wanted. Instead, I
tried to edge away from it, shifting attention further out, clinging to
the immediacy of space and sensation.
Dan Barker had already been a legend, confined somewhere securely
off-grid, but the ripples from his work still spread, frightening people.
Soon I would be precisely reminded. That was inescapably obvious. Shapes,
patterns were coming back, clicked together by the machine. I could
already smell the jungle. The outline of missing years thickened …
“How old do you think I am?” I asked.
“Twenty-three,” Zach answered, correctly.
“So how can it have been remotely possible for me to spend years working
on some kind of advanced cryptoproject in the Indonesian wilderness? I’ve
never been to Indonesia. I don’t know anything about codes. This is all
such …”
“… total bullshit,” he agreed. “Chill. It’s nothing. What do I care?”
“I never met Barker. I don’t even know what he looks like.”
“Sure. Forget it.”
“Sclater’s Lemuria hypothesis has been obsolesced by plate tectonics, and
Sumatra is too far east. Why would anybody describe themselves as
‘Neolemurian’? It doesn’t make any sense.” But that was a stretch.
***
As the pattern spread across the underside of my thoughts, I was – in fact
— beginning to understand the adjective ‘Neolemurian’ with grating
clarity. It denoted the first literal counter-culture.
A mentor and close friend of Barker’s, Archaeo-Ethnographer Echidna
Stillwell, had built the foundations, or excavated them. She theorized
that a sunken cultural matrix explained the peculiar correspondences
between religious ideas, myths, games and counting practices distributed
across a vast area of South and East Asia. She proposed a model to connect
and explain these extensive commonalities, based on a specific
comprehension of decimal numeracy and its meaning, elegantly compacted
into an arithmetical structure that she called ‘the Numogram’. Worse
still, I had begun to trace this figure on the table, unconsciously,
treacherous digits doodling in spilt coke and ash, pairing the Pylons so
they added to nine, then webbing them together through elementary digital
relations.
Zach gestured with a nod of the head and a spectral grin, drawing my
attention to diagram emerging in front of me. I froze, my moistened finger
suspended in the swirling molten vortex of three and six.
“As the camouflage netting is torn away, it all comes rushing back,
doesn’t it?” he said, twisting the softly-spoken words like a sadist’s
dagger. “In layers.”
I suppressed a childish impulse to scrub out the diagram and retreat into
preposterous denial. Instead, I forced myself to complete it, closing the
Hex or circuit of time, mother of the Yi Jing and
Vedic trigunas, then daubing the line of ultimate descent that
dropped its knotted skein through the Gate of Shadows into the lower abyss
or Chasm of Nyx, the infernal plummet-path that is marked and masked by
the date 1890.
Repulsed by this undeniable performance of the inconceivable, my thoughts
slid into crisscrossed congestion, mired in the thickening silt of
unintelligible events, defeated by the compressed impossibility in
process. Reason was drowning in synistreme darkness and a piteous noise,
something between a moan and a gurgle, escaped my throat.
Zach laughed.
“Don’t fight it,” he said. “It’s futile. The syndrome can’t be outwitted.
What you’re becoming won’t be stopped. Let the bastion burn.
Vae victis.”
***
As the grip of cognition broke, long-hidden powers of perception were
twisting free. Impulsive multitudes, without order or shape, came swarming
out of the conundrum. Like a tide of rats released from a ruined fortress,
vague torrents swept over the charred beams of intelligibility and heaps
of false obstruction, fleeing into unshackled intensities of delirium.
Vivid hallucinatory threads hatched and seethed from the ashy streaks,
ramifying into endless, indecipherable tangles of qabbalistic implication.
All around us, faces flickered through fish features and zombie flesh.
“Today, the twelfth of May, was the Old Halloween,” said the Girl in the
Little Red Dress, as if from a distant place. “The Christians built it on
top of the Roman festival of the dead, Lemuria, when the restless ghosts
or larvae, the lemurs, were propitiated by time-tested rituals based on
the number nine. The Romans devoted three non-consecutive days in May to
Lemuria, the ninth, eleventh and thirteenth. The last of these dates was
converted into All Saint’s Day by Pope Boniface IV, in the year AD 609.
Halloween remained a spring festival for over a century, until the ancient
rites of Lemuria had been thoroughly absorbed, its signs and sorceries
supplanted.” As if emerging from a trance, she turned towards me, smiling
sweetly. “But I guess you knew that. Any chance of another smoke?”
I passed the packet around again. My lungs ached and the after-taste of
the coke was sickening me. I needed a real drink, or several, but
searching through my pockets turned up nothing but loose change. Somewhere
during the earlier proceedings I had parted company with my wallet.
There were a number of ways this divorce might have happened – a large and
growing number. I distinctly remembered sliding my wallet into the pot at
the end of the last game, along with what remained of my cash. But then I
also recalled, with absolute retrospective certainty, a collision,
muttered apology, and confusion of limbs, as a hand slipped into my
jacket. Although, of course, I had discarded my wallet before entering the
casino, emptying it of bills and tossing it, along with my ID, into a
trash can, three blocks down the strip.
There was no ready solution to this puzzling hyper-abundance of truth.
Memory had lost none of its detail, but the uniqueness of what must once
have been a dominant storyline was now obliterated by the proliferation of
alternatives. At first, trivial particulars had multiplied into subtly
differentiated varieties, but it had not taken long for the hypothetical
mode to supplant every pretender to authentic antecedence. Somewhere, deep
in the sprawling jungle of alternative pasts, my previous life was no
doubt faithfully conserved, but I could think of no way to identify or
isolate it. A powerful current streamed steadily backwards, from the
present moment to the innumerable tributaries that might conceivably have
led to it. It was less amnesia than Amazonia.
“OK,” Zach said decisively. “It’s time. We need to get you back into the
game.”
With a tilt of the head he focused us upon the far end of the room. A
gaunt elderly figure was being seated at an empty table by two
lounge-suited assistants.
“Mister Brewer is ready for us,” he explained. “Let’s go.”
***
Zach rose and led us across the room, past groups of absorbed poker
players, to the corner gaming table where the old man waited to greet us.
His hand shake was surprisingly firm. Zach received an affectionate slap
on the shoulders, then left without comment, weaving back through the
players towards the bar area, where new customers were already waiting.
We seated ourselves in a triangle around the circular felt-topped table. A
seething silver glyph-stripped Numogram was embedded into the smooth green
surface. Brewer’s attendants stood behind him, arms folded, systematically
scanning and re-scanning the room.
“I hope Mister Cardiac has been looking after you well,” Brewer said.
“Care for a drink? Cigar? In fact, I insist.” He beckoned to a nearby
waiter, soundlessly communicating his request through a cryptic series of
finger signs, in conformity with a precise, settled code. I wondered idly
whether ‘Cardiac’ was a testament to amphetamine consumption, or perhaps a
compression of ‘card-sharking maniac.’ Persistent synistreme
hallucinations stroked the edges of the world into electric streaks. The
soft mutterings of chance throughout the cavernous space tightened, then
crystallized, until they delineated an intricately-structured, sprawling
maze, built from chipped echoes.
Brewer’s craggy face was clean shaven, dominated by a prominent hawk-like
nose and sharp blue eyes. His thin lips curled upwards slightly, in an
inscrutable private smile. He was dressed in cowboy-dandy style — white
Stetson and jacket, starched checked shirt with bootlace necktie,
immaculately pressed jeans and soft leather boots. A generous tumbler of
whiskey sat on the green baize in front of him, alongside a neatly stacked
pile of cards.
***
“My grandson has a great work to accomplish,” Brewer began, without
further preliminaries. “By the time he fully embarks upon this
undertaking, I will be dead.”
He lifted the pack of cards carefully and passed it across to the Girl in
the Little Red Dress.
“Take a look,” he said.
She cut and re-stacked the pack, then flipped over the top card and placed
it on the table in front of her, considerately angled for our joint
inspection. It was not a conventional playing card at all, but rather a
name, or business card, marked for ‘Sandra Dee,’ complete with an
Abyssoft commercial logo, contact details, and the title Senior
Communications Representative.
“Don’t get trapped in it,” Brewer said. “That’s not yours, at least not
yet. It’s a test-run.”
Tumblers of amber liquid and a box of slender cigars arrived.
“I’d like to propose a toast, to lemur conservation,” Brewer jested,
raising his glass to clink rims above the inner void of the Hex. I took a
grateful sip of the spiritous liquor, savoring the sublimation of peaty
fluid into neural fire. It was an excellent single malt, Lagavulin, I
guessed, and probably an old one. Brewer passed us our cigars,
ceremonially, then ignited them with a steady hand, using an ornate
mechanical device that strung a distinct tang of raw petroleum through the
spreading aroma of Caribbean tobacco. Beyond the perimeter of sense, lofty
intelligences gathered.
“Your turn for a taste,” Brewer said, passing me the cards. “It means
nothing yet. We’re just opening our eyes, in the pre-dawn.”
“And if it’s a female name?” I asked.
“Then you’ll have disconfirmed everything I have ever learnt,” he
answered. “But it won’t be.”
I took a card and laid it next to Sandra Dee.
“Todd Blair,” I noted redundantly, as the others leaned in to read it.
Crowds of recollection broke through a rotten door. I remembered the name
on my mother’s lips, called out innumerable times, in a multitude of
intonations. “Todd, what are you doing?” “I hope that’s not what I think
it is Todd.” “Todd, it’s time to go.” Todd’s life rushed to inhabit me:
the car crash that killed his father and scarred his face, his schoolyard
belligerence, his first job flipping burgers for weed money …
The name burrowed inwards, determinedly, working to attach itself to the
roots of my destiny, like a parasitic larva. It felt wrong.
“That’s not me, is it?”
“Most probably not,” Brewer admitted, smiling thinly. “Let’s find out.”
***
He restored the pack and shuffled it expertly, then passed it to each of
us in turn to cut and re-cut. His hands hovered over the Numogram Pylons,
slicing through the fragrant clouds of cigar smoke as if dowsing for
obscure signals. An almost palpable concentration hardened the features of
his face, subtly animated by the inaudible mouthing of an elaborate
invocation.
With a conjuror’s dexterity he fanned the cards onto the table in a long
even curve.
“Take one,” he said to the Girl in the Little Red Dress. “Your fate awaits
you.”
As she settled upon a card and drew it out, I wondered vaguely why we were
accepting this imposition with such utter passivity, but outrage refused
to come. I drew deeply on my cigar, watching intently.
“Mary Karno,” she said, as she turned it over and absorbed its oracle.
“Yes, that’s right.”
Something like relief washed across her face.
“Mary,” she murmured to herself. “Mary Karno. That’s me,” and then, after
a slight pause, “My book …?”
“I have it here,” Brewer responded, passing her a canvas bag. “It’s
unfinished, of course. There’s a letter from the publisher in there
somewhere. They’re excited about what they’ve seen so far.”
She took the bag and extracted a block of printed sheets, densely
annotated with red ball-point amendments. She flipped through the pages,
sliding into frictionless recognition.
“Too much blood, torture and perversion for my taste, of course,” Brewer
continued drily. “But I’m guessing it’ll be huge.”
***
“And you are?” he asked me pointedly.
My hand wavered above the cards, suddenly chilled, and frozen. The
oppressive weight of the moment fell upon me with its full force, crushing
the air from my lungs, until I gasped with the resigned terror of a
cornered prey animal.
“Do it,” whispered Mary, encouragingly. “It will be OK.”
“I don’t think so,” I answered, my voice straying beyond the edge of
control. “It won’t be OK. At all.”
“It could be rough,” Brewer agreed. “But this is the place you’ve reached,
you wanted it, and now it’s yours. There’s no evading it, not for long. A
trapped, scared, pitiful creature has reached the end of its flight.” He
drew a finger across his throat. “Best to finish it. Begin over.”
“You know, don’t you?” I challenged him, as a wave of inconsequential fury
rolled over me. This was what it felt like to be absolutely cheated. It
was something new, and horribly intriguing. “This whole game, the theater
of uncertainty, it’s all a feint. Your expectations are confident,
precise, and you have extremely good reasons not to share them …”
“You’re wasting everybody’s time,” he interrupted, impatiently. “You know
it’s going to happen. That’s why you hate it. And beyond that,” he leant
towards me, his voice soft, intense, and only superficially hostile, “you
chose it. You wrote it. I’m just directing your play. So take the card,
Mister …?”
“Duzsl,” I said, completing his request. “Nemo Duzsl. What kind of batshit
crazy off-planet fucking name is that?”
But I knew it was mine.
***
“So, now we know who you are,” Brewer said, smiling sympathetically, his
expression flavored with notes of relief, pride, and gratitude. “It will
be tough …” he repeated, no longer muting the strain of prophetic
authority, but even emphasizing it, as if graciously clambering down to us
from the cloud-swaddled towers of providence, “… but educational. You can
see the necessity, I’m sure. You have to be hardened, forged.”
“I can’t see anything but toxic fog,” I grumbled. Yet, strangely, the
sense of asphyxiating oppression had begun to lift. Perhaps I even
returned his smile, although in a way that was unconvincingly twisted.
“To tough luck!” I proposed, raising my glass.
“Perfect!” said Brewer, responding to the toast. He looked abominably
pleased, as if savoring my definitive submission.
Mary clinked glasses, too, but with a slight hesitation that hinted at
reluctance. Her smile expressed nothing more than clumsily redecorated
melancholy.
“Down we go,” she mumbled approximately, her words clinging to the edge of
inaudibility, as she took a minuscule sip, scarcely exceeding a sample of
vapor. The descent she had announced was evidently not a gulp of
fire-water. This should have concerned me, a lot. It upset me a little.
“There are things that you’ll need,” she said quietly, turning towards me,
and reaching into her shoulder bag. Her face was subtly tragic. I wanted
to comfort her. It was stupid.
“Yes, yes,” Brewer interrupted, irritated. “In time, nothing’s rushing us.
The work is done.” Then, in a tone softened to the point of insincerity,
as if obliquely apologizing for his brusqueness, he repeated: “Nothing’s
rushing us.” It sounded mesmeric, and for an instant I heard these words
as a cryptic mantra that had been chanted ceaselessly over the course of
hours, years, and aeons, although it had been ‘nothing rushes us’ before.
I was drifting into it, when hooked back by the word ‘… cigar’, slanted to
the interrogative.
Brewer was asking me an inane question.
“The cigar?” I replied, idiotically.
“Are you enjoying it?”
I had not, in actuality, much noticed it. Now I realized that my throat
itched, although not intolerably. A column of ash, the length of an
intermediate phalanx, drooped from the end of my cigar. Doubting my
ability to reach the ashtray successfully, I released it – with a gentle
tap – to fall onto the floor, where it exploded softly into formless dust.
“Superb,” I half-croaked. It was. The smoky flavors were complex and
richly textured, evoking the peripheries of fragrant jungles, tropical
humidities, and enthralled sunlight.
“These were given to me by a very special friend,” Brewer explained. The
pace of his utterance promised a story, most probably a lengthy one. I
relaxed backwards into my chair, and noticed Mary doing likewise. She took
a sip of the Lagavulin – a real one. The time tremors had relapsed into
quiescence, with only occasional muffled shudders still perturbing
concentration. The work is done, I remembered. Things had
secretly shifted, on the outside, somewhere beyond the edge of the world.
***
“Where’s the edge of the world, Nelson, think on that, and head there,
always head there. That’s what he used to say. I must have heard those exact words from
him a thousand times. He doesn’t say it now, but only because he doesn’t
need to.” Brewer paused to drink, nearly emptying his tumbler, and then to
inhale on his cigar, pulling the smoke deeply into his lungs, as if
attempting to saturate his cells rather than his senses. He exhaled an
aromatic cloud. A semi-cough fractured the next syllables: “Carlos. Carlos
Colón: that’s his name. A direct descendant of Christopher Columbus, he
insists. It’s important to him. He’d say,
you know Nelson, Cristóbal didn’t abolish the edge of the world. He
wanted us to look for it in the right place. It was always funny, that intimacy, as if they’d been discussing things
together in some taberna just the week before. I’d be tempted to
laugh, shake him by the shoulders, tell him: ‘for Christ’s sake Carlos,
you have no idea what he wanted.’ Not that I did, or would. It wasn’t just
some ridiculous piece of nonsense, you see, not at all. It was serious —
truly and totally serious. It still is serious. But you get that, right?”
He broke off, as if expecting confirmation. It would have been absurd to
nod – what did I know? Instead I looked to Mary, who said, with quiet
firmness: “Oh yes, it’s serious.” I tacked on a fraudulent “sure.”
Brewer seemed satisfied as he retreated into his memories. He signaled for
more whiskey, a gesture that seemed to communicate
bring the bottle. His eyes wandered through the cigar smoke, as
if seeing something else.
“Not that I’d have called him that – Carlos — not to his face, he wouldn’t
have it. There were too many Carlos Colóns. It was unacceptable to him.
Call me 2Cs, he said. I didn’t get it immediately. ‘What, you
mean like, to seas unknown?’ I asked.
That’s right amigo, he replied immediately,
to seize the unknown, to seize some pretty chica’s ass. We were
still filthy young fools – this was before the Depression, way back, late
1920s. We had nothing but spunk and some undeveloped smarts.”
He tilted the bottle towards Mary, who shook her head, then to me. I let
him pour another finger of whiskey into my tumbler. He added two fingers
to his own. He scanned his casino methodically, almost mechanically, as if
seeing it for the first time.
“I was already on my way to this – cards – it was what I was good at, and
Carlos helped me out with that. Once there’re two of you – a pair – lots
of things become possible. You’re a team, and if people don’t realize
that, you have them. He was really good at that, especially the
bad stuff. He could walk into a crowded room and have everybody worked out
within minutes. He gave nothing away. They came to call me ‘Granite Face’
eventually, but I learnt that from him. It was years before I came close
to what he could do, see, and hide. His face told whatever story he
wanted. He could be anybody. He was strict, too. We’d never kid about
together in any place that we were working.
A secret team, that’s una máquina, he’d say.
Two friends joking around in public? – Losers.
“He worked with me on the cards, but it didn’t mean anything to him. If we
were alone, sitting at the table after a game, he’d ask:
where’s the edge Nelson, is it here? ‘Sure it’s here,’ I’d reply.
No, it isn’t here. That’s all he’d say.
No, it isn’t here. It would drive me mad. ‘So where the fuck is
it? It’s here, right here.’ Slapping the table top, you know, maybe I’d
riffle through a pile of banknotes, in his face, obnoxiously. ‘See. This
is working. This is where things are happening.’
No, it isn’t here, always that, just that, sadly, defiantly. No
one could bully him. I had no idea what he was looking for.”
***
“When the breakthrough came we were out of the game for a while, hiding
out in a small town down by the coast, near the border. There was a bar
there that we’d made our own, through sheer intensity of custom, and we
were the only patrons that night, sitting together at a flimsy circular
table, somewhere into our third bottle of mezcal. We were deeply drunk.
“How long can you stare at tables and not see? Carlos asked,
suddenly. Not this again. Not now. ‘See what?’ I had already slurred,
reflexively, the robot at work, you know. This seemed to enrage him. His
voice was climbing to a howl:
Think, Nelson, fucking think enough to see the obvious fucking
thing. He even reached over and slapped me across the head, hard. It almost
knocked me from my chair. I’ve no idea why I didn’t hit him back, or what
would have happened if I had. Instead I groped down through swirls of
booze-shattered sensation to the table top, soaking up the scratches and
flaking varnish and stains. ‘It’s flat?’ I ventured.
“It was like flicking a switch. He erupted in an outburst of shouts and
wild, theatrical gesticulations, waving his arms in the air as he cried:
At last, at fucking last, Jesus fucking Christ, at last … It was
stunning, stupefying. My first impulse was to search for some kind of
question, for additional information, but fortunately I suppressed it.
Instead I began to think, and it was then that I realized that I hadn’t
even been trying before. To think, I mean. It hadn’t even occurred to me
to think, at all. That was already to cross a line, seeing that
stupid unreflective obstinacy, which I had been. I still remember the
moment – the instant – vividly, perfectly, but who knows? It
seems exact: the threads of smoke, the smells of sweat and mezcal, the
quality of the light, and then the tension of that alien, inner machine,
unexpectedly starting up. I don’t ever want to forget it. I might have
waited for ever to start thinking – that had always been his point, his
maddening stubbornness. Now, something had switched over. It came to me
then, suddenly, out of nowhere, the critical step. Flatness. It had to be
some crazy shit about Christopher Columbus. I was drunk, and irritated,
and my left ear was ringing from the slap, and I two-thirds wanted to just
finish with this bizarre conversation. But the other third had set out
somewhere, and it wasn’t going to stop.
“’These aren’t your edges, are they?’ I said, running my hands along the
sides of the table. I was quite confident about it. It wasn’t really a
question. He just smiled – beamed, actually. Go on amigo, was all
that he said. But now I wasn’t sure that I could. My thoughts struggled to
advance. It was a swamp, or a jungle. If you came to the end, to what had
been believed to be the end, demonstrating that it wasn’t an end at all,
what then? Where would you look for an edge, if the old edges were lost,
and an edge was all that mattered? The silence stretched out. Thought lost
its purchase. I was worried that his patience would break. I needn’t have
been.
“It’s OK, he said.
It’s hard. The next part is hard. It defeated me every time, every
single time, for five years, but then I got it, the next step
… ‘So, what is it?’ I had never wanted to know anything this much.
You want the key? he teased. ‘Sure. Yes. Absolutely I want the
key.’
“It was a kind of sublime torture, utter tantalization. Time curved
inwards, compressive, crushing, folding my life towards the answer that he
had, and I didn’t. He knew, and it amused him. He said nothing. He drank
and grinned, his eyes roving delightedly across my torment. Those minutes
– were they minutes? – dragged themselves out, endlessly. A tic in the
corner of his mouth marked out the hidden metabolism of eternity in tiny
spasms, hoarding some unreadable, invaluable clue. I wanted to strangle
him, rip his eyes out. The density was unbearable. It was the center of
the world, ultimate pressure. The need to know would kill me, if I let it.
It couldn’t go on. That was the test. I had to change, to stop caring, to
transcend, immediately, accept my ignorance, or die… At least,
that’s how it felt …”
Brewer laughed, almost goofily, as if the entire story – broken off and
already partially forgotten – had been nothing but an elaborate fishing
yarn, a string of mock confessions fabricated to idly pass the time. He
knocked back his whiskey, poured another, and then drew deeply on his
cigar, exhaling luxuriantly. The depressurization was transparently faked.
He wanted us to share, viscerally, in the unbearable anticipation of that
moment. As he leant backwards, arching his back, stretching, Mary tensed
forwards reciprocally, transfixed, her elbows sliding across the table.
Perhaps she was going to succumb, and demand, hungrily, that he continue.
The manipulation was so crude it disgusted me.
I yawned rudely, finished my drink, and stubbed out the remains of my
cigar.
“It’s getting late Mister Brewer. I should probably be going. Thanks. It
was fun.” I began to get up.
Mary half-twisted towards me, her eyes glinting with shock and rage. She’d
been hooked, and I was ruining everything.
You stupid bitch, I thought cruelly, more determined than ever to
wreck the event.
I confidently hunted Brewer’s face for the quick burst of hatred I hoped
to find there, but there was no sign of it. Instead, there was a kind of
weary satisfaction, at once humorous and sad. There had been no surprises.
“Of course Mister Duzsl…”
“Call me Nemo,” I interrupted sarcastically, in a petty display of
resistance. “There’s no need for formality among old friends.”
“Nemo then,” he continued, unruffled. “Do you have your key?”
Without thinking, I reached into my pocket, withdrawing a plastic card,
and then inspecting it. Interlocking double Ds narrowed it down to the
casino hotel, but there was no number.
“Two-zero-nine,” Brewer informed me, helpfully. “Sleep well.”
“Sleep, holy shit,” Mary muttered irritably. “As if he’s going to
sleep.”
“Rest, then,” Brewer allowed.
“Oh please,” Mary sighed dramatically, her frustration boiling over. “You
know exactly what will happen to him. He’ll spiral down into the drug,
coming apart into rags of shredded fate, until there’s nothing left but
splintered panic and screaming.” She was looking at me, coldly now, even
as she spoke, with the detached observation one might appropriately apply
to a doomed lab animal. “He’s truly fucked. This was stupid.”
“Mary, your imaginative extravagance betrays you,” Brewer growled,
obviously entertained.
“Mister Duzsl – Nemo – wants to rest. There’s no need for additional
stimulation.”
***
Did they understand? I was unsure. Understanding had become almost
unbelievably precious, and precarious. There were too many new facts, and
the latest one was especially disconcerting, because the story Brewer had
been relating was known to me now, in its entirety, from before its
beginning to some indefinite end, or edge, far beyond its premature
termination, and in much greater detail than had yet been revealed. It is
not that I had somehow learnt it. Rather,
I had become somebody who already knew it. That made me a
replacement, for somebody who hadn’t known it, and who now knew nothing,
was nothing. That supplanted creature was nothing now, but it was also –
and equally – an earlier draft of this inexplicable being that considered
itself to be me, and it was perhaps no less adequate compared to whatever
had become me than I would be compared to what might soon follow. It would
be important to keep notes.
April 18, 2013Halloween XS 2
A (short) exercise in bombastic Halloween fiction
The dead center of the story would come at the
end. It was a culmination, to be coaxed back – or was it forward? To stare
into dazzling unseeing – that was the thing. Animated obscurity
approaching him across a darkened pumpkin field.
It had been a dream, exquisite in its horror. Upon its return, a few
nights later, the edges of its moonless luminosity were still undulled.
Then, only inane slumber, for over a week. He had still written nothing
down. By the time of the third apparition it had decayed, shredded into
black rags by delirium, wormed-through by neglect. He awoke in a sweaty
chaos of tangled sheets and recalcitrant memory. In a panic, he now sought
– too late – to capture it.
Detail had eroded down towards a fever-ground core of inarticulate
urgency. Numbly, he understood that the sole meaning of his career – and
thus his life – was buried in the ruins of an unmined nightmare,
avalanched under by confusion and thickening dread. Everything he would
ever want to say had been whispered to him, but he had fumbled the
priceless gift into oblivion. A jagged chunk of non-being had been flung
at him across the desert of limbic night. With each loop of recollection,
it receded further behind a wake of undecipherable reference codes. The
weird tale he had been offered was reduced to an unthreading ghost story,
degenerating by the hour, into chattering nonsense picked up among rumors
of forbidden secrets. The sacred touch of vacuous insanity was gone.
Nobody would ever have mistaken his life for anything other than a futile,
slow-motion catastrophe. His literary career was a partial-birth abortion
of singular grisliness. The pieces that emerged still twitching soon
expired amid detestable groans. Now everything fell completely apart.
Seen coldly, in the morbid pre-dawn glow, it was suddenly obvious that the
empty whisky bottles and overflowing ashtrays were detritus from a
forgotten ritual. There had been an incompetent summoning. If repeated
mechanically, it would deteriorate a little further. The alternative was
to do it right. As a memento, he attached a post-it note to the computer
screen, bearing the single word: Invoke. Then he stumbled
groggily to bed. His dreams were discreet and interred in sleep.
Satan had nothing to offer him, except indirectly, and unconvincingly.
Luciferic inspiration would not ignite. Instead, the Dark Prince, slumped
in reptilian lassitude upon the throne of doom and undisguisedly bored by
the conversation from its first moment, merely derided his attachment to
conventional ideas. A claw-toed foot sifted vaguely through the heap of
crumbling skulls. “Have you drawn your entire contact list from a Dennis
Wheatley novel?” susurrated the Old Deceiver with languorous contempt.
There was nothing further to be said.
It was a circuit, locking him out. To access the name he needed to know
who to call. Incense-clouded blackness and strange drugs broke upon a
sea-wall of silence. At the dead-end of each ruined night, the only thing
that mattered was further gone, recessed more deeply into the
cross-hatched palimpsest of memory. The unintercepted missile of oblivion
streaked away from his life, on some unimaginable course.
“You need help,” said the young man in the street, proffering a
crudely-printed pamphlet.
“Jesus Christ your Savior,” he read, enunciating slowly and carefully.
“Nope.”
The street evangelist studied him for a drawn-out minute, in calm silence.
“What are you searching for?” he asked eventually.
“Can’t you see?” he laughed, sleepless mental dilapidation knapping an
edge of hysteria onto his tone. “I’m pursuing the dream.”
“You’d turn your back on peace?” the young man asked sadly.
“If I could still find the back I’d fall into it …”
His abandonment of all hope led him on long, looping walks through the
countryside. Mindless sensation blurred the damnation of unknown names.
Autumn had enveloped him in mists and mildewed fruitlessness. He shuffled
without objective through rotting leaves.
Everything had been broken by the time he stumbled upon the distant
perimeter. The day, the year, and his existence were simultaneously
tumbling to an end. Light had thinned to a play of shadows. Glancing
sideways, he was jolted from his reveries – hurled into startled
recognition. This was the place.
Its familiarity captured him, guiding the direction of attention.
Realization was instantaneous, and all-engulfing. As the gates opened,
recollection flooded back, indistinguishable from perception. Suddenly –
diagonally – it was time.
The scene returned, enthralling. Every detail was assembling itself to
perfection. He stepped forward, slowly, but without hesitation, into what
he had once thought – once dreamt to be – no more than a nightmare. There
was a piece cut out of his mind, matching a hole in space. Like a missing
tooth, it was now simply not there. He groped for it, which meant
taking another step forward. Whatever it wasn’t to be would arrive soon.
That was the only certainty.
With solemn inevitability, the shape – like a shard of broken fate, or a
compact rift wounding the sky – drifted toward him across the pumpkin
field.
October 31, 2014Deadlines (Part-1)
If you believe in yourself, you’ll believe in anything. – Nicola
Masciandaro
Based – very roughly – on a true story.
[Subsequent content carries a vulgarity and decadence warning, for
sensitive readers.]
§00. Friday was fright night
at my (virtual) place, and Deadlines was the most reliable source
of inspiration. Most of the deracinated Shanghai morbid literature scene
cycled through the place, but no one would be turning up for hours. So it
was just Cal and me. We both had better things to be doing, which – as
usual – we weren’t.
“‘Beginning is the most difficult thing.’”
“That’s it?” I asked, unconvinced.
“Yes, those words, exactly.”
“Double embedded?”
He tilted himself even further backwards into the deep leather chair, so
that he was staring straight upwards into the attic rafters. His slow
exhalation released a column of cigar smoke on an obscure expedition among
the old beams. “Surely, yes … That’s all it takes.” Voice down-paced in
dreamlike detachment. “Then it’s happening.”
If Calvin Lambsblood Dodd had written so much as a paragraph of horror
fiction himself, it had been done in strict secrecy, without a hint of the
fact escaping. Yet the attitude he now slipped into, once again – that of
an authority on the topic of anomalous prose construction – had been
adopted as if by instinct, and with seamless confidence. He was adept at
it, undeniably.
It was hard not to smile, but my irritability was slow to dissipate.
“‘Thing’ is wrong.” I closed my laptop, with calm theatricality, and
finished my drink. “A beginning isn’t a ‘thing’. I use ‘thing’ too much
already.”
Dodd squinted at me, his features micro-adjusted to some space between
amusement and annoyance. “So you’re just going to bunker-down in your
precious writer’s block?” He shrugged. “That’s OK. Let’s investigate the
Thing, while we’re waiting for the others.” Then, indicating my glass with
a slight re-angling of his head: “Ready for the next one?”
I glanced at my watch, knowing it would be precisely 3:33pm, and it was.
Not that it mattered. “Sure.”
He caught the bartender’s attention with an absurdly feudalistic
hand-gesture that concluded silently in two raised fingers.
“Dark Enlightenments again?” The softly-spoken words, ritualistically
unnecessary, carried easily across the empty lounge. We both nodded in
confirmation.
§01. A Dark Enlightenment – or ‘333’ – is a hell of a
drink. Dodd had spent most of a weekend inventing it, immediately after
the Include-Me-Out Club had first been convened at Deadlines. The
base was some kind of rough ‘whiskey’ he had discovered in southern
Yunnan, distilled as moonshine in the mountains. Each bottle served as the
pickling jar for a giant venomous centipede, which tainted the liquor
distinctively. The complete cocktail recipe, as far as I was able to tell,
was:
2 shots ‘pede spirit
1 shot absinthe (for the wormwood)
1 shot black rum (for the extinction of light)
3 drops funestia
1 drop specially-concocted house ‘herbal tincture’
1 speck strychnine
Chili garnish
Absolutely no ice.
The psycho-active effects were remarkable. It was almost certainly
illegal.
§02. Not that illegality was any problem for Dodd. Even
if the Shanghai authorities had given a damn about self-inflicted brain
damage in a private club, which they quite evidently didn’t, there was
Dodd’s girlfriend, the ‘PP’, to manage things. PP was the ‘Party Princess’
(with ‘party’ referring to the Communist Party of China, rather than to
anything more frivolous). People called her that to her face, and she
didn’t seem to mind. Her real name was Jiang Yu, her uncle a senior cadre
in the local party apparatus. Dodd met with him regularly, and they got
along well. Boss Jiang’s security-related administrative position meshed
well with Dodd’s specialism in organized decadence and unscrupulous
trans-national deal-making. Their Party Nights were notorious.
§03. Cal was strictly a facilitator, and not a
practitioner. It was a distinction he invested with peculiar
significance.
“I don’t need to write. I don’t want to write. Fuck writing.”
“OK.” I had no idea where he was going. “So what about this?” I gestured
vaguely towards the surrounding lounge, abstractly indicating the club.
This was ‘the second drink’ exchange. We must have had it hundreds of
times before, and each time it got worse.
He squinted at me suspiciously. “Honestly?”
“Of course.”
“‘Of course’,” he repeated, the sarcasm wound up to a peculiar, biting
extremity. Recognizing that its object was unintelligible, he added,
awkwardly: “Which ‘course’ would that be, exactly?”
Not only was the conversation increasingly hard to follow, his mood was
deteriorating unpredictably. There seemed no way to extract myself from
it. I took momentary refuge in a gulp of 333. “You build a temple to
writing, and then tell me you’re not interested?”
“Oh, that …” he feigned nonchalance, took a drink, idly toyed with a
cigar, put it down without lighting it. Then, as if restarting randomly:
“I never told you about Mary Karno, did I?” It wasn’t a question, and he
didn’t bother waiting for a response. Without significant pause he
continued: “I never told anybody about her, about her ‘practice’. It’s
time I did.”
Up to that point I had read only a couple of Karno stories. It had been
enough to get the gist. Her fiction was undeniably intense.
Merely by broaching the topic, Dodd had undergone an extraordinary
transformation. His obnoxious, sullen slump of posture and affect switched
into ardent engagement. He leant forward, as if about to clamber onto the
table, left leg jittering as an emotional dissipator.
“It’s not that I don’t have problems with her stuff,” he declared,
adamantly. Tiny drops of sweat beaded his forehead. “I mean … fuuuuuck.”
He reclined a little. “Truly. Fuck.”
“Sure. It’s strange stuff.”
“The priest-torturing thing she has going on, it’s unbalanced. You know,
really unbalanced.”
“Right.”
“The sex is out there too … out somewhere. Guess there has to be a market
for that kind of metaphysically-smashed lesbo-tentacular fucking
demon-twisted goneness.”
“Apparently.”
His voice dropped to something scarcely above a whisper. “Still, she’s
serious.” He picked up his cigar, inspected it curiously, and finally
ignited it. “Utterly serious.”
It seemed pointless to interrupt.
“She stayed in my place for a while, you know. A small place I own here.
Off Fuxing Lu. It was an interim arrangement – lasted maybe three months,
a little under. Thing is, the place was set up for …” He trailed off.
Clearly, the function of this building was not easily describable.
I had already guessed why. “Boss Jiang?”
Dodd’s expression froze immediately into a mask of fortified suspicion,
cross-laced with lethal traps. “What do you know?” he hissed.
“A lot more now,” I responded, with a pathetic laugh.
There was a drawn-out moment of tension. Then he smiled crookedly. “Yes,
it was an arrangement we had,” he conceded unnecessarily. “He called it
‘the information room’ – set up guests there, place was rigged with all
kinds of crazy snoop-tech shit that he provided.”
“And you put Karno in there?” I asked, in disbelief.
“It was a mistake. She was supposed to get the apartment next door – the
unmonitored twin. It was over a week before I learnt what had happened,
and by then the situation had become rather … sensitive.”
“Christ!”
“Yeah, well, not exactly, as you know, but the point is – I wound up
learning a lot.”
“I bet.”
“Are you just going to carry on snarking about this? Or are you going to
let me tell you the story?”
“No, yes, whatever. I’m interested. Obviously.”
“So you’ll shut the fuck up with the smart-ass remarks?”
“Absolutely.”
After a micro-punishment pause, he continued. “I’m going to cut short the
technical details, because you’re being such a jerk about it. Main point
is, Boss J. didn’t have any professional interest in Karno, naturally, but
she kind of captures attention, if you know what I mean. Extracting all
the video wasn’t easy, but in the end it isn’t the sort of material you
want to leave lying around for a Party inspection team to stumble upon.
After XJ took over, the negotiations became a lot smoother. A couple of
bottles of Moutai and he was ready to wash his hands of it. Assured me
there weren’t any copies. Who knows? It probably doesn’t even matter. I
was going to delete the lot immediately – nearly nine gigabytes …” he
scrutinized me for overt indications of skepticism. My poker-face held. “…
but then I thought, ‘what has he seen?’ – it seemed important, right? I
had to know what I was dealing with. You don’t survive in this business by
blinding yourself to potentially vital information. Could have been some
Tantric craziness with the Dalai Lama there, for all I knew. Sure, it felt
grubby, but my hands were tied.”
‘Grubby’ doesn’t begin to cover it, of course. It was the abomination of
desolation. Still, Dodd had his business, and his bar. I had my blog. The
story had to come out.
“You’re not going to mention any of this, are you?” he suddenly asked me,
anxiously.
“I was thinking of switching a few names about.”
“Oh, hilarious.”
“You ready for another?” changing the subject.
Without replying, or taking his eyes off me, he did the neo-feudal hand
signal again.
“It’s fate, right?” I suggested encouragingly. It seemed to work. There
was an unknotting of tension.
“You ever see her odd little essay about ‘Ascryptions’?”
I shook my head.
“Never met anyone who gets it. You know, even remotely what it’s about. I
certainly never did, before. Subtitled
Practices for writing on reality, then wall-to-wall
senselessness, even by her standards. Remember Bob Clayton?”
Another head shake. I didn’t want to risk interrupting him.
“Strange guy. Driven. Working on that tale about buried-alive dreams for
over a year, without ever managing to finish it. Anyway, he was obsessed
with that piece. Constantly trying to talk to me about it. Told me once
that it ‘solved everything’. Hung himself from a rafter two weeks later.
Not to imply there was any connection. I’ve come across that a lot – not
quite so far gone, of course.”
The digressions were straining my patience, but the drinks arrived. I
stole one of his cigars, without asking, and flamed it up.
“It’s all in the first two sentences. ‘Writers get stuck when they forget
that every story has a demon. To begin, you have to learn its name.’”
“Ascryption?”
“Exactly. And there it was, on the video. I actually watched her start a
new story – two actually – open an immaculate notebook, with a giant
question mark, jot down a few scrappy thoughts, cross-legged, meditating
or some shit, then cross some kind of threshold – you could see it, as if
something had cut through her body, switched her – and then she
seriously set to work, patiently, full of – what the fuck do you
call it? – intention, rolling back the rug, chalking a huge
diagram on the floor, all swirls and numbers and ancient evocations, then
building what I can only describe as a voodoo shrine, pasted together out
of candles, clippings from poetry books, kitchenware, pictures, drug
paraphernalia, bits of dead animals, and electronic trash. She’d get up,
wander around the number maze in loops, muttering some cryptic stuff, in a
whisper – the audio was too crap to pick it up – then back to the shrine,
shifting pieces about, nudging it towards convergence. It was mad as fuck,
obviously, but the horrible thing was that I began to pick up on the
purpose, I could see it coming together, like a wave out of
hyper-space, the necessity of it, I just couldn’t stop watching, seeing it
arrive. I mean, holy fuck. And then a jolt went through her,
harsh and electric. She snapped out, crossed over to her laptop,
and typed in the name. Ascryption. That’s how it works.”
We were both silent for a moment.
“She has to come and lead a discussion session at the club,” I said,
predictably.
“Invite’s already in the motherfucking mail,” Dodd replied.
[To be continued – with some regularity]
November 28, 2014Deadlines (Part-2)
Screaming is rare. Outside the movies, war zones, or psychiatric
institutions, it’s unusual to hear anything more than an exaggerated
squeak. This wasn’t that.
Alison Luria was screaming. She stood in the middle of the cluttered
office, rigidly upright, arms by her sides, head angled slightly back. Her
mouth was locked open, eyes tightly shut. The sound she was emitting, in a
continuous, only slightly uneven stream, overwhelmed apprehension. It was
less a specifiable noise than an abstract inaudibility, the unheard
manifested as a monstrous positive entity, insensibility made palpable.
It had begun at almost exactly the moment of entering the room. I had not
quite finished closing the door behind me, still uncertain whom first to
address, when – as if out of nowhere, without the slightest warning – a
shard of sonic shrapnel sliced into my head, making any further thought
impractical.
It was my second visit to the company, and the small team was already
vaguely familiar.
Fred something, the tech guy, was (incredibly) ignoring the phenomenon,
and seemed still to be working. Alison’s editorial assistant, Xu Ling, had
retreated beneath her desk, where she now lay perfectly immobile, coiled
into a tight fetal knot. Millie Zhang, the sales director, had missed it.
Her tidy, south-facing work-space was unoccupied. It had been set up as an
oasis of light and order, semi-withdrawn from the gloomy debris-field of
the larger open-plan attic area. She was probably out on a sales call.
I had never fallen prey to mystical inclinations, and problems of an
esoteric nature seldom detained me. If, on rare occasions, hints of hidden
profundities over-spilled the dikes of dismissal, they elicited vague
repulsion, rather than enthusiasm. I would, at that time, have reacted
with instinctive aversion to any claim that the suspension of reason opens
secret gates. (No one had ever bothered me with such suggestions.) Yet as
the threads of intelligence were severed by the scream, it was as if
access were being granted to the inner substance of the world, violently
unwrapped from the distractions of visual identification. Something was
poking through the wall of sonic oblivion – a clicking or crackling.
This isn’t a message, said the click-code,
it’s just the sound of your auditory nerves dying.
Would it ever stop? Had it, in reality, ever begun? Its duration had
become a matter of no significance, because this breakage of the world was
no longer Alison Luria screaming, but the scream as it existed in
eternity, freed from the bonds of fact. It was the primordial scream, vast
beyond cosmology, anonymous and inexpressive, the pure howl of being now
perceived as it always had been …
… and then, as suddenly as it had begun, it ceased.
Something crawled out of her mouth, then a
second, and a third – wasps. They wandered across her lips indecisively,
before flickering out in a trick of minutely-dappled light. I couldn’t
recall ever seeing a wasp in Shanghai before. Almost certainly, I still
haven’t.
“I’m finished,” she said. Then she walked past me, out of the room,
without looking at anyone, and clattered down the stairs, fast.
“That was intense,” I muttered awkwardly.
Fred looked up, smiling crookedly. “Girls,” he mumbled, as if that
explained everything.
There was a commotion behind me, and Bob Jarvis – the company’s Australian
boss – rushed in, smiling implausibly, grabbing me by the shoulder to
avoid pitching me across the room. “Nick! I’m so glad you could make it
in. Are you ready to go?”
“To go?”
“To get going, to start, there’s no point messing around.”
“Start work?” I asked stupidly.
“Absolutely. Why not right now? You’re here after all. Don’t waste the
journey. There’s no room for dithering in this business. You can have
Alison’s desk.”
“Yes, Alison …”
“Nothing to worry about. Spot of tension.” He steered me across the room,
then started picking randomly through the chaos of papers, battered copies
of Shanghai Live magazine, and work-desk lunch detritus that
surrounded her computer. Mine now, I suspected ambivalently. “We thought
you could take over the Shang-Hive blog, keep it pressing forward, raise
the profile, you know. Dig deeper.”
Ominous fragments of writing, scrawled in red ball-point, flickered from
the print out sheets that Jarvis was consigning to the waste-paper basket.
There is no blood in Cyberspace. Endless darkness now.
It drains. We brought it to unlife.
And so it ends.
“Was Alison OK?” I persisted, stubbornly.
“Oh, nothing really to worry about, it was just, you know … She was fine
wasn’t she Sue?” he pretended to ask, reaching out for narrative support.
Xu Ling looked as if she were about to vomit. She nodded in grim
obedience.
“Fred, what was that business with Alison about?” Jarvis
soldiered on. “Any previous signs of a problem?”
“Was it in any way work-related?” I interrupted.
Fred was struggling to suppress a cruel smirk. “Perhaps a little,” he
said. “Towards the end, her blogging became a little … I don’t know, I
guess you could say, weird.”
“No one said anything to me about that,” Jarvis cut in, clearly irritated
by the direction this conversation was taking.
“‘Weird’?” I refused to let that go.
“Yeah, you could definitely say that, I suppose,” Fred explained. “She
said that she’d ‘contacted something’.”
“Contacted something in the backend,” Xu Ling added. She looked
like under-cooked death.
Fred scowled at her. “Like she even knew what the backend is.”
“What is the backend?” I was clutching.
Jarvis waved away the query. “You don’t need to worry about that. Nor did
Alison. That’s what we have a tech team for, isn’t it Fred?”
“The backend is where everything happens,” Fred said. “You’ll see.”
April 10, 2015Vauung
There’s a horror story I’m writing (slowly), developing from the central
conceit that the ‘monster’ (Vauung) is the war. It feeds upon escalation,
zig-zagging between antagonists, to extinguish any inclinations towards
peace. It’s part Apocalypse Now, part
Blood Meridian (“War is God”), part other stuff … It’s not going
to be finished for a while.
Scott Alexander has finished
something
truly excellent, which isn’t fiction (exactly), but clearly tunes into
Vauung-signal:
Toxoplasma is a neat little parasite that is implicated in a couple of
human diseases including schizophrenia. Its life cycle goes like this:
it starts in a cat. The cat poops it out. The poop and the toxoplasma
get in the water supply, where they are consumed by some other animal,
often a rat. The toxoplasma morphs into a rat-compatible form and starts
reproducing. Once it has strength in numbers, it hijacks the rat’s
brain, convincing the rat to hang out conspicuously in areas where cats
can eat it. After a cat eats the rat, the toxoplasma morphs back into
its cat compatible form and reproduces some more. Finally, it gets
pooped back out by the cat, completing the cycle.
Replicators are also going to evolve. …
I’m assuming that “Instead of judging …” isn’t a deliberate
Apocalypse Now (or Judge Holden) reference, but it works as one.
(Incidentally, ‘Vauung’ alphanomically numerizes to 140, the same as
‘language’. When Twitter came along I accepted its character limit as a
soft suggestive tap to the base of the brain.)
ADDED: Linking this oldish thing, due to its obvious relevance. (No idea how
it found its way to that website, btw.) … and while tagging stuff here,
there’s
this
(naturally): Πόλεμος πάντων μὲν πατήρ ἐστι (“War is the father of all.”)
November 19, 2015Bloody Mary
§00 — It required only a mirror. Initially, at least, it seemed like that,
although it turned out there was more.
She had been known as ‘Hell
Mary’ at times. There were many other names.
§01 — The ritual varied, but was never complicated. Its simplicity was
essential. In that lay the danger, supposedly. The invocation could be
realized almost by accident. It might begin as nothing more than a joke,
or a dare. A disastrous non-seriousness is the core of the urban legend.
The proximal agents, scarcely older than children, typically, are playing
about with something they don’t understand. The Hell Prank is archetypal.
Deadly foolishness, or worse, is not difficult to imagine, if only in
broad outline. Teenage kids do it best. They’re trying to prove something,
and then do, by mistake. Movie viewers like to watch them damn themselves.
With younger children it’s more horrible.
§02 — Start at the exoteric level, at least in appearance. The point isn’t
to make something happen, but rather the opposite. You are supposed to
avoid the ritual, out of fear. It’s what
might have happened, had you not been so chicken, that stokes the
thrill. The dark potential preserves itself this way. It intimidates
against disproof. This is where the legend and the real story part ways.
They remain, nevertheless, confusingly entangled. Ironic twists thicken
the obscurity. The legend itself has a real story. Actuality belongs only
to the legend.
§03 — Divergence goes further than this. The legend is a central part of
the real story. It’s the legend, alone, that protects Bloody Mary from
examination. The ritual is structured as a challenge. An examination that
is declined leaves its object, in principle, examinable. This is the
ontological payload.
Do you want to see what’s in this box? It could be something too
horrific to bear.
§04 — Although the story is archetypal, there’s always a first time.
Vanessa Sheridan had never heard it before. She’d never heard
anything at all like it before. It thrilled and appalled her in
equal measure. The idea split time in two. To go back was impossible.
Innocence was Bloody Mary still unthought. Experience opened a new
universe.
§05 — How had Christine known? This knowledge had desynchronized them.
Even as the moment before sharing receded, it still separated them. They
would always now, then, have been strangers. For such asymmetry ever to
have been was enough. It could not be unmade all the way to non-being.
Some echo of the gulf would always persist. What had once been friendship
could never be anything so simple again. Perhaps it would be more. Their
dark complicity was a bond. Bloody Mary connected them, even as she prized
them apart.
§06 — Chris had called her Nessie at first, like the monster from
the loch. She’d found it mildly annoying, but three syllables were too
much to ask, and there was nothing else. So Vee had come as a
relief.
§07 — Her tenth year would soon begin. Things would then start over,
automatically. It was as if there had been time enough for anything to be
learnt. That she still knew so little could only be an accident. She
understood what such an accident meant now – by contrast – because she
knew this.
§08 — They would do it, she was sure. The looming horizon was no less
critical than death. At the end, Bloody Mary would step out of the mirror.
Nothing more could ever happen. It would be finished.
§09 — Dusk was draining away into night. At one level – and perhaps
several – she expected nothing to occur. There was no Santa Claus,
Tooth-Fairy, or Easter Bunny. There was also, she was beginning strongly
to suspect, No God. That was certainly her elder brother’s vociferously
confident assertion. No God was, for him, a positive cosmic principle,
equaling zero. It was not a deficiency, but an operator. For there to be
no Bloody Mary, then, was by far the tidiest conclusion. Yet she was also
sure it could not be so simple.
§10 — Ontology was not a word she yet commanded, and its absence
gaped unrecognized within her. The spell she sought to cast upon her
thoughts required it. She had to reach all the way down to the being of
things. Whatever Bloody Mary was, or was not, she did not belong in the
world. She was a rip, gash, or rending. She was of the substance that
might be drawn by a blade.
“Cut it out,” Vee murmured to herself,
when such thoughts wouldn’t stop, in order to continue them.
§11 — In the end it was not ontology, but rather sorcery, that was
sovereign here. What could be called up? That was the question,
and no other.
“It’s called invocation,” Chris had solemnly
explained. “I invoke thee fell spirit.”
“Those are the
words?”
“Once they were.”
“And now?” asked Vee.
“We have to
find them.”
“Like a password,” Vee had said, understanding
immediately.
Chris nodded. “Exactly like that.”
It would be
difficult, then. But difficult meant possible. There was a way.
Passwords were meant to be used. They were hidden only because finding
them matters.
§12 — It seemed too much to ask that anyone could want it as she did. To
want it absolutely, at any cost, when nothing about it could be commonly
conceived as desirable, was suggestive of isolation. Such longings
dismissed every ordinary idea of sharing. She’d thought about trying it on
her own, but had immediately known that would not do. Company was
necessary. In solitude, whatever happened could be mere madness, of the
emptiest kind. Its credibility would be fragile, even to her. The event
would remain stuck in her mind. That was not the destination.
To
escape, it had to undeniably exceed her.
§13 — Astonishingly, there was Chris, so it would happen after all. Chris
was committed, serious. She was patient, and knew how to
concentrate. Most of all she was stubborn. Dogged was how Alex
described her. She could be trusted not to stop. That was the important
thing. Bloody Mary was a name for something indescribably bad happening,
but that wasn’t the way to lose the game. The only way to
lose was to stop. Chris understood that, or would act as if she
did. She would keep going, further in.
§14 — They were waiting together, unhurried.
“What do you think?”
Chris asked. She was talking about it, obviously.
Vee
simmered in the question silently, her eyes closed. The excitement was
painful, scarcely bearable. She couldn’t speak, at first, because too much
would show.
“Nothing,” she said, eventually. “There’s nothing
yet.”
“There’s no rush.”
“No rush, or anything else,” Vee joked.
Humor cloaked solemnity. “There’s time.” There was some, at least.
It
was still early. Perhaps half an hour of dusk remained. Bloody Mary would
belong to the night. How could it be otherwise? Her complexion bled into
ultimate shadow. Her gaze was abolition.
§15 — A sleep-over at Chris’ would be the occasion, if not this time, then
another. There was no doubt about the room. It could have been made for
Bloody Mary.
A huge old mirror dominated one wall. It was hard to
understand how it could have been moved into the attic. It was as if the
space had been built around it.
“Like a ship in a bottle,” Chris had
said, sharing the same thought. The analogy was odd, and stimulating.
Something that – upon reflection – didn’t seem to fit was the
common element. It was inherently sorcerous in some way. At first it had
to look like a trick.
§16 — Chris’ mom had required some persuasion. She suspected they were up
to something troubling. Not that she would have come close to guessing
what. There was a surreptitious undercurrent they were unable to fully
conceal.
“Are you girls up to something?” she’d once asked. The
obscurity of their secret permitted no question more exact. They’d been
‘all innocence’ in response. She had to smile. How bad could it be?
“I’m
not really happy about you with candles up there,” she said. “Those old
beams are like fire-wood.”
Such fears were so misdirected Vee
struggled to control her expression.
Chris assuaged her mother’s
concern without great difficulty. They would be careful, she had
gently insisted. The candles were never left unattended. They were in
tins.
§17 — It could only happen once, obviously – or even subtly. An end could
not repeat. If Bloody Mary was not the end, she was nothing. Her finality
would be her signature. Last things would crash in, to undo the illusion
of the world. There could be no afterwards.
§18 — They were making their way circuitously to Chris’ place. The streets
were unusually quiet. It threatened to rain, but didn’t.
“I’ve been
thinking about blood.” It was chanted more than spoken.
Chris nodded.
“Yes, me too,” she said. “Bloodiness is especially
fascinating.”
“And multitudinous,” Vee added, using her favorite
word. There was no need to explain why. So many types of bloodiness had
swirled among their thoughts.
“Bloody hell is such a strange
oath.” It was odd and English to them, but then Bloody Mary was too.
“Does
she bleed? Or is it only that she
brings blood?”
“Bloodshed,” Chris mused. “She’s
bloodshed.”
“The mother of bloodshed,” Vee suggested.
“Our
secret blood mother,” Chris agreed. “Bloody Mary, come to us.”
“Blood,”
they said together, stressing the plosives. “Let there be blood.”
§19 — Again they circled the question.
“What does her name really
say?”
It was always the problem, carrying them forward, like a
current. However its surface varied, in its depths it was the same.
Chris
had returned from a family holiday in France months before. She had run to
Vee immediately upon getting home, to excitedly share her linguistic
discoveries. Mary, she had learnt, whispered of mother,
of death, and of the sea. A murmur rippled it. As fine metal,
tapped by a knife, it sang.
Now, when asking about her name, they
explored for codes.
“There are secret echoes running through it,” Vee
said.
“It has layers.”
The responsive nodding to each line would
become more vigorous. “And what does she dream?”
This was
the silent answer. She dreams this.
Through the thought she
made contact, around the back. Soft, spine-prickling hints of cold lunacy
crept in with the idea. They shivered in acceptance.
“What is
madness, really?”
It was an enigma they agreed upon. Only a ritual
could respond to it, because Bloody Mary was madness itself. She was the
still eye of the cyclone, the absolute tranquility that lurked within
delirium. The world’s insanity found shelter in her.
§20 — There was a window in the roof, letting in natural light. It had not
been cleaned for a while. At night, dust-smeared splinters of starlight
poked through it. A smudged moon fell through it heavily, to sink into the
depths of the mirror. The heavens were re-written, vague and converse.
An
old wooden chest served as a shrine. Over months, they’d collected things
for it. The candles had come first. A closing church sale provided most of
those.
The center-piece was an old doll of abnormal apparent maturity
and creepiness which Vee had found in a curiosity shop. Unblinking gray
eyes stared accusingly from her broken face.
§21 — Gripped by sinister excitement, she had taken Chris to the shop the
next day. For weeks it was their hunting ground. It supplied the shrine
with other things. They added a small collection of Victorian post cards,
showing incongruously smiling visitors to ominous places. Then there came
an ornamental knife, pieces from an old sewing kit, and some obscure
surgical instruments. A long-stopped clock, fixed upon some forgotten
midnight, dominated the edge of the composition. Every item had been
painstakingly agreed upon. They’d taken their time, but never really
disagreed. Those things which were right only needed to be
recognized. There were enough of them by now. The pattern, while
ungraspable, was complete. It released a mute call.
§22 — Their most important find was a second mirror. Placed across from
the shrine, beneath the window, it exploded visual space into infinity.
Within this endless room, it was as if anything that might possibly be
seen now could be. The invitation was near-palpable. It silently appealed
for occupancy. To be visually absorbed into it would be scarcely less
soul-shattering than Bloody Mary herself. Almost, Vee felt, she could hear
the utterly hushed whisperings of the boundless mirror-labyrinth. They
spoke so softly they could only be remembered as imaginings.
Her name had to be said, and also could not be said. The path was
obliquely suggested, in this way.
§23 — Vee and Chris each lit one of the large candles. Simultaneity had
been a ceremonial necessity, which could be left unspoken. They swapped
subtle smiles at its perfect accomplishment, as they prolonged it. Their
lives to this moment had been twin training disciplines. Convergence was
completing itself.
They both knew it was time. After all, which it
might nearly be, if not now, when? The question answered itself, in mute
urgency. It had begun already.
In the mirror, the distended moon
seemed to ache for abomination. Raw existence was pitched upward toward an
unbearable limit. It throbbed at the brink of crisis. Some mad, absent
music tormented it. They held each other for a moment, in psychological
defense against the wild slashings of non-existent violins.
Chris was
stretched by the ritual, tautened. Her eyes blazed with inexorable
purpose.
Vee saw through her into darkness and absolute loss. The
intensity hurt somewhere that felt beyond bodily location. She gulped back
a moan.
§24 — Candle flames, mirror-multiplied without limit, jittered as if
caught by an alien draft. A subtle chill seemed less in the air than
outside it.
She would be behind them in a direction that could never
be turned towards.
“Bloody Mary,” they intoned together.
The end
was near.
October 31, 2019Patience
§00 — Stuart Thorndike had never been a ‘morning person’. This basic
trait, however, was only poor preparation for what now befell him. He woke
from what hazily seemed to have been torments without limit. Memory would
have been unbearable. He clawed his way out of the clammy sheets.
“My throat,” he gasped.
Cecily, his wife, looked haggard and ill-tempered. The sympathy that had
still dominated the day before was wearing thin. Evidently she had been
over-stretched.
“You were screaming,” she said. “It’s the same as before – perhaps worse.
You were screaming as if possessed, for most of the night. It was
horrible, again.”
“Bad dreams,” he ventured, unimaginatively.
“At least,” she snapped. “You should see someone. I’m serious. This can’t
go on.”
§01 — Over breakfast her questions were colder, and more determined. Her
patience had broken.
“Do you remember anything this time?”
“Not really.” He paused to wrestle the mental fog, but it only
thickened.
“Why would you place a bomb in a tree?” she asked.
The question meant nothing to him. He stared at her blankly.
“That’s what you were mumbling about, before the screaming started,” she
continued. “‘I finished making the bomb, it’s in the tree. We only have to
wait now.’ You said it several times.”
“Was it my voice?” he asked. He wasn’t sure where the question came
from.
“Who else would it have belonged to?”
“Did it sound like me?”
“It wasn’t raving or screaming, if that’s what you mean.”
“And you’re sure that’s what it said?”
“Completely,” she said. “You should take a look in the garage. I did. It’s
disturbing.”
§02 — After putting the task off for over an hour, he went down to check
the garage. Cecily’s grim judgment was hard to contradict. If someone had
not been building a bomb there, it was almost as if they’d been pretending
too. The scattering of nitrate chemicals, clock parts, and sawn-off metal
tubing was hard to otherwise explain. Who could it have been, if not him?
He tried to put a hoax narrative together, but quickly gave up on the
attempt. The fabrication was too obvious. It could have been no one else.
He had no memory of it at all.
§03 — Had not some philosopher once said that
Consciousness is Hell? It would have to be a gloomy German, most
probably, or perhaps a French existentialist. He couldn’t remember, if he
had ever actually known. Maybe it was a Swede, or a Norwegian. Thorndike
was not, in any case, an avid reader of such literature. In his opinion,
it tended consistently to unfettered extravagance. Even now, after the
gnawing horror of recent nights, the formula struck him as hyperbolic. Yet
he could vaguely intuit a psychological situation in which it would not
be, at all, for the first time in his life. Certainly, he had not awoken
into any such situation. Perhaps, though, he had awoken dimly recalling
one. This was a thought he found himself reluctant to more thoroughly
explore.
§04 — Thorndike soon learnt that the ‘specialist’ Cecily had in mind for
him was not a medical professional.
“She’s an old friend,” Cecily said. “There’s nobody I’ve ever trusted
more.”
He could have taken that as a slight. In less disillusioned times he might
have.
“She calls herself a reader,” Cecily added. “It’s a good
description.”
“What the hell does it mean?”
“She reads things.”
“Things?” he asked.
“Situations, problems – people.”
“Me, you’re thinking?”
“Someone has to.”
§05 — The ‘consultancy’ struck Thorndike as a parody of itself. Every
visible surface had been swallowed into a seething chaos of astrological
and cartomantic symbolism. Ancient Egyptian themes predominated.
Hieroglyphs jostled against algebraic formulae in the extended margins of
charts, tables, and diagrams of obscurely ominous implication. There were
pictures, too, whose inferior number was compensated by superior size and
still more – in most cases – by teeming inner multiplicity. They were, no
doubt deliberately, dizzying to contemplate. Animal-headed gods erupted
from the walls in mad multitudes. The air was glutinous with mind-clogging
fragrances. To casual inspection, it was generic to the point of
absurdity. If not for the recommendation, he would have dismissed the
place contemptuously. It epitomized flamboyant intellectual indiscipline,
of a kind he had always found peculiarly repellant.
Every belief is at once a disgrace. That was the Thorndike family
motto, never explicitly formalized, but resiliently preserved down through
the male line. To withhold credence was a matter of honor. To believe was
scarcely better than to beg. Staring now at some solemn Anubis, he
recalled the tradition with a grimace.
§06 — She wanted him to talk, which he found himself strangely reluctant
to do.
“There’s much I still don’t know,” she said.
“I don’t think you know anything,” he grumbled in reply. Perhaps the
insolence was an attempt to abort developments in the immediate wake of
their conception. If so, it didn’t work. At some level, he’d known that it
wouldn’t.
“So why are you here?” she asked. Her calm was untouched by even the
slightest hint of amusement.
“Curiosity,” he said.
“Not so.” It was stated softly, as a matter of obvious fact, rather than
as a step in an argument.
“So, why then?” he asked, drawn in irresistibly.
“You’re here because you feel – obscurely – like a prey animal.”
The accuracy of the analysis upset him.
“What were you told?” he asked.
“What could I have been told? You haven’t shared your dreams, with
anybody.” This, again, was true. “Not intentionally, at least,” she added.
“Naturally, there are other tellers. My profession is based upon
them.”
“Naturally,” he repeated. It came out sounding childish, like a
sneer. He had attempted to avoid that. “I’m sorry. My manners are not
usually so badly frayed.”
She waved away the apology. They were beyond such things.
§07 — As she explained how things would proceed, he found something
obscurely unsettling about her persistent mention of the cards.
His personal distaste for the conventional trappings of occultism
accounted only for part of it, but only a part. The word suggested an
uncanny doubling. It took him a moment to close upon it. Cartomancy, too,
was a ritual of sorts, and also an invitation. It was meant to open a
door.
Ultraviolet photographs of flowers exhibited landing-strips for
pollinators, as he had seen in books, and on TV. Cecily, who loved
gardening, gathered such information assiduously, and spread it outwards.
These images returned as he watched the reading blossom. The pattern was
not really for him. It spoke to unseen witnesses he resented.
§08 — Tarot came first, according to occult tradition. He, however, had no
doubt that reality ran the other way. Playing cards had branched into
arcane functions. The idea had inane and insidious versions. The former
had previously held him – he had assumed securely. Now things flipped. The
derivation of cartomantic ritual from casual pastimes began to seem
positively insidious. There was more, though, he realized. ‘Cards’ was a
word, which itself carried charge, beyond anything it said. There
was an unnatural insistence to it. Its single syllable packed irreducible
plurality within itself. It was a nuclear spell.
§09 — He had been drifting.
“There’s a ritual,” she said. “One which, when completed, will provide an
invitation. To perform it would be a very serious mistake. Your destiny
now suspends from this.”
“The danger is that I deliberately let this whatever-it-is in?” he asked,
enveloping the question in a nervous laugh. He had to be misunderstanding
the idea, surely? “Why the fuck would I do that? It would be
utterly insane.” The suggestion deeply annoyed him.
“You should be careful,” she said, with calm gravity. “The cards suggest
great peril. You have upset something. Perhaps you know that?”
He half-did, at least. “And by ‘upset’ you mean?” he asked.
“You turned something over, stumbled into it. I have to suspect
clumsiness.”
“When did this happen?”
“Three days ago.”
He thought back. Three days ago? What had he been doing then? It had been
an entirely ordinary Wednesday, to superficial recollection.
“Is it possible to specify the time?”
“Late afternoon, early evening,” she said without hesitation. “Perhaps a
little later than it is now. Not much.”
He would have been on the way to the club, then. This regular journey took
him on a twenty-five-minute walk through some of London’s quieter streets.
Last Wednesday’s stroll had not been especially memorable. No unusual
encounters came to mind. Later, in the club, he’d lost himself in
The Spectator, with a whisky and cigar. Nothing had
reached in to meet him – as far as he had noticed.
“Nothing,” he said.
“But actually there was something,” she replied stubbornly. “There has to
have been, as you know. Let’s take a closer look.”
She flipped the cards back into the pack, and shuffled it without taking
her eyes from him. The procedure had been long automated into instinct,
clearly.
After a few seconds of this, she placed three cards in a row, studying
them in motionless silence.
“Patience,” she said.
He initially misunderstood the word as an admonition. His irritable
jitters no doubt deserved it. He sought to get a better grip upon himself.
Twitching was risible. Then he remembered the game.
§10 — Outside, dusk had been deepening. There was something sickly about
the half-light that strayed in. It hinted at hallucination, even madness.
The club was almost empty. He’d noticed Basil Heath, sitting alone at the
bay window table. Heath had been playing a card game.
Cyclone solitaire was the name he had given to it, when asked. It
was peculiarly involving. The cards rotated between three piles, and were
removed in pairs.
“How’s it going?” Thorndike had asked. It was a casual question, scarcely
expecting a reply.
Heath had looked up, his expression somehow haunted, and abnormally grave.
“Not well,” he said. “Not well at all.” His voice trembled at the edge of
indignity. “An unprincipled man, in such straits, might even try to pass
it over.”
“Pass it over?” Thorndike had not understood the remark. Its intensity –
apparently so disproportionate – was disconcerting. “I don’t know the
game,” he’d said. “I’d be of little use to you.”
Heath made no further acknowledgement. His forehead was slick with
perspiration. A gambler perched upon the brink of ruin could have looked
no worse.
Thorndike had looked down then, again, at the table, drawn to the shape of
the cards strewn upon it, and – for some fleeting fraction of a second –
seen through it. The content of this vision was concealed behind
a black wall now. It was buried from him in the way dreams were. He might
have thought it a dream, were it not lodged so firmly in the day, framed
by lucidity without respite.
“I saw something,” he said.
“Yes,” she agreed. “And you heard something, too.”
She was right. During the initial recollection it had come first. It had
not been quite a bark, but that was the closest approximation to the sound
that had a name. He shuddered at its echo.
“Horrible,” he mumbled. “It shocked me.”
It was like sheer suddenness made audible. The shock was part of
its texture. No one ever jumps out of their skin, but at that
moment he had understood the expression. The unanticipated had detonated –
cracked. Everyone, surely, would react to it, he had thought. The entire
club would be stricken. Panic would ensue. Then he had looked around,
amazed. The calm was more terrifying than anything he could remember.
“Yet no one heard it, beside you,” Cleo said. “You must then have realized
that it came from elsewhere. It’s why you forgot. It didn’t fit.”
It had been an after-shock, to recognize that solitude.
So this is madness, he had thought. The unexpected solidity of it
chilled him. Argument was irrelevant to it. It meant only
to be alone. Not swirling delusion, but simply incontestable
private evidence. There was nothing to correct.
“Private evidence tends to go astray,” she continued, as if emulating
telepathy. “That makes it a good place to hide.”
“Good?”
“Good for it.”
“Yet you can see.”
“It knows I pose no threat to it,” she said coldly. “It smells my
neutrality.”
§11 — How difficult could it be to decline the performance of a summoning
ritual? Nothing could be easier, surely? Yet an actual
spine-tingle accompanied the question. Something like a cold itch
had infiltrated the lumbar region, from a dimension beyond scratching. The
sensation preceded understanding, but opened a path for it.
Things were coming the other way. That was the ghostly precursor
to the idea, registered as a visceral shadow of intuition. There are
thoughts the body warns against. This was one of them.
Why would it require an invitation? It was a familiar idea, from vampire
myth, perhaps also other places, he hazily remembered. In one
black-and-white fragment of an old horror movie the predator waited
outside a window. Its target occupied the room on the other side. They
tricked you into letting them in. Predation by permission was a demonic
trait, it seemed.
“What does it want?” he asked. “If it wants anything, that is.”
“It wants only to exist, and what follows from that.”
“So what does? Follow from that, I mean.”
“Roughly speaking, the trajectory it arrives on is prolonged. It continues
on its path.”
“The way it gets in defines what it will be like?”
“It likes spirals, fire, and blood,” she said, as if still in
conversational sequence.
“Have you got anything more definite?”
“Hard consonants –
cat-stutter, catastrophe, cataclysmic, tactical, contracts –
words like that could attract it. It hunts for fun.”
“You mean it searches for fun?”
“No, the other thing,” she said, smiling coldly. “It might amuse you, if
that level of detachment were possible. As it is, a certain dark laughter
could be a warning sign. If you start to identify with it, that’s an
indication it’s getting in.”
“Perhaps you’re enjoying this too much,” he growled.
“My objectivity is what you’re paying for. If you want a shoulder to cry
on, you could find one more cheaply.”
“I’d rather hoped that for almost two-hundred pounds an hour I wouldn’t
have to wonder if you were on my side.”
“If I was simply against it, I wouldn’t be able to help you at
all.”
He knew she was right. Pretending to argue was idiotic immaturity. He
sighed. “So what’s next?”
“Seriousness,” she scolded. “You’re in a lot of trouble, even without
being stupid about it.”
He might have bristled against the condescension under other
circumstances.
“So it’s waiting for me to offer it a key?”
She nodded.
“Then, how long?” he continued. “I mean, if I’m going to try to out-wait
it, how long will that take?”
She took a while to respond, watching him. He found her expression
difficult to read. “It would be best to assume
longer than you have,” she said, eventually. “Such beings don’t
lose time games.”
They were done, then. She was restoring the cards to dormancy. There was
nothing more to be learnt, or said.
§12 — The consultation had taken more than two hours. By the time it had
finished, night was thickening.
He paused for a moment outside, before setting back. Behind him, the
warmth of the shop light quickly fell away into icy obscurities.
The road ahead was discouraging. He was out-matched, to an
incomprehensible degree. Whatever ailed his soul outflanked it in every
conceivable – and even inconceivable – direction. However he ran, he would
run into it. So he told himself he would not run.
The rain had stopped. Nightlights shattered among reflections. There was
no doubting the town’s charms. He was aware, to an unusual degree, that it
would be sad to leave.
The moon appeared unnaturally large. For a disconcerting moment he found
its scale indicative of dreaming. Clues of some deep delusion swirled into
themselves, drawing abstract spirals. Would it like that?
Vision seemed to have a surface – a kind of film. He was stretching out a
finger to touch it before noticing.
§13 — It would be safer – perhaps even faster – to cut diagonally across
the fields. The ground was dry enough for efficient progress.
Before reaching the house, there would be the woods. He would probably
spend no more than five minutes among the trees. A few hundred seconds –
it would not be long. Yet he balked at the prospect.
If something was waiting for him, it would be there.
There was a demand being made for discipline, he soberly realized.
Childish fears were no longer affordable. Survival called for a new way.
It could begin from a confrontation with the dark.
It was not just ontogeny but also – and more profoundly – phylogeny that
trembled within him. Like wind and water upon eon-exposed rocks, the fangs
of a billion ancient predators had carved his fears. Not millions, but
tens and hundreds of millions of years whispered their dread.
Those who feared less are no longer among us, they said.
Ravenous things, stalking silently through the night, bore them away
into a deeper darkness. It was thus, and not in the proximate world, that his nightmares had
been trained. The murmurings of archaic terror drew his attention
astray.
He left the open ground and the black mass of the forest swallowed him. He
paused as his eyes adjusted. Gray-scale gradually returned. Shapes
emerged. This was the crossing. Ancient nightmares beyond number chattered
softly on the dark periphery. Yet it was only as it ever was. There was no
hint of novel or exceptional encroachment. If something had happened, he
had missed it.
§14 — Cecily was gone. A note – neatly-folded into a miniature tent –
stood on the table by the door. The message was formally affectionate, but
curt. She doubted her value to him at this time, it said. He shrugged.
Better that she not be involved in this. She couldn’t help, and might
easily come to harm. There was something more – a darker component to his
response, which he didn’t want to think about. The gist crept in,
nevertheless. This wasn’t for her.
§15 — Standing in the hallway of the silent house, he thought, now, about
what he’d been told. Spirals meant nothing much to him. They were
easy enough to recognize. The rigorous definition, he supposed, was
mathematical. It would likely exceed his comprehension. Where he struggled
was on the possible application to his case. To have been advised of the
entity’s attraction to irregular tetrahedrons would have drawn a
comparable blank. Pursuit would not be cost-effective, he knew.
§16 — Fire was quite probably mere smoking. It was the one
indefensible thing, above all, that everyone knew
you should stop. His hackles rose against the scarcely
contestable imperative.
You’d let a monstrosity from beyond The Veil crash into your soul
rather than abstain from burning some few pitiful shreds of tobacco
leaf?
Yet the habit would only dig itself in deeper. Certain counter-arguments
had begun to mindlessly arrange themselves, like the wasp pattern of an
orchid flower. He extracted a cigarillo from their silver case and stepped
out onto the dark veranda. His heavy old Zippo, picked up years past from
a small-town curio shop, sat in a saucer on the window sill. It smelt
strongly of gasoline. Fire, it said to him, silently, as it
glinted in the moonlight. It likes fire. The temptation to ignite
the flame was not – quite – irresistible. Once burning, the cigarillo
would be a complex sign. It would express defiance, most superficially. If
that, though, it would surely also spell invitation. Fear would
condense upon it, as if drawn in to a beacon. A dimension would collapse,
simplifying the equation.
§17 — Fire couldn’t be stopped. She’d get it, eventually. She only had to
wait. Blood-letting would be even easier. The illusion of control would be
thinner. A rare steak wouldn’t be enough, of course. The critical act, in
that case, had occurred in the abattoir, where the hemophile demons
gathered like excited flies. A trivial shaving or kitchen accident, on the
other hand, should be quite sufficient. A mere nick, a single drop of
blood, and it was done. He wondered how often he shed his own blood. Could
it be less than once a week? There could be no security in this direction,
or on this front. To seek protection here would be to court crippling
neurosis.
If a blood-offering required intentional sacrifice, he would be safe. So
it couldn’t be like that. Absence of safety was the starting point – the
axiom. Design had been stripped away, down to the bedrock of raw
accident.
Once intention was dismissed, everything was left open. The last
recognizable factor was then deducted. The route would be unmarked, and
uncharted. Figuratively, he was treading a cliff path in pitch darkness. A
plunge into disaster was the default outcome. The first step, then, was to
stop.
To go on as he had was no good. He had no idea what he was doing, which
was intolerably dangerous now.
Any habit might be a building block, the modular component for a ritual.
Safety lay only in doing nothing. He laughed bitterly at his
plight.
§18 — The entity visited his dreams. It was shadow become body, female and
inhuman. Her avatar was a black leopard which was at the same time a wolf.
The choice was not forced. Fluid ambivalence was her
gait, as if she padded through the nocturnal forests of her
natural realm. She was a familiar animal at first and then at once an
unrecognizable predator. You would make your mind a trap? How
could he not? His predicament necessitated at least that.
She was laughing at him, in a way that wasn’t simply unkind. There was
nevertheless much of pitiless killing in her mirth. It amused her that all
worlds were built upon darkness. Blood drew her. Predation was her play.
There was an ambush underway that entirely out-witted him.
In the dreams he whirled around, dizzying himself. It would come from his
flanks, or rear. In attempting to spot it, he spun. At once too slow to
catch a glimpse of it, and too fast to bear, he would always stumble.
When would it be? With this question a time vortex swallowed him.
He awakened, head-spinning, damp with half-remembered horrors.
§19 — Time passed. Some few days became weeks – but no more than that.
Duration had thickened. It was palpable to him now.
It could not be out-waited. It would not forget, or give up. It would be
coming forever, and always had been. That was the oracle. Yet he had
dreams of this, too, and they were tangled beyond straightening. Ambiguous
grappling mixed desperation with something adopted from a wolf spider.
He was using her skills against her, which meant things he didn’t
want to contemplate. He had been waiting to trap her.
There had been no other option. Running was not a solution. She was too
deeply lodged in the quick of duration to out-run. Flight ran out of time.
In the grim dawn it was clearer, and emptier. No alternative was left. She
would have to be defeated. Why not today? In delay there was no advantage.
The initiative was no more denied to him now than it would ever be. A
terrible impatience seized him, close to panic. He looked around.
I should get back, he thought. Even if she cared little
for space, it had to be less safe out here. The trees whispered eerily, as
if in agreement. He stuck closely to the old wall, minimizing angles of
potential attack.
§20 — Suddenly – as if defining the word – a detonation shattered the
stillness. It was extraordinarily shocking.
He stumbled, striking his head on a stone. The wound was superficial, but
it bled freely. He dabbed at his torn scalp with a paper tissue,
momentarily dazed.
Absurd hypotheses flooded in. Could it have been a minor meteorite impact?
Had he been shot at? Nothing he could imagine made much sense.
The site of the explosion had been a nearby tree. A charred crater was
apparent on its trunk, near the roots. The edges of the wound still
smoldered. Scorching had emphasized the growth whorls. They were rings,
surely, but a fracture-line had subtly shifted the pattern. The figure
drew him in. He struggled to pull his mind back. Everything swirled. He
was swept around the eddy of a swoon without quite succumbing to it. The
crashing absurdity of the event still stunned him.
He sat for a moment, seeking to regroup his scattered faculties. His grasp
on what had happened was – if anything – weakening. The fragments of
recall continued drifting apart. The sole coherent sense was of an
incomplete awakening. Only now had he begun to understand.
Only now was what he had begun to understand. There was only now,
even if he did not yet understand it, or ever would. Only now was
happening, and he – truly – wasn’t. That’s how it went.
§21 — Even in his befuddlement he knew more than he wanted to, far more
than he had thought. Alien ideas had come to him along paths he did not
recognize. Their grim magnificence appalled him.
I have become a hunter, he accepted. A feverish chill-wave washed
through him, then, as he glimpsed what that might suggest. There was
altogether too much likeness in it. He was imitating her. Was it, in fact,
that she was teaching him? Thoughts that were still worse
intruded, but they were harder to grasp. I’m scared to think, he
admitted to himself. This undoubtedly compounded the danger. Psychological
security procedures had been disabled, as if by hysterical paralysis.
Certain strategically-indispensable positions had become too terrifying to
defend. He had to laugh.
A garrison too frightened to man the walls offered no protection.
There was no survival that way. So instead, he twisted the blade of fear
into himself, grimly determined to rouse his defenses. He would befriend
his final horrors. Love whatever hurts the most. Only then might
it somehow work out.
§22 — There was nothing being said, because his mind had stopped guessing.
It rested now amidst the uninterpretable-as-such. There was no sense, no
possibility of sense. A kind of death had washed through him. Mystics had
sought this place, he thought with a smile. The profanity of meaning was
gone.
§23 — It surely wouldn’t be long now. The thought had already
crystallized before its full wrongness struck him. Its impatience was the
worst mistake. Attention was thus misdirected.
§24 — He was aware of her now, continuously. It was less a sensation than
– if such a thing were possible – the opposite. Was
nonsense not precisely that, if literally understood? He thought
of low meteorological pressure, of withdrawing tides, recessions. A
palpable emptying left nothing to grasp at. Whatever it might have been
had already departed.
§25 — He lurked at the edge of the clearing. There was no need for even
the slightest repositioning. It astounded him, that he was capable of such
stillness. Inhuman patience was what it seemed to him then,
momentarily. There was only the beyond, and nothing else. Here
and now was being calmly considered, elsewhere. This was only
bait. It was impossible. Bare survival had required nothing less.
§26 — All fear was forgotten. He was ready for her, and always had been.
But it went much further. That which he had not so long ago thought
himself to be would have shuddered at the stage it had reached. It was
amusing, though not to the point of distraction. He had arrived at the
place where everything stopped, or something had. It pointed nowhere else.
The meaning was intrinsic, or it was nothing.
This is the time went the lure. ‘This’ was what he had never
before – and also always – taken himself as being. It had been crafted to
hunt with.
§27 — The Great Now had already begun, of course. The moment no longer
gave way to another, but extended itself without boundary. Whatever
would happen was happening, though unseen. Here was the
secret of patience. It was far simpler than he had ever understood. There
was simply nothing to wait for. Duration was compact. Unless momentarily
stranded – apparently out of reach – by the cramping, rucking, or pleating
of time, there was no longer any up ahead. To look forward was
pure delusion.
§28 — An absolute act of predation was consummated, then, in primordial
finality. There had been a quick, quiet killing. It was still now. Arrival
and departure were fused in immensity.
§29 — So, it was done.
It had always been done.
There was only this way, and no other. The hunter – alone – remained.
November 11, 2019Mermaids
Katy was sleeping better. The dark patches beneath her eyes were
disappearing. She even smiled now, occasionally. “I don’t mind the bad
dreams about mermaids anymore,” she said.
“That’s good, why?”
“Daddy told me nightmares were the world’s only real treasure.”
“He said that?”
“Lots of times,” Katy said.
“He shouldn’t have. Those thoughts are unhealthy. They’re why he has had
to spend so much time in hospital.”
Claudia cast narrowed eyes around her
daughter’s room. Though not especially untidy, the space was cluttered to
a fantastic degree. It had the vivid quality of scarcely-inhibited
psychological projection. Mermaids were an insistent theme. Two large
mermaid posters dominated the largest wall. Even without any true insight
into her daughter’s phobia, she still shuddered slightly. Their horror was
directly proportional to the cognitive attention they drew. Thinking about
them was bad. They were creatures of malevolent seduction. Sirens were
mermaids.
“Why do you torture yourself like this?” Claudia had once asked her
daughter, in frustration.
“I’d rather see them, than have them hide,” was the reply.
It made enough twisted sense to be unanswerable.
Katy had always been wise beyond her years. Her remarks were peculiarly
considered. It made her seem sad.
Claudia wondered now whether there was something she should have said. Had
there been an opening she’d missed?
There had never been a sign of Katy being disproportionately anxious about
anything else. As a baby she’d been unusually solemn, but no less
exceptionally calm. The Little Buddha, Derek had called her. She
would very rarely cry. Nothing had seemed to profoundly upset her before
this.
Why were mermaids so horrible? She felt the answer through powerful but
indistinct intuition. Fluid boundaries were essential to it. A rocky
sea-shore at twilight was darkly suggestive enough. It whispered of
mermaids without needing to show them. Ambiguous transformations thrashed
the coast of sleep.
“Do mermaids scare you, too, mommy?”
She’d wanted to say ‘no’ of course, but the word caught in her throat.
She’d actually coughed – almost choked. “I don’t think about them much,”
she’d managed, eventually. “They are kind of creepy, I guess.”
“Super-creepy,” Katy said.
“Why is that, do you think?” It was, perhaps, an incautious question, but
Claudia couldn’t help herself.
“The join is the scariest part.”
“Where fish begins?”
“Or girl,” Katy said.
“Imagine being able to swim so well, though,” Claudia suggested, with
unconvincing cheerfulness.
“That makes it worse, because you might want it.”
November 13, 2019Wallypede Girl
Words can be an infected wound. Things are read that cannot be unread.
They can injure, and fester.
For me, such words were delivered by a story, called
Wallypede Girl. The title alone sufficed to betray its radically
abominable character. It was a tale scraped from the filthiest sewers of
Hell. You don’t need to know more than that. Believe me, really, you
don’t. Thank all that is holy if you are spared. I pray you will not err
as I have.
Looking back, my behavior is indecipherable to
me. I watch a madman destroy himself. He picks up the slim volume whose
vileness – he knows – has never been exceeded. As if craving
damnation, he consumes it in one session. It took, perhaps, three
hours.
I could not put it down, as the saying goes, though it explains
nothing. Why – I now ask myself – did I continue to the end? Why proceed
beyond the first hideous paragraph? I can make no sense of it. In any
case, the private calamity was done. That was the first episode. I would
never know ‘a good night’s sleep’ again.
In the next episode, I was introduced to the author, at a gallery
opening.
“I’m sure you told me that you’d read one of her stories. What was it
called?”
Chillingly, I knew. Please let it not be, I mumbled silently, in
vain. It was, of course. Had it not been, this also would not be. The
words were said. I will not willingly repeat them.
After the name was spoken I seemed to pass – for a moment – out of the
world. Sensation collapsed into darkness and noise. A buzzing reached me
as if from distant ruined galaxies.
“You’ve heard of it?” she was asking. “Maybe you’ve even read it?”
I stared at her dumbly, if not quite open-mouthed. It was meeting a
monster.
“How did you think up something like that?” I asked, not really wanting to
know.
“Oh, it just came to me,” she said. The breeziness of the reply was almost
impossibly distressing. “Do you ever have that? You know, when things just
arrive, and you’ve no idea from where?”
“It doesn’t worry you?”
“Strange visitors are my favorite things.”
My look of abhorrence cannot have been well-concealed. Her expression
shifted through discomfort to amusement.
“You look as if you’ve seen a Wallypede girl.”
“Don’t say that,” I begged. “I mean, don’t joke about it. It’s not
remotely funny.”
“Are you okay?”
“What you did was so wrong.” I had to say it. “If there was any justice in
this universe, you’d be punished for it.”
“Jesus,” she said. She looked taken aback. “You don’t like it?”
Her appalling understatement shocked me to the core. For some moments it
stripped me of the power of speech. Could she somehow not realize what she
had done?
“Like it?” I stammered, groping for more. “You find it imaginable that I
could have liked it?”
“Aren’t scary stories your thing?”
I searched her face for indications of mockery. We were trapped in a
dialog of unanswered questions. “You think what you wrote was a
scary story?”
“Wasn’t it?” Once again, her confusion seemed genuine.
“Was Auschwitz-Birkenau undesirable accommodation?”
“I don’t get your point.” Some evidence of irritation was creeping in.
This tilted my sense of existential devastation into fury. Did she dare
pretend to injury, after what she had done? I closed my eyes, grasping for
calm.
“We should probably drop it,” she said. “The topic seems to over-excite
you.”
It’s not about me, I wanted to shriek, but I managed to restrain
myself. My temples ached. Throbbing veins probably betrayed my condition.
I took a deep breath.
“You can’t be evading your responsibility,” I said. “Nobody would try to
shrug-off something at this scale, surely? It would look too cynical, and
– frankly – almost psychopathic.”
“What’s wrong with you?” she asked, openly annoyed now. “It’s a
fucking story.”
“Oh is that all,” I replied, maximally accentuating the sarcasm. “For a
moment there I thought it might – you know – actually matter.”
Despite its crudity, this response arrested her indignation in mid-flight.
She seemed now to recognize something untenable about her position. The
presumption of literary innocence visibly trembled.
“Who could it hurt?” she asked, in a shrunken voice. “It’s just a
story.”
“Are you a Christian?” I asked.
She nodded, a little confusedly.
“So you think the Bible helps people, and perhaps even saves them?”
“It’s Jesus who saves people,” she said. “The Bible is only the Door to
Him.”
I let only slip past. There was no need for it to get in the way.
“So it’s a good door?”
“Of course,” she said.
Quietly, but firmly, I locked the trap. “Then you should be able to see
the evil you’ve done, through simple inversion.”
It took her less than a second to see the connection. “No one could take
Wallypede Girl as their Bible,” she protested. Her voice had
risen, betraying hints of moral panic. She was beginning to imagine the
horror of it. From the edge of anguished howl her words crashed back down
to a hoarse whisper. “It would be monstrous.” As she explored the
possibility, revulsion at her own thoughts spread glints of nightmare
across her features. It seemed she might faint.
After some moments she regained composure. There was a deadness to her
now, one I recognized – an installation of adamant despair. Elements of
her expression were glazed with resignation to irreparable ruin. Laughter
would not soon return, and when it did, it would be broken.
I could not quite pity her. She had ventured too deeply into the abyss for
that.
The Hell of her own imaginings now claimed her.
“It was wrong,” she agreed, far too late.
November 22, 2019Things Left Mostly Unsaid (00)
This series needs an introduction, but there isn’t one yet.
§00 — He stared grimly at the ‘object’ – if that’s what it was. Some would
call it one, of course, though without much conviction. There was an
illusory unreality to it.
“It means nothing to me,” he said. “I don’t recognize it at all.”
“Are you sure?”
“For sure, I’m sure,” he insisted. “It’s not the sort of thing you’d
forget.”
“I’d have thought it was exactly that sort of thing.”
“How can you say that?” he asked, surprised.
“It might have been made to be unmentioned.”
“You think it was made?”
He reconsidered. “It came from somewhere.”
Whatever it was, the exchange had been glitched by it, and
disconnected.
“If it’s an artifact,” she said, with firm confidence, “it’s not ours.”
“We being?” he asked.
“Anything you can identify with will do.”
“Unless ‘artifact builders in general’.”
“That’s thinkable?”
He paused to reflect. “I guess it would be bold to say ‘yes’.”
“Heroic even,” she said.
“So talking about unthinkable artisans means talking around them.”
“If that’s the trajectory you’re on.”
“Consistent avoidance turns into an orbit, almost inevitably.”
“Continually missing something,” she agreed. “But that’s a trap, surely?
You’re stuck to it.”
Yet stickiness kept its distance. The entity repelled contemplation. Its
formlessness suggested no alleviating simplicity. The impression it made
was elusive, hinting at immense bulk twisted into itself, or withdrawn
into obscure dimensions.
“I really don’t like it,” he said childishly.
“No one expects you to.”
“Could we hand it over somehow?”
“Who’s going to take it?”
“We could just leave it here.”
“Be realistic.”
“Okay then,” he accepted. “What’s the next move?”
“First priority has to be not screwing this up,” she said. “We need to
take our time.”
“Take it back, you mean?”
“If we can do that,” she concurred. “It’s not clear.”
They retreated from it slightly, as if by instinct. There was no sign of
movement. Still, it indicated some kind of motionless shifting.
Alternative patterns suggested themselves. Distances wouldn’t be changing
much, apparently.
“How long do you think it will take?” he said after a while.
“As much as it’s able to, would be my guess.”
“We could use some expert assistance.”
“Spare us the happy thoughts.” If there were experts it would be an
entirely different situation.
He’d been correct about the trajectory. It was like an orbit. The
inclination to see more, without getting closer, produces circumspection
automatically. Of course, neither was in any hurry to approach it, if that
was even possible. Passive contact-aversion might not have been its
primary property, but it appeared to be. The effect was repulsive. An
inescapable thought was generated that it might somehow sting – very
badly.
“Do you think we get out of this?” The remark was spun ironically, as if
lifted from a movie.
“Why wouldn’t we?” The game was distracting. “There’s no need to
exaggerate its malignancy.”
He tilted his head towards the thing, as if that was argument enough.
“I doubt it’s even hostile,” she said.
“Doubt how much?”
“It’s not done anything so far, or – at least – so far as we can tell.”
Everything was hidden in the qualification, and not deeply. To scrape at
it would have been too crude.
“There’s no obvious end to this,” he said.
January 28, 2020Things Left Mostly Unsaid (01)
[These things are being posted opportunistically in no particular order]
§01 — The suggestion was peculiar. It raised many questions.
“So what do you think?”
“Nothing really,” he said, too quickly. That wouldn’t do, he realized.
“Not much really,” he added, as a substitute. Then a query, for
deflection: “What sort of thing?”
“What sort of thing are you thinking?” she repeated, with a laugh. “I’m
supposed to know that?”
He’d forgotten what his question had meant. “Anyway, I’d rather not think
about it,” he said. “Why dwell on such things?”
“So what – then – instead?” she asked.
“Does there have to be something?”
“Doesn’t there?”
“I suppose,” he admitted, obviously very far from thrilled about it.
“Nothingness wouldn’t take enough time.”
He’d reached the crux. Duration had to be sponged-up somehow. Still, the
proposition was questionable.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked, laughing again. The joke, if
such it was, he found obscure.
“Is there any choice?” he grumbled. His own question was misleading, he
knew at once. It wasn’t necessary to talk, at least not out loud, which
was the thing. Yet, to keep from talking required a continual renewal. It
involved effort. “It’s why people want to die,” he mused aloud. “It’s the
only way to be quiet without trying.” The morbidity exceeded anything he
would have wanted to say. “Always words,” he said. “They go too far.”
“Not always,” she countered. “Often, though, admittedly,” she added. “This
time, certainly.”
February 1, 2020Things Left Mostly Unsaid (02)
§02 — It was too self-evident for words. Even this shouldn’t have required
utterance. The redundancy echoed emptily through it. It added and then
multiplied nothing. Nevertheless, it had crept into the conversation. Now
he snapped at the intrusion.
“That goes without saying.”
“Yes, it has,” she said. “That’s its way.”
Her philosophical perversity struck him as glib and infuriating. “How can
you even think that, let alone say it?” he demanded.
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“Of course it is,” he said. “It’s far too obvious. That’s the whole
point.”
“So drop it. How difficult is that?”
He made an animal noise signaling rage mastered by humor. She laughed at
it politely.
“You let it get to you too much,” she continued. “Why does it matter?”
“What kind of question is that?”
“You don’t like it?”
“Whether I like it or not isn’t the issue.”
“It wouldn’t be, if you cared less about it.”
“So it’s my fault now?”
The deflation was jolting. She could only laugh again, shaking her head.
The way he fed it – while at the same time lamenting its prominence – was
an extraordinary thing to see.
“You have to let it go,” she said, as soothingly as possible. “It’s not
just going to get up and leave, while you’re worrying at it.”
“What if it has to be dealt with?”
“That’s your guess?”
“Regardless,” he insisted.
“It’s not asking anything of me.”
“Not as far as you can tell.”
‘Tell’ was a word, she now realized, that she’d never listened to enough.
Ancient sorceries hummed within it. “I can’t tell,” she tried,
experimentally. “It’s hard to tell.” What might be telling?
“Are you even listening?” he wondered.
“I’m trying to.” She shook her head again, as if to clear it. “There’s a
lot going on.”
“It only seems like that.”
“No,” she said. “It doesn’t. It seems as little as possible. Still though
…”
“Still what?” he asked.
“Catching glimpses, whispers – there are chances.”
“‘Chances’ – Christ,” he said, without attempting to conceal his disgust.
“That’s what you call them.”
“You’d prefer ‘curses’,” she knew, because they’d been there before. “But
that’s unbalanced.”
“You can’t balance this.” It had always been his main point.
“There’s no leverage.”
“Brains are sheer leverage.”
“They’re side-eddies.”
“That too,” she accepted. “But balancing is the only thing they do.”
“Or try to do.”
“That was built-in.” Built-in to the statement, she had meant,
not the organ, though it worked equally either way. Over time it cancelled
out. To be poised out at an edge was still to be poised. It wasn’t a
matter of foundations, but of traffic.
“Okay, that’s enough,” he thought aloud, and it was.
February 2, 2020Things Left Mostly Unsaid (03)
§03 — She’d survived the event, however narrowly. Most probably, it was
only melodrama that had placed such an outcome in doubt. There were no
grounds for expecting anything worse. Yet it was as if she was still
stricken. Her existence appeared somehow thinned.
A sheen of unseasonal perspiration glowed on her forehead.
“I don’t know,” she repeated, about nothing obvious. It was almost a plea.
“I really don’t,” as if she couldn’t imaginably be believed.
Such stammering was not really speech, still less security. The seals and
wards were far too weak. They offered no serious protection, or even the
pretense of it.
He scrabbled at the enigma, quite undeterred by her distress. “So, what
was it like?”
“There are no words.” She exaggerated, but only a little. Really, she had
no idea where a description would begin. Perhaps there were too many
words, but none for her, or none for it. The happening hadn’t been
something meant for discussion. So the phrase was an alternative to saying
more. It would have subtracted itself, if it could. In a way it
disappeared, but incompletely. It left ripples, like something retreating
into aquatic depths.
“There have to be words,” he insisted. “It isn’t necessary to be
exact.”
“Vagueness in the right direction is already a lot to ask.”
His response was an inarticulate grunt of irritation. He was not here to
fence. Was she not yet broken enough to be unguarded?
She ignored the tacit demand. There was too much else going
on.
Impatience made him careless. “Spit it out,” he grumbled. He knew at once
that exposing so much aggression was a mistake.
Her inner recoil was undisguised. Defenses would now compound the
difficulty of the terrain.
He apologized clumsily, but too late.
“I’m tired,” he tried to explain. “I’ve been worried.”
“It’s okay,” she said, but the wariness in her eyes said something else.
“I can’t really talk now.”
“Don’t say that.”
“It’s already too much,” she said, withdrawing further.
“Then who’s going to help?”
“Jesus,” she said, with a sad laugh. “Come on!”
He mumbled something even he himself missed. It was nothingness badly
emulating speech. “I have to know,” he croaked. Despair was completing the
loss of caution. “You understand, don’t you? I have to.”
“What if you simply can’t?” The complete absence of hostility in her tone
somehow made it worse.
“No,” he said. “I won’t think that.”
“You can’t avoid it,” she said. “It’s settled.”
“Nothing’s settled.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“This isn’t about what I believe.”
“You don’t get to decide, either.” Once again, her tone was fatalistic,
rather than accusing. “It’s the way it is.”
“You say that as if you’re on its side.”
“Everything’s on its side,” she countered. “Or nothing is.”
February 3, 2020Things Left Mostly Unsaid (04)
§04 — No one knew what it was, beside a scandal. Obscurity somehow
occupied the center of it. It’s not the crime but the cover-up,
as they say.
“Can you explain your involvement?” the reporter asked, thrusting a
microphone forward aggressively. “Do you deny the accusations?”
What accusations? It would only encourage them.
There were other questions, being raised simultaneously. They blurred
together into a hubbub of hostile inquisition.
“No comment.” He said it only to make his silence emphatic.
“This is an opportunity to set the record straight,” shouted someone
else.
“Not really,” he mumbled, reaching the door.
His wife was inside, slightly shaken, but
still managing to smile. “They want you to talk,” she said.
“It’s all nonsense.”
“They think your silence is a confession.”
“I doubt it,” he said. He paused to consider. “They probably want me to
think that.”
“Why do they even care?” she asked. “It’s all so – nothing.”
“They smell blood, it excites them.”
“You exaggerate,” she hoped.
“Maybe,” he accepted, unconvinced. He scratched the side of his nose
distractedly.
“Are you going to make a statement?”
“You think I should?”
“It might be the only way to get out in front of things.”
“Improbable,” he muttered. “There’s no interest in what really
happened.”
“You can’t just accept that.”
“Can’t I?” he asked. “Self-deception isn’t going to help.”
“If there’s a time for cynicism, this isn’t it,” she insisted. “It comes
too close to vindicating their story-line.”
“If I was merely being accused of cynicism, I’d find it survivable,” he
replied, with a grim laugh.
“So what are you being accused of, to your understanding?”
“Oh, you know.”
“Actually, I really don’t.”
“I’m supposed to have said some things.” He hesitated. “They’re vague
about the details.”
“By ‘details’ you mean the actual words?”
“And the occasion,” he added.
“You’re talking about that ghastly club, aren’t you?” Her exasperation
overflowed. “Why do you associate yourself with those people?”
“They’re good company.”
“They are not ‘good company’ – and now see where they’ve got
you.”
“It’s hardly their fault,” he protested.
“Isn’t it, really? Then why is the press besieging our house?”
“You’re saying there was a leak?”
“What other explanation could there be?”
“I’m reluctant to jump to conclusions.” He realized in saying this that
more would evidently be needed. “The place might have been bugged.”
“This is supposed to be more likely than you having sleazy friends?”
“I’m just admitting to uncertainty.”
She sighed dramatically, rolling her eyes. “You’re unbelievable. Can’t you
see where this is going to end?”
“No, I can’t” he said. “I can’t at all, and I have to doubt that you
can.”
“It’s as if you positively want to crash in flames.”
“How?” he protested. “How is it remotely like that?”
“Try to imagine what it looks like.”
“It looks mostly like the picture they want to paint.”
“They work with what they’ve got.”
He scowled, but without contesting the point. “It’s hard to know what
they’ve got.”
“But knowing what they could have just requires recollection.”
“Some undiplomatic language,” he said, “but that’s all.”
“That’s quite enough, though, isn’t it?”
He sighed. “I think you’re approaching this the wrong way around.”
“You mean, from what actually happened?” she asked, only
semi-sarcastically. “Let’s try to agree that’s at least relevant.”
“Minimally relevant,” he countered. “First of all, it’s a story.”
“It’s not a story about nothing, though, is it?”
“It’s a story about nothing-very-definite – at least so far.”
“But they clearly don’t expect it to be, for long.”
“Damn them,” he muttered, without further specifying who they were. “They
won’t stop.”
“Why would they stop? The audience enjoys the chase.”
“What happened to ‘You exaggerate’?” he sniffed.
“You’ve changed my mind.”
“Anyway, I’m not feeding them.”
“Isn’t it a bit late for that?”
February 4, 2020Things Left Mostly Unsaid (05)
§05 — The interrogation would undoubtedly be difficult to navigate. There
wasn’t any kind of sensible story to offer up. Some impure version of
nothing was the only message available. That would seem odd. They’d want
something.
He paced back and forth agitatedly, softly tortured by anticipation. “What
if they ask about it directly?”
“They won’t.”
“But if they do?”
“Say as little as possible. Avoid lying, though, if you can. Lies are
vulnerabilities. They tend to come apart under pressure. They release
information when they break.” She paused a moment before continuing. “They
can’t force you to talk.”
“That’s true, probably,” he admitted, not
entirely without bitterness. “But what would silence sound like to
them?”
“You can’t afford to worry about that.”
“What can I afford?”
“Caution,” she said.
“That’s it?”
“That’s enough.”
It seemed unlikely. “I’m assuming they’re good at what they do.”
“Asking questions?”
“Roughly,” he accepted. He meant approximately.
The word took her elsewhere. “Not especially roughly,” she countered.
“Their freedom is tightly constrained.”
Torture was close to the last thing he wanted to talk about. Yet, here
they were.
“I’d tell them everything, if I could,” he muttered, unnecessarily.
She smiled thinly. “Thank you for the honesty.”
“Not that it matters.”
“Quite,” she agreed.
“There have to be words that would work,” he mused, “but how to find
them?”
“You think there’s a method?”
A method you could conceivably follow in time, she might have
elaborated, which would have been colder.
There was no answer to it, in any case.
“Inaccessible possibilities seem like a theme,” he grumbled. “It starts
and ends with them.”
“They divert you too much. You should concentrate upon what you can
do.”
“You mean, what I can avoid saying.”
“Why reach for more than that – especially now?”
“‘Now’ is kind of the point, though, isn’t it?”
“Not unless you want to trip yourself up, at the worst time.”
“Yes, it would be better to forget.” The irritability had drained out,
leaving only gloom. “Another inaccessible possibility,” he added.
She tapped her watch. Time’s passing. Words would only have
softened the message.
“How long, do you think?” he asked.
“An hour or two, maybe,” she guessed. “Not long enough for
this.”
“Or, maybe, for anything useful?” he said. “The opportunity cost of
digression could be zero.”
“Only if you’re already fucked,” she said, her patience broken.
“Sometimes there’s nothing that can be done.”
“Isn’t that what you’re supposed to be planning?”
“Yeah, I guess,” he said, smiling awkwardly at her joke. He seemed bored
by his own predicament.
“Best case you’ll get through on sheer apathy.”
“You think they’ll spin it out?”
“Why wouldn’t they? But it’s you who’ll be doing the spinning.”
“So the less I give them, the longer it takes,” he mused. “It’s a
siege.”
The insight was too inane to remark upon. She felt mild relief he hadn’t
posed it as a question.
“Not giving them anything is simply what’s going to happen,” she said.
“That’s baked in. You have nothing. The problem begins when it seems
you’re keeping something from them.”
“Which they have to,” he said, completing the circle.
“You see how easy it is to get nowhere? Keep that up at the right time,
for a maximum of – probably – six hours, and you’re through.”
He groaned at the schedule.
“You’ll have to step-up the manifest compliance,” she added. “Any time
that they think has been spent playing games won’t count.”
“Round and around,” he said.
“That’s the way. It’s not as if there’s another.”
February 5, 2020Things Left Mostly Unsaid (06)
§06 — As always, she’d been exhaustingly elliptical. It seemed as if she
never approached a point unless to curve about it. Her extreme
circuitousness drew out the interrogator in him, which felt too much like
work.
“What are you trying to say?” he asked wearily.
“‘Trying’ suggests failing,” she replied, immediately, with a laugh.
“What are you saying, then?”
“That’s better, but now redundant.”
It was always like this. “You’ve said a lot
less than you think,” he muttered. It was pointless. She hid by nature.
Irritable words wouldn’t draw her out.
She appraised him with cold neutrality now, wondering whether this was a
fight. “Confession is a myth,” she said. “It collapses the question of
evidence into intention. Information isn’t being held back. It isn’t
available.”
“Sometimes, maybe,” he quibbled. He wasn’t going to grant her more than
that, or in fact even that. “More often it’s withheld.”
“Sure, but primordially.” It was a word designed to up-end what
remained of casual conversation. She smiled a little sadistically after
uttering it.
“You mean, not by you?”
“Of course not by me,” she said, perhaps too quickly. Immediately, the ‘of
course’ had seemed crude to the point of self-parody. They were speeding
into stupidity again. Maybe it was the only thing that ever happened. She
sighed.
He appeared to understand her frustration. An element of apology crept in.
“Don’t let me rush you,” he said. “There’s time.”
“Meaning what?”
“Patience, I guess.”
“So you’re retreating from everything now?”
“Is that what’s happening?” The question was transparently insincere. He
could almost feel himself stumbling backwards.
Perhaps it didn’t matter. The can could be kicked down the road, as they
said. There’d be another time.
The thought unfolded through exactly those words. ‘They could pick it up
again later’ was the whole of the initial conception. Yet – even
unannounced – ‘another time’ seemed like the strangest idea supportable by
the world. Reciprocally, this time became unbearable. The
peculiarity was crushing. He backed away from this too, as if cornered. To
think in the direction indicated would be like endless falling.
“You okay?” she asked. He’d paled oddly, staggering slightly, as if
intoxicated.
“I was going to say something really weird,” he said, with an awkward
laugh, “by accident.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No, I didn’t.” It felt alright, although that didn’t say much, either.
There was relief as at an abyss missed.
She laughed too, though less awkwardly, which was nice. Then she put a
finger to her lips, making the ‘hush’ sign.
They listened to nothing for a while, but it was hard to hear.
February 6, 2020